Minh Mạng

Born Nguyễn Phúc Đảm at Gia Định in the middle of the Second Tây Sơn – Nguyễn War, Minh Mạng was the fourth son of lord Nguyễn Phúc Ánh – future Emperor Gia Long. His mother was Gia Long's second wife Trần Thị Đang (historically known as Empress Thuận Thiên). At the age of three, under the effect of a written agreement made by Gia Long with his first wife Tống Thị Lan (Empress Thừa Thiên), he was taken in and raised by the lord consort as her own son.[3] Following Thừa Thiên's death in 1814, it was supposed that her grandson, Crown Prince Cảnh's eldest son Mỹ Đường, would be responsible for conducting the funeral. Gia Long however, brought out the agreement to insist that Phúc Đảm, as Thừa Thiên's son, should be the one fulfilling the duty. Despite opposition from mandarins such as Nguyễn Văn Thành, Gia Long was decisive with his selection.[4]

In 1816, Gia Long appointed Đảm as his heir apparent. After the ceremony, Crown Prince Đảm moved to Thanh Hòa Palace and started assisting his father in processing documents and discussing country issues.[5]

Gia Long's death coincided with the re-establishment of the Paris Missionary Society's operations in Vietnam, which had closed in 1792 during the chaos of the power struggle between Gia Long and the Tây Sơn brothers before Vietnam was unified. In the early years of Minh Mạng's government, the most serious challenge came from one of his father's most trusted lieutenants and a national hero in Vietnam, Lê Văn Duyệt, who had led the Nguyễn forces to victory at Qui Nhơn in 1801 against the Tây Sơn dynasty and was made regent in the south by Gia Long with full freedom to rule and deal with foreign powers.

In February 1825, Minh Mạng banned missionaries from entering Vietnam. French vessels entering Vietnamese harbours were ordered to be searched with extra care. All entries were to be watched "lest some masters of the European religion enter furtively, mix with the people and spread darkness in the kingdom." In an imperial edict, Christianity was described as the "perverse European" (practice) and accused of "corrupting the hearts of men".[6]

• 
  Martyrdom of Joseph Marchand in Vietnam in 1835.
• 
  Martyrdom of Saint Pierre Borie, 24 November 1838, in Tonkin, Vietnam. Vietnamese painting.
• 
  Martyrdom of Jean-Charles Cornay, 1837.
• 
  Vietnamese catholic martyrs Paul Mi, Pierre Duong, Pierre Truat, martyred on 18 December 1838
• 
  Painting depicts the trial and execution of three Catholics in Ninh Bình. the offenders were forced to step on the holy cross.

Between 1833 and 1838, seven missionaries were sentenced to death, amongst them Pierre Borie, Joseph Marchand, and Jean-Charles Cornay. He first attempted to stifle the spread of Christianity by attempting to isolate Catholic priests and missionaries from the populace. He asserted that he had no French interpreters after Chaigneau's departure and summoned the French clergy to Hue and appointed them as mandarins of high rank to woo them from their proselytising. This worked until a priest, Father Regereau, entered the country and began missionary work. Following the edict which forbade further entry of missionaries into Vietnam, arrests of clerics began. After strong lobbying by Duyệt, the governor of Cochin China, and a close confidant of Gia Long and Pigneau de Behaine, Minh Mạng agreed to release the priests on the condition that they congregate at Đà Nẵng and return to France. Some of them obeyed the orders, but others disobeyed the order upon being released, and returned to their parishes and resumed preaching.

Minh Mạng continued and intensified his father's isolationist and conservative Confucian policies. His father had rebuffed a British delegation in 1804 proposing that Vietnam be opened to trade; the delegation's gifts were not accepted and turned away. At the time, Vietnam was of no interest to the European powers, since most of the continent was engaged in the Napoleonic Wars. Nevertheless, Napoleon had seen Vietnam as a strategically important objective in the Anglo-French power struggle in Asia, as he felt that it would make an ideal base from which to contest the East India Company's foothold in the Indian subcontinent. With the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy and the final exile of Napoleon in 1815, the military scene in Europe quieted and French interest in Vietnam was revived. Jean-Baptiste Chaigneau, one of the volunteers of Pigneau de Behaine who had helped Gia Long in his quest for power, had become a mandarin and continued to serve Minh Mạng, upon whose ascension, Chaigneau and his colleagues were treated more distantly. He eventually left in November 1824. In 1825, he was appointed as French consul to Vietnam after returning to his homeland to visit his family after more than a quarter of a century in Asia. Upon his return, Minh Mạng received him coldly. The policy of isolationism soon saw Vietnam fall further behind the pace of technology and become more vulnerable to outside encroachment as political stability returned to continental Europe, allowing European powers free hand to once again direct their attention towards increasing their influence in Asia. With his Confucian orthodoxy, Minh Mạng shunned all western influence and ideas as hostile and avoided all contact.

In 1819, Lieutenant John White of the United States Navy was the first American to make contact with Vietnam, arriving in Saigon.[7] Minh Mạng was willing to sign a contract, but only to purchase artillery, firearms, uniforms and books. White was of the opinion that the deal was not sufficiently advantageous and nothing was implemented. In 1821, a trade agreement from Louis XVIII was turned away, with Minh Mạng indicating that no special deal would be offered to any country. That same year, East India Company agent John Crawfurd made another attempt at contact, but was only allowed to disembark in the northern ports of Tonkin; he gained no agreements, but concluded relations with France posed no threat to Company trade.[8] In 1822, the French frigate La Cleopatre visited Tourane (present day Đà Nẵng). Her captain was to pay his respects to Minh Mạng, but was greeted with a symbolic dispatch of troops as though an invasion had been expected. In 1824 Minh Mạng rejected the offer of an alliance from Burma against Siam, a common enemy of both countries. In 1824 Henri Baron de Bougainville was sent by Louis XVIII to Vietnam with the stated mission "of peace and protection of commerce. Upon arriving in Tourane in 1825, it was not allowed ashore. The royal message was turned away on the pretext that there was nobody able to translate it. It was assumed that the snub was related to an attempt by Bougainville to smuggle ashore a Catholic missionary from the Missions étrangères de Paris. Jean-Baptiste Chaigneau's nephew, Eugène Chaigneau, was sent to Vietnam in 1826 as the intended consul but was forced to leave the country without taking up his position.

Further fruitless attempts to start a commercial deal were led by de Kergariou in 1827 and Admiral Laplace in 1831. Another effort by Chaigneau in 1829 also failed. In 1831 another French envoy was turned away. Vietnam under Minh Mạng was the first East Asian country with whom the United States sought foreign relations. President Andrew Jackson tried twice to contact Minh Mạng, sending Edmund Roberts in 1832, and Consul Joseph Balestier in 1836, to no avail. In 1837 and 1838, La bonite and L'Artémise were ordered to land in Tourane to attempt to gauge the situation in Vietnam with respect to missionary work. Both were met with hostility and communication was prevented. Later, in 1833 and 1834, a war with Siam was fought over control of Cambodia which for the preceding century had been reduced to impotence and had fallen under the control of its two neighbours.

In 1824, an Burmese envoy dispatched by Burmese king, presenting a proposal of a Burma-Vietnam alliance against Siam, which was immediately declined by Minh Mang. Minh Mang saw a risky war against Siam, the former ally, might have jeopardized Vietnamese hegemony in Cambodia, which had been acquired by his father Gia Long. Second, he had careful watched the British seizure of Singapore in 1819 and were waging war in Burma, thus he saw Britain as the new rising threat, and urged the Chakri dynasty of Siam should focus with Burma in their struggle against the British expansion.[9][10]

After Vietnam under Gia Long gained control over Cambodia in the early 19th century, a Vietnamese-approved monarch was installed. Minh Mạng was forced to put down a Siamese attempt to regain control of the vassal as well as an invasion of southern Vietnam which coincided with rebellion by Lê Văn Khôi. The Siamese planned the invasion to coincide with the rebellion, putting enormous strain on the Nguyễn armies. Eventually, Minh Mạng's forces were able to repel the invasion as well as the revolt in Saigon, and he reacted to Western encroachment by blaming Christianity and showing hostility, leading to the European powers asserting that intervention was needed to protect their missionaries. This resulted in missed opportunities to avert the colonisation of Vietnam through having friendly relations, since strong opposition was raised in France against an invasion, due to the costs of such a venture. After the outbreak of the First Opium War in 1839, Minh Mạng attempted to build an alliance with European powers by sending a delegation of two lower rank mandarins and two interpreters in 1840. They were received in Paris by Prime Minister Marshal Soult and the Commerce Minister, but they were shunned by King Louis-Philippe. This came after the Society of Foreign Missions and the Holy See had urged a rebuke for an "enemy of the religion". The delegation went on to London, with no success.

The beginning of Minh Mang rule over Vietnam was vastly unsettling. Vietnam was divided into autonomous domains governed independently by Viceroys under Gia Long. The first cholera pandemic reached Vietnam in summer 1820 removed 206,835 tax payers from royal tax registers,[11] while political scientist Samuel Popkin suggested that around one million people might have been perished due to the disease, out of Vietnam's total population of around eight million.[12]

On the domestic front, Minh Mạng continued his father's national policies of reorganising the administrative structure of the government. These included the construction of highways, a postal service, public storehouses for food, monetary and agrarian reforms. He continued to redistribute land periodically and forbade all other sales of land to prevent wealthy citizens from reacquiring excessive amounts of land with their money. In 1840 it was decreed that rich landowners had to return a third of their holdings to the community. Calls for basic industrialisation and diversification of the economy into fields such as mining and forestry were ignored. He further centralised the administration, introduced the definition of three levels of performance in the triennial examinations for recruiting mandarins. In 1839, Minh Mạng introduced a program of salaries and pensions for princes and mandarins to replace the traditional assignment of fief estates.

Diseases, disasters and rebellions against oppression and misery were very frequent, undermining the king's strength. Vietnam was at its low point of coherence in history. About 200 rebellions were recorded during his twenty-year reign.[13]

• 
  Thân Văn Nhiếp, Sinologist and Law prosecutor in the Ming Mạng's reign
• 
  Trương Tấn Bửu the Viceroy of Hanoi in 1802 and vieroy of Gia Định in 1823 under Gia Long and Minh Mạng's reigns respectively

Conquests and ethnic minority policy

Map of the extent of the Vietnamese empire's power under Minh Mạng's rule

Despite ongoing intra-turmoil, Minh Mang exhibited his admiring to Confucian rule and classical Chinese culture, while imposing ethnic assimilation at home[14][15] and pursuing territorial expansion and interference in neighboring Laos. Minh Mang put his support to Vientiane's king Chao Anou, his close ally, to wage war against Siam. But the outcome did not go for their plan. Anou was defeated and then was detaining to the Siamese in late 1828 by Chao Noi, ruler of Muang Phuan, also a tributary of Minh Mang.[16] Chao Noi was arrested by the Vietnamese for betraying, then being executed in Hue by Minh Mang. Muang Phuan was annexed into Vietnam in 1832 as Tran Ninh prefecture.[17]

Minh Mạng enacted the final conquest of the Champa Kingdom after the centuries long Cham–Vietnamese wars. He aggressively repressed culture of the Cham and indigenous highland peoples. The Cham Muslim leader Katip Sumat was educated in Kelantan and came back to Champa to declare a Jihad against the Vietnamese after Emperor Minh Mạng's annexation of Champa.[18][19][20][21] The Vietnamese coercively fed lizard and pig meat to Cham Muslims and cow meat to Cham Hindus against their will to punish them and assimilate them to Vietnamese culture.[22]

The Chinese or Hoa particularly concentrated in urbanized areas such as Saigon, Cho Lon, and Hanoi. They organized themselves into bang or 'congregations.' Two groups of Chinese that people tended to distinct, known as Minh Hương and Thanh nhân. The Minh hương were Chinese refugees that had migrated and settled down in Vietnam earlier during the 17th century, who married with Vietnamese women, had been substantially assimilated to local Vietnamese and Khmer populaces, and loyal to the Nguyen, compared to the Thanh nhân that recently arrived in Southern Vietnam, who dominated the grain trade. During the reign of Minh Mạng, a restriction against the Thanh nhân was issued in 1827, which prohibits the Thanh nhân access to the state bureaucracy, rice monopoly and foreign trade. Their alternate option was having themselves to be adjusted and integrated into Vietnamese society like the Minh Hương.[23]

During this time from 1820s to 1830s, for unknown reasons, French geographers and mapmakers was tending in incorporating whole Laos into Vietnam on their maps. Other contemporary geography authors, such as Aaron Arrowsmith (fl. 1780–1823) and Conrad Malte-Brun (fl. 1800–1826), claimed a bloating Empire of Annam consisted of several states, including Laos, either being conquered or vassal.[24][25] Later, Paul Doumer (fl. 1897–1902) admitted the cartographic error that during the apogee of Minh Mang's empire, the Vietnamese court could only have exerted its control or influence over Tonkin, Annam, Cochinchina, and Cambodia, but not Laos.[26] The Lao Kingdoms of Mekong Basin in fact still maintained their independence in diplomacy with Vietnam.[27]

Minh Mang sent troops to crushed a rebellion in Cambodia in 1820, then incorporated Cambodia into Vietnam in 1834 as the new Tây Thành province.[28] Since then, until his death, Minh Mang had been trying to force the Cambodians to adopt Vietnamese culture by the cultural assimilation progress of what historian David P. Chandler dubbed The Vietnamization of Cambodia.[29] Siamese accounts describe that Khmer nobles in Phnom Penh was forced to dress like Vietnamese, abide to Vietnamese laws, and were called "the new Yuon (Viet)". Cambodian revolts were put down brutally. Douglas Johnson recalled year 1836 as the momentum marked the greatest territorial extent of the Vietnamese empire, also high point of its stability which most revolts in Minh Mang's realm had been suppressed.[30] However, continuous uprisings in Cambodia, Tonkin, and wars with Siam put Minh Mang's expansion to an query, as all sides became exhausted.

Coin bearing the flying dragon (phi long) issued by Minh Mạng, 1833

coin Minh Mạng thông bảo.

Minh Mạng was known for his firmness of character, which guided his instincts in his policy making. This accentuated his unwillingness to break with orthodoxy in dealing with Vietnam's problems. His biographer, Marcel Gaultier, asserted that Minh Mạng had expressed his opinions about national policy before Gia Long's death, proposing a policy of greater isolationism and shunning westerners, and that Long tacitly approved of this. Minh Mạng was regarded as more nuanced and gentle than his father, with less forced labour and an increased perceptiveness towards the sentiment of the peasantry.

Minh Mạng mausoleum, Hue.

Burial of Minh Mạng inside

Tomb of Minh Mạng.

Although he disagreed with European culture and thinking, he studied it closely and was known for his scholarly nature. Ming Mạng was keen in Western technologies, namely mechanics, weaponry and navigation which he attempted to introduce into Vietnam. Upon hearing of the vaccination against smallpox, he organised for a French surgeon to live in a palatial residence and vaccinate the royal family against the disease. He was learned in Eastern philosophy and was regarded as an intellectually oriented monarch. He was also known for his writings as a poet. He was known for his attention to detail and micromanagement of state affairs, to a level that "astonished his contemporaries". As a result, he was held in high regard for his devotion to running the country. When Minh Mạng died, he left the throne to his son, Emperor Thiệu Trị, who was more rigidly Confucianist and anti-imperialist than his father. During Thiệu Trị's reign, diplomatic standoffs precipitated by aspiring European imperial powers on the pretext of the "treatment" of Catholic priests gave them an excuse to use gunboat diplomacy on Vietnam, and led to increasing raids and the eventual colonisation of Vietnam by France. Nevertheless, during his reign Minh Mạng had established a more efficient government, stopped a Siamese invasion and built many national monuments in the imperial city of Huế.

Vietnamese Wikisource has original text related to this article:

Đế hệ thi

Minh Mạng had a large number of wives and concubines. He is reported to have fathered 142 children from 43 wives.[33] His sons included: Miên Tông (Emperor Thiệu Trị), Miên Định (Prince of Thọ Xuân), Miên Thẩm (Prince of Tùng Thiện), Miên Trinh (Prince of Tuy Lý), Miên Bửu (Prince of Tương An), Miên Lâm (Prince of Hoài Đức), Miên Triện (Prince of Hoằng Hóa), Miên Lịch (Yên Thành). Three of his daughters, Nguyệt Đình, Mai Am and Huệ Phố, were famous poets.

Minh Mạng's sons also had a remarkable number of offspring: Prince of Thọ Xuân fathered 144 children, including 78 sons and 66 daughters, Prince of Tuy Lý, another son, had 77 sons and 37 daughters. He is succeeded by Emperor Thiệu Trị, who himself fathered 29 princes and 35 princesses.

He decided to name his descendants (Nguyễn Phước or Nguyễn Phúc: all members of the Nguyễn dynasty) by choosing the Generation name following the words of the Imperial succession poem to avoid confusion. For boys, the following poem is shown in Chữ Quốc Ngữ (modern Vietnamese script) and in chữ nôm:

Note: Hường replaced Hồng and Thoại replaced Thụy because it was taboo to use the names of passed emperors or fathers.

The meaning of each name is roughly given as follows:[34]

Girls receive also a different name on each generation, for example: Công-chúa, Công-nữ, Công Tôn-nữ, Công-tằng Tôn-nữ, Công-huyền Tôn-nữ, Lai-huyền Tôn-nữ, or shorten to Tôn-nữ for all generations afterward.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Emperor Minh Mạng.

• Hall, D. G. E. (1981) [1955]. A History of South-east Asia. London: Macmillan. ISBN 0-333-24163-0.
• Cady, John F. (1976) [1964]. South East Asia: Its historical development. New York: McGraw Hill. OCLC 15002777.
• Buttinger, Joseph (1958). The Smaller Dragon: A Political History of Vietnam. Praeger. OCLC 411659.