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Vietnam The Tay Son Rebellion
The Tay Son Rebellion (1771-1802), which ended the Le and
Trinh dynasties, was led by three brothers from the village of
Tay Son in Binh Dinh Province. The brothers, who were of the Ho
clan (to which Ho Quy Ly had belonged), adopted the name Nguyen.
The eldest brother, Nguyen Nhac, began an attack on the ruling
Nguyen family by capturing Quang Nam and Binh Dinh provinces in
1772. The chief principle and main slogan of the Tay Son was
"seize the property of the rich and distribute it to the poor."
In each village the Tay Son controlled, oppressive landlords and
scholar-officials were punished and their property redistributed.
The Tay Son also abolished taxes, burned the tax and land
registers, freed prisoners from local jails, and distributed the
food from storehouses to the hungry. As the rebellion gathered
momentum, it gained the support of army deserters, merchants,
scholars, local officials, and bonzes.
In 1773 Nguyen Nhac seized Qui Nhon, which became the Tay Son
capital. By 1778 the Tay Son had effective control over the
southern part of the country, including Gia Dinh (later Saigon).
The ruling Nguyen family were all killed by the Tay Son rebels,
with the exception of Nguyen Anh, the sixteen-year-old nephew of
the last Nguyen lord, who escaped to the Mekong Delta. There he
was able to gather a body of supporters and retake Gia Dinh. The
city changed hands several times until 1783, when the Tay Son
brothers destroyed Nguyen Anh's fleet and drove him to take
refuge on Phu Quoc Island. Soon thereafter, he met with French
missionary bishop Pigneau de Behaine and asked him to be his
emissary in obtaining French support to defeat the Tay Son.
Pigneau de Behaine took Nguyen Anh's five-year-old son, Prince
Canh, and departed for Pondichery in French India to plead for
support for the restoration of the Nguyen. Finding none there, he
went to Paris in 1786 to lobby on Nguyen Anh's behalf. Louis XVI
ostensibly agreed to provide four ships, 1,650 men, and supplies
in exchange for Nguyen Anh's promise to cede to France the port
of Tourane (Da Nang) and the island of Poulo Condore. However,
the local French authorities in India, under secret orders from
the king, refused to supply the promised ships and men.
Determined to see French military intervention in Vietnam,
Pigneau de Behaine himself raised funds for two ships and
supplies from among the French merchant community in India, hired
deserters from the French navy to man them, and sailed back to
Vietnam in 1789.
In the meantime, by 1786 the Tay Son had overcome the
crumbling Trinh dynasty and seized all of the north, thus uniting
the country for the first time in 200 years. The Tay Son made
good their promise to restore the Le dynasty, at least for
ceremonial purposes. The three Nguyen brothers installed
themselves as kings of the north, central, and southern sections
of the country respectively, while continuing to acknowledge the
Le emperor in Thang Long. In 1788, however, the reigning Le
emperor fled north to seek Chinese assistance in defeating the
Tay Son. Eager to comply, a Chinese army of the Qing dynasty
(1644-1911) invaded Vietnam, seized Thang Long, and invested the
Le ruler as "King of Annam." That same year, the second eldest
Tay Son brother, Nguyen Hue, proclaimed himself Emperor Quang
Trung. Marching north with 100,000 men and 100 elephants, Quang
Trung attacked Thang Long at night and routed the Chinese army of
200,000, which retreated in disarray. Immediately following his
victory, the Tay Son leader sought to reestablish friendly
relations with China, requesting recognition of his rule and
sending the usual tributary mission.
Quang Trung stimulated Vietnam's war-ravaged economy by
encouraging trade and crafts, ordering the recultivation of
fallow lands, reducing or abolishing taxes on local products, and
resettling landless peasants on communal lands in their own
villages. Quang Trung also established a new capital at Phu Xuan
(near modern Hue), a more central location from which to
administer the country. He reorganized the government along
military lines, giving key posts to generals, with the result
that military officials for the first time outranked civilian
officials. Vietnamese was substituted for Chinese as the official
national language, and candidates for the bureaucracy were
required to submit prose and verse compositions in chu nom
rather than in classical Chinese.
Quang Trung died in 1792, without leaving a successor strong
enough to assume leadership of the country, and the usual
factionalism ensued. By this time, Nguyen Anh and his supporters
had won back much of the south from Nguyen Lu, the youngest and
least capable of the Tay Son brothers. When Pigneau de Behaine
returned to Vietnam in 1789, Nguyen Anh was in control of Gia
Dinh. In the succeeding years, the bishop brought Nguyen Anh a
steady flow of ships, arms, and European advisers, who supervised
the building of forts, shipyards, cannon foundries and bomb
factories, and instructed the Vietnamese in the manufacture and
use of modern armaments. Nguyen's cause was also greatly aided by
divisions within the Tay Son leadership, following the death of
Quang Trung, and the inability of the new leaders to deal with
the problems of famine and natural disasters that wracked the
war-torn country. After a steady assault on the north, Nguyen
Anh's forces took Phu Xuan in June 1801 and Thang Long a year
later.
Data as of December 1987
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