Dai Viet under the Ly and the Tran

One order, three and a half centuries

Drafted from Taylor, A History of the Vietnamese (2013)formation

Ly Thanh Tong proclaimed the name Dai Viet in 1054. It was still the state's name in 1804, when Gia Long changed it.

Those seven hundred and fifty years are not one thing, and treating them as one is the commonest mistake made about Vietnamese history. Between 1400 and 1804 the Red River delta had a usurping dynasty, a twenty-year Chinese occupation, the Le, a century of contest with the Mac, a two-century partition between two families holding opposite ends of the country while both nominally served a Le emperor with no power, and finally the Nguyen. The name was continuous. Almost nothing else was.

The Ly and the Tran are one order. A capital at Thang Long, a Buddhist court, an examination system growing alongside an aristocracy, a defined relationship with the empire to the north, and an expansion southward against Champa: it starts, it runs three and a half centuries, and it is ended by a usurpation with a date.

That is one polity, and what follows it in 1400 is a different one wearing the same name — which is why the histories that run straight from Ly Thanh Tong to Gia Long have to keep changing the subject without saying so.

The vocabulary of the north

Drafted from Taylor, A History of the Vietnamese (2013)expansion

The Red River delta had been administered from China, on and off, for something over a thousand years, ending in the tenth century. What it built afterwards was a state that described itself in the northern empire's own imperial vocabulary.

The ruler was an emperor at home, in the same characters the court in the north used for itself, with the same mandate, the same ritual, the same calendar, and his own claim to be the centre of a civilised world with barbarians around its edges — among whom he counted the Chams and the Khmer. The bureaucracy sat examinations on the Confucian classics. The records were kept in literary Chinese.

And abroad, to the northern court, the same ruler was the King of Annam, holding that title by investiture from the emperor, sending tribute missions on schedule.

A rank accepted abroad and contradicted at home

The discomfort in this arrangement was real and the Ly and Tran courts lived with it deliberately rather than by oversight. Melaka's own investiture from the Ming, decades later, cost that sultanate nothing to accept — a new state with everything to gain from the recognition and no rival claim of its own to protect. Dai Viet's rulers had no such easy bargain. They called themselves emperor at home, in the same register the northern court used for itself, over a state that had fought its way out of that same empire's direct rule only a century earlier — and they went on accepting investiture as King of Annam continuously for three centuries, including in years when the two courts were openly at war. The contradiction was not resolved. It was managed, deliberately and for generations, as the ordinary way of dealing with a much larger neighbour a Vietnamese army could beat in the field but not permanently ignore.

Chu Nom

The Vietnamese language also got its own writing system in this period: chữ Nôm, assembled out of Chinese characters, some borrowed for their sound, some for their sense, and many invented by combining two characters into one. It let Vietnamese be written down for the first time on its own terms rather than in literary Chinese, and later poets and chroniclers used it for work meant to be read as Vietnamese rather than translated into it.

A throne married into

Drafted from Taylor, A History of the Vietnamese (2013)expansion

The Ly dynasty's power had always rested on the upper Red River plain, the agricultural heartland of the delta. The Tran were a different kind of family entirely: their base was the coast, where the port of Van Don had grown, over the twelfth century, into a gathering point for merchants trading with southern China under the Southern Song — wealth accumulating in the hands of local producers, traders, and the family positioned to profit from all three. By the early thirteenth century that family was strong enough to fight its way into the capital.

A kingdom in pieces

The takeover was neither quick nor bloodless. Two local strongmen, Nguyen Non and Doan Thuong, held out against the Tran's advance up the delta for years, partitioning what had been the Ly heartland between them. The Tran won control of the reigning king, Ly Hue Tong, largely by protecting his sister-in-law and her newborn daughter and building royal favour from that position rather than by any single decisive battle — a slow consolidation carried out while Nguyen Non and Doan Thuong remained undefeated in their own districts, kept apart from each other more by Tran manoeuvring than by military defeat.

The brother who did not need the throne himself

Tran Tu Khanh, who had led the family's military campaigns, died in 1223. His younger brother, Tran Thu Do, stepped into his position and remained the effective ruler of the country for the next quarter century without ever taking the crown himself. The nominal head of the family, the elder brother Tran Thua, held formal precedence and a real role in government — but Tran Thu Do had the last word in every decision that mattered.

Two daughters, and which one the throne would need

Ly Hue Tong had no son, only two young daughters by his queen, herself a Tran. The elder, Thuan Thien, had already been married as a child to Tran Thua's eldest son and so was set aside; Tran Thu Do judged that son unfit to be king in any case. The younger daughter, Chieu Thanh, not yet ten years old, was the one Tran Thu Do used instead. He had her father abdicate in her favour, then arranged her marriage to Tran Thua's second son, Tran Canh — a child bridegroom the same age as his child bride. At the end of 1225 Tran Canh was crowned king, his father took the newly invented title of senior emperor, and the Tran dynasty existed in fact, sealed by a marriage between two children neither of whom had chosen it.

What happened to the king who stepped aside

Ly Hue Tong and his mother were sent to live out their retirement in a temple in the capital. It did not last. Within a year, worried that a living former king might become a focus for lingering Ly loyalty, Tran Thu Do drove the retired king to suicide — and then, with the old dynasty's last male claimant gone, took the deposed king's own former queen, his own sister, as his own wife. The Tran had not simply replaced the Ly on the throne. They had married into it, waited for the family they married into to run out of options, and then removed what remained of it by hand.

Three times

Drafted from Taylor, A History of the Vietnamese (2013)peak

The Mongols came into the Red River delta in 1258, in 1285 and in 1287–88. Each time they took Thang Long, which each time had been evacuated. Each time they left.

The third ended in the Bach Dang estuary, where Tran Hung Dao's forces planted iron-tipped stakes in the riverbed at low water, drew the Yuan fleet in on the flood tide, and destroyed it as the tide fell. It was the third time in three hundred and fifty years that a Vietnamese commander had won a battle at that estuary by that method, which the Yuan admiral might reasonably have looked up.

The Mongols built the largest contiguous land empire in history, and the list of places that stopped them outright is short. The Mamluks turned a Mongol army back at Ain Jalut in 1260 and held Syria afterward. Java met the fleet when it arrived in 1293, used it against a domestic rival, and then turned on it in turn. And Dai Viet did it three times, on its own ground, against forces marching overland from a province the empire already held.

Japan is the other name usually given, and it had a strait and a typhoon working for it. Dai Viet shared a land border with the empire that invaded it.

How

Both dynasties kept household registers of adult men and called them up by quota. The Tran added something more unusual: the princes of the ruling clan held their own estates and raised their own forces from them, which meant that when the capital fell — and it fell three times — there was no single army whose destruction would end the war. The court withdrew, the countryside was stripped, the invaders held a city with nothing in it, and the levies came back at them from several directions at once.

An empire that won by destroying field armies and taking capitals had nothing to take.

Abdication as a rule

Drafted from Taylor, A History of the Vietnamese (2013)aside?What aside means

The Tran had a practice, adopted deliberately at the start of the dynasty and applied for most of its length: the reigning emperor abdicated in favour of his designated heir while still alive and in good health, took the title of senior emperor — thượng hoàng — and governed alongside the man he had just installed.

The heir was on the throne, publicly, with the previous holder standing next to him, years before there was anything to fight over.

Why that is worth stopping on

Succession is where most of the polities on these pages come apart, and the failures are monotonous. Singhasari's chronicle is four generations of revenge killings. Ayutthaya changed dynasty five times in four hundred years, most of the transitions violent. In Aceh the merchants installed four queens in succession precisely to keep the throne weak. At Angkor the throne was repeatedly taken by force, and the taking is most of what is recorded.

A designated heir is normal; every one of those places had the idea. A designated heir who is already reigning, with the man who designated him alive and in the room to enforce it, is not.

And what happened when they stopped

The Tran abandoned the practice late in the dynasty. The throne was usurped within two reigns, and the dynasty ended.

That is the closest thing to a controlled experiment these centuries offer. The rule was in force and the successions held; the rule lapsed and the succession failed in the ordinary way. What it does not tell you is why the practice was abandoned by rulers who could see, as clearly as anyone reading now, what it had been doing for them.

The Tran run down

Drafted from Taylor, A History of the Vietnamese (2013)contraction

The dynasty that beat the Mongols three times was finished a little over a century later by a combination of a Cham king, an estate system and a family that had stopped producing adults.

The estates

The Tran had won the Mongol wars partly through a peculiar arrangement: princes of the imperial clan held large personal estates in the delta, with their own dependants, their own retainers and their own military followings, and the wars were fought substantially by those private forces under family command.

It worked because the family was united and the enemy was existential. Neither condition is permanent.

Afterwards the estates remained, and they did what such things do. Land and the labour on it accumulated in the hands of princes and monasteries; the registered peasantry that the state taxed and conscripted shrank; and the court's own revenue and manpower declined while the private establishments grew.

The Tran also married exclusively within the clan — cousin marriages, generation after generation, as a deliberate policy to keep the throne out of any other family's reach. It kept the throne secure and it produced, by the fourteenth century, a run of emperors who were children, invalids or both.

Che Bong Nga

Into that came the one Cham ruler who could have reversed four centuries of Vietnamese advance.

Che Bong Nga sacked Thang Long — the capital — in 1371, and again in 1377, when the Vietnamese emperor was killed attacking Vijaya, and again in 1383. Three sackings of a capital in twelve years.

The court fled each time. The chronicles record the imperial archives burned, the palaces looted, and the emperor of the day taking to the river.

He was killed in 1390 by cannon fire from a Vietnamese ship after a defector pointed out which vessel he was aboard, and Champa never threatened the delta again. But the dynasty did not recover its standing. A ruling house that cannot keep an enemy out of its own capital three times in a generation has demonstrated something to everybody who was watching.

The man who was watching

Ho Quy Ly was a court official related to the imperial family by marriage who made himself indispensable during the Cham wars and then made himself unavoidable.

Through the 1390s he removed the people who might have stopped him, in the usual order. In 1400 he took the throne outright.

What is unusual is what he did with it, and it is the reason he is argued about rather than dismissed. He capped the amount of land any individual could hold and the number of dependants they could keep, which was aimed directly at the princely estates. He issued paper money and called in the bronze coin. He reformed the examinations, added mathematics, and had Chinese classics translated into Vietnamese written in chu nom. He built a new capital of enormous dressed stone blocks in Thanh Hoa, and its gates are still standing.

Every one of those is an attempt to fix what had gone wrong: too much land in private hands, too little revenue, an administration recruited from too narrow a group.

He had seven years. In 1407 a Ming army arrived on the pretext of restoring the Tran, took the country, and held it for twenty.

1400

Drafted from Taylor, A History of the Vietnamese (2013)end

Ho Quy Ly had married into the Tran, held the regency, and controlled the last two emperors. In 1400 he deposed the child on the throne — his own grandson — and took it.

Nobody conquered anything. The senior official of a dynasty that could no longer defend its own capital removed the last child in the line and took the throne, and his own dynasty lasted seven years.

What happened next is the part worth the chapter. In 1407 the Ming invaded, announcing that they had come to restore the dynasty Ho Quy Ly had displaced. Having taken the country they did not restore it. They annexed it, administered it as a province for twenty years, shipped its records and its scholars north, and were expelled in 1427 by a rebellion out of Thanh Hoa that founded the Le.

So the state whose court had accepted investiture from the northern emperor for three centuries, as the price of being left alone, was reconquered by that emperor's successor using a dynastic technicality as the pretext. The arrangement described two chapters back had exactly one failure mode and this was it.

What came out of it

Ho Quy Ly's state lasted seven years and the occupation that followed lasted twenty, and what emerged from both was the Le — a dynasty founded by a provincial landowner from Thanh Hoa who spent ten years running an insurgency and drove the Ming out in 1427.

The Le ruled, in one form or another, for three hundred and sixty years, and under Le Thanh Tong in the second half of the fifteenth century the Vietnamese state took the shape it kept until the French: six ministries, a censorate, a cadastral survey, a law code that lasted three centuries, and an army that finished Champa in 1471.

So the reforms Ho Quy Ly was executed for attempting were substantially carried out, by the dynasty that replaced the dynasty that replaced him, within two generations.

What the north left

Drafted from Taylor, A History of the Vietnamese (2013)afterlife

The Ly and the Tran established the thing that Vietnamese history afterwards is about: a state that ran on Chinese institutions and defined itself by not being China.

The vocabulary

Everything formal in the Vietnamese state was Chinese in origin and Vietnamese in use.

The examinations, on the Chinese classics, in classical Chinese, run from 1075 and continue — with interruptions — until 1919, which makes Vietnam the last country on earth to abolish the Confucian civil service examination, fourteen years after China did.

The law codes are modelled on Tang and Ming originals. The six ministries, the censorate, the ranks, the court dress, the calendar, the dynastic histories written in the Chinese manner about the dynasty just ended — all of it.

And the writing. Literary Chinese was the language of administration and scholarship for nine hundred years. Alongside it, from the Tran period, chu nom: Chinese characters used and combined to write Vietnamese, a script of some tens of thousands of graphs that only a person already literate in Chinese could read, and the vehicle for the vernacular poetry that Vietnamese readers actually care about.

And the argument

The point of all that machinery was to be a separate country using it.

Vietnamese rulers took the title hoang de — emperor, the same word as the Chinese one — at home, and sent tribute to the Chinese court as vuong, king, abroad. Two titles, two audiences, one man. It is the most precise institutional statement of the relationship anybody devised, and it lasted until the French.

The Mongol wars are the other half. Three invasions in thirty years, three defeats, and Tran Hung Dao's proclamation to his officers before the second — a text every Vietnamese schoolchild still learns — is an argument that they should prefer death to serving the invaders. The tactics were withdrawal, scorched earth, and the stakes driven into the bed of the Bach Dang river in 1288, which impaled the Mongol fleet on a falling tide.

That last was a deliberate repetition. The same trick had been used in the same river against the Chinese in 938 and again in 981. Doing it a third time, three hundred years later, against a different enemy, is a state telling itself a story about its own continuity.

What came next

The twenty-year Ming occupation from 1407 was the most serious attempt ever made to absorb Vietnam back into China, and it was systematic: the administration reorganised as a Chinese province, the examinations imposed, and — according to the Vietnamese accounts — books collected and sent north or destroyed.

Le Loi's ten-year insurgency drove them out by 1427. The proclamation of victory written for him by Nguyen Trai opens by stating that Dai Viet has its own civilisation, its own mountains and rivers, and its own customs, distinct from the north's — which is the whole argument of the preceding four centuries in one sentence, made necessary by the fact that the institutions being defended had all been imported.

The march south

The other inheritance is the direction.

The Ly and Tran had taken Cham provinces piece by piece for three hundred years. The Le finished the job in 1471. The Nguyen carried it into the Mekong delta over the following two centuries, taking Khmer territory the way the earlier dynasties had taken Cham.

Vietnam is the shape it is — a thousand-mile ribbon down the coast, with a delta at each end — because of a process that began under the Ly and the Tran and did not stop until there was nothing left to move into.