Dai Viet under the Later Le

The puppet king is poisoned

formationDrafted from Ký, Cours d'histoire annamite à l'usage des écoles de la Basse-Cochinchine (1875)

When the Ming occupation of Vietnam finally broke, the general who had led the uprising against it, Le Loi, did not simply take the throne outright. A figurehead had been placed on it during the fighting, a Tran claimant named Tran Cao, kept in place as a concession to Vietnamese loyalty toward the old dynasty even as the real power in the kingdom belonged entirely to Le Loi. Once the country was at peace, Le Loi issued a general amnesty and called on the people to return without fear to their farms and their trades.

An unnecessary flight

The following year, 1428, with calm restored across the country, Le Loi's generals and the court's own mandarins unanimously demanded Tran Cao's death and Le Loi's coronation. Tran Cao had no real following left - Le Loi was already revered as the saviour of the country and its independence - but the frightened young king fled by sea toward Nghe An regardless. A mandarin loyal to Le Loi caught him and brought him back to the citadel at Dong Quan, where he poisoned himself on the tenth day of the first month of 1428. His disappearance changed almost nothing in practice, since Le Loi had already been running the state in every respect that mattered.

A dynasty announced

By the second month Le Loi had distributed rewards to his army and organized his court, and on the eighteenth day of the fourth month he sent an embassy to the Ming imperial court to announce Tran Cao's death and the extinction of the Tran line. It was the formal beginning of a dynasty that would rule Vietnam, in one form or another, for the next three hundred and sixty years.

Vietnam National Museum of Fine Arts, Hanoi · Ký, Cours d'histoire annamite à l'usage des écoles de la Basse-Cochinchine (1875) · Daderot · CC0

A scaling ladder in the night

expansionDrafted from Ký, Cours d'histoire annamite à l'usage des écoles de la Basse-Cochinchine (1875)

Le Loi's own son and successor, Le Thai Tong, and his grandson Le Nhan Tong governed the kingdom Le Loi had founded without incident for three decades between them - Le Nhan Tong's own reign secure enough that by 1456 he was receiving the homage of Lao chieftains on the kingdom's western frontier. Not every claimant to the throne had accepted being passed over, however. Nghi Dan, Le Nhan Tong's own elder half-brother, had been set aside from the succession years earlier on account of his mother's rank, and he had never stopped believing the throne was rightfully his.

A palace taken by scaling ladder

On the third day of the tenth month of 1459, Nghi Dan struck. He had won over a number of mandarins to his cause and gathered his own partisans in secret; that night, they scaled the palace walls and broke in. Le Nhan Tong, nineteen years old, was killed in the attack, and the queen mother was put to the sword the following day. Nghi Dan proclaimed himself king under the name Thien Hung, and moved immediately to secure recognition: he sent the triennial tribute embassy to the Chinese court without delay, followed three weeks later by a second embassy asking that his own kingship be formally invested.

Ký, Cours d'histoire annamite à l'usage des écoles de la Basse-Cochinchine (1875) · Unknown · Public domain

Eight months, and a chosen death

The reign did not last. Nghi Dan's rule leaned entirely on the adventurers who had helped him seize the palace, and the kingdom's senior mandarins, worn down by eight months of his government, conspired against him in turn. They caught his followers by surprise and put them to death; Nghi Dan himself was spared at first, then stripped of his rank and ordered to choose the manner of his own death. In his place, the court raised to the throne Tu Thanh, prince of Binh Nguyen - the eighteen-year-old who would be crowned that summer, on the eighth day of the sixth month of 1460, and remembered afterward as Le Thanh Tong.

The head of Tra Toan

peakDrafted from Ký, Cours d'histoire annamite à l'usage des écoles de la Basse-Cochinchine (1875)

Le Thanh Tong, the fourth king of the dynasty, was crowned at eighteen in 1460 and went on to become one of the most illustrious rulers Vietnam ever had. He steered the kingdom through the political unrest that had brought him to the throne and quickly gave every department of government - administration, public instruction, war, finance, law - his own vigorous attention.

An army of two hundred and sixty thousand

His defining campaign came against Champa, the kingdom on Dai Viet's southern border. After a Cham raid into Hoa Chau, Le Thanh Tong resolved to pursue the Cham forces into the heart of their own territory. He sent 100,000 men by sea and marched personally at the head of 160,000 more, studying the geography of Champa as he went and refining his plan of attack. On the seventh day of the second month of 1471 he embarked his army - swollen, according to the annals, to as many as 700,000 men by local levies gathered along the way - aboard a thousand junks.

Ký, Cours d'histoire annamite à l'usage des écoles de la Basse-Cochinchine (1875) · TRMC · CC BY-SA 4.0

Cha Ban falls

The Cham king, Tra Toan, sued for peace once the scale of the invasion became clear, but Le Thanh Tong refused to settle for anything less than the Cham capital itself. On the twenty-seventh day of the second month his forces seized the citadel of Thi Nai in a single stroke; by the next day the capital, Cha Ban, was completely surrounded, and on the first day of the third month it fell by storm. Forty thousand Cham were killed and thirty thousand taken prisoner, Tra Toan among them. Le Thanh Tong had ordered his life spared in the fighting and had him treated with consideration, but the captive king, weakening steadily in captivity, died before the army had even returned home. Le Thanh Tong ordered his head cut off and displayed at the prow of his own royal junk beneath a white banner reading: "Head of Tra Toan, source of Champa's misfortune." Champa itself was broken into three small principalities under Cham chiefs who answered, from then on, to Dai Viet.

Two faults I have

peakDrafted from Ký, Cours d'histoire annamite à l'usage des écoles de la Basse-Cochinchine (1875)

Le Thanh Tong's reign, which ran thirty-eight years from his coronation to his death, was not exhausted by the Champa campaign that made his military reputation. He gave the same vigorous attention to administration, public instruction, finance and law that he had given to war, and it was under his direction that a new legal code, later known by his reign name as the Hong Duc code, took shape - a code that did away with the older practice of allowing punishments to be bought back with a payment, up to and including the death penalty itself. Only eight categories of case were reserved thereafter for the king's own personal judgment; everywhere else, a sentence handed down was a sentence that had to be carried out.

Ký, Cours d'histoire annamite à l'usage des écoles de la Basse-Cochinchine (1875) · Daderot · CC0

A son's grief, a king's confession

Le Thanh Tong's private life closed in sorrow before his public one did. In 1496 the queen mother fell fatally ill, and the king and his younger brother kept watch at her bedside without leaving her side day or night until she died. Before the year was out Le Thanh Tong himself fell ill in turn. On the twenty-ninth day of the first month of 1497, though he was already dying, he propped himself up on a table long enough to see his own son formally take the throne before him and to deliver his last instructions; he died the following day.

In his final days he had spoken with real bitterness about his own reign, listing what he judged to be his own two failings: that he had sometimes acted against justice simply to win men's praise, and that at other times he had sat on his throne as inert as a corpse, drawing down heaven's own displeasure on his kingdom rather than governing it. He turned the same unsparing eye on the men who had served him, naming ministers he judged mere decorations at court - wooden statues in official dress - who had never once opened their mouths to advise him on the business of the state, or lifted a worthy man up, or turned an unworthy one away. He left behind thirty-four children, and a code of law that would outlast every one of them.

An honorable minister refuses

contractionDrafted from Ký, Cours d'histoire annamite à l'usage des écoles de la Basse-Cochinchine (1875)

Three decades after Le Thanh Tong's death, real power at the Le court had passed into the hands of a general named Mac Dang Dung, who kept the reigning king as a captive figurehead while he methodically broke resistance to his own authority across the provinces. He was not gentle even with his own family: in 1526 he had his own brother-in-law put to death after his wife, seeking revenge for his taking ten concubines, falsely accused the man of conspiracy. King Le Chieu Tong, held prisoner since Mac Dang Dung's allies had captured him, was murdered on his captor's order that same year, at the age of twenty-six.

A boy king kept for show

Mac Dang Dung did not seize the throne outright at once. He kept the young Le Cung Hoang on it as a legal fig leaf while he finished his preparations, surrounding the boy with pleasures precisely so that he would not see clearly what was happening around him - by Mac Dang Dung's own household's later account, an image the court could point to from a distance so the people would still see a king seated on the throne. In the meantime Mac Dang Dung accumulated titles and ceremonial honors that made him, in substance, a second king standing beside the first.

The abdication no honorable minister would write

When the moment came, Mac Dang Dung ordered his minister of the interior to draft an act of abdication transferring the throne to him. That minister, Truong Phu Thuyet, refused outright, asking by what right such a thing could be demanded of him. A more compliant official, Nguyen Van Thoi, wrote the document instead, and Mac Dang Dung had the boy king sign it before proclaiming himself ruler under the name Minh Duc in the sixth month of 1527. He degraded Le Cung Hoang and the queen mother at once, confined them, and before long ordered them to take their own lives. Mac Dang Dung then settled into the royal palace at Thang Long, gave his ancestors the title of kings, and set about securing the loyalty of officials who, as even his own court could sense, had little real devotion to him.

Ký, Cours d'histoire annamite à l'usage des écoles de la Basse-Cochinchine (1875) · Feng Shiyang and others · Public domain

A brother-in-law sent south

contractionDrafted from Ký, Cours d'histoire annamite à l'usage des écoles de la Basse-Cochinchine (1875)

Mac Dang Dung's usurpation did not go unanswered. A former Le general named Nguyen Kim, fleeing Mac rule, took refuge with the king of Laos, who granted him a district's own revenues to support himself; there he gathered the scattered loyalists of the fallen dynasty and brought with him a surviving son of the murdered King Le Chieu Tong, building the nucleus of a restoration movement in exile from the kingdom Mac Dang Dung now ruled at Thang Long.

The Trinh inherit a cause

When Nguyen Kim died, his own son-in-law inherited both his army and his restoration cause, not only because he was a capable commander but because Nguyen Kim's own sons were still too young to lead in their father's place. That son-in-law was Trinh Kiem, and under him the Le restoration turned from an exile's cause into a standing rival government: by 1551 Trinh Kiem's forces were strong enough to attack Dong Kinh, the old Le capital, directly.

Ký, Cours d'histoire annamite à l'usage des écoles de la Basse-Cochinchine (1875) · Jean-Baptiste Tavernier · Public domain

An honest governorship, a hidden intention

Trinh Kiem kept Nguyen Kim's own sons at arm's length as far as their family name allowed him to. One of them, Nguyen Hoang, won his permission to go govern the provinces of Thuan Hoa and Quang Nam as a feudatory governor - territory still held by Mac troops, which Trinh Kiem judged a convenient, deniable way to be rid of a rival brother-in-law. Nguyen Hoang had intentions of his own. He left at once with a thousand carefully recruited men aboard twenty armed junks, landed at the port of An Viet, and settled first at Ai Tu. The country he explored there struck him as magnificent, and he resolved to make his future in it; he lived there in peace for ten years, until 1572, when a Mac expeditionary force of ten thousand men on thirty junks arrived to drive him out. Against them he had only twenty junks and no army worth the name - until, by his own account, a miraculous dream sent him the means to hold his new country and kept the line of Nguyen lords his descendants would build there out of Trinh hands for two centuries to come.

Ký, Cours d'histoire annamite à l'usage des écoles de la Basse-Cochinchine (1875) · Unknown · Public domain

A Chinese queue and a Chinese coat

endDrafted from Ký, Cours d'histoire annamite à l'usage des écoles de la Basse-Cochinchine (1875)

By the 1780s the Le kings reigned without ruling, their throne long overshadowed first by the Trinh lords in the north and then by the Tay Son rebellion that broke the Trinh in turn. Le Chieu Thong, the dynasty's twenty-seventh king, turned to the Qing empire for help against the Tay Son general Nguyen Hue, who had taken Hanoi in his name but was fast becoming a power the throne could not control. A Qing army marched south to restore him.

Ký, Cours d'histoire annamite à l'usage des écoles de la Basse-Cochinchine (1875) · Unknown · Public domain

Destroyed in a single campaign

Nguyen Hue met that army and destroyed it. The Qing commander escaped only by his own agility, scaling a wall and fleeing across the river; the rest of his force, cut off when the Vietnamese seized the bridge linking the citadel to the far bank, was killed almost to the last man. Le Chieu Thong fled north with his defeated protectors; the queen mother and the crown prince, leaving too late, found the bridge already cut and had to seek refuge in the western provinces instead. The king himself crossed into Chinese territory, gradually rejoined there by mandarins scattered in the retreat.

A symbolic abdication

New Qing reinforcements were promised at first, but the general given command of them, bribed with gold and silver sent by Nguyen Hue's brother, talked the emperor out of continuing the campaign on the Le king's behalf. Le Chieu Thong's advisers, reading the situation clearly, persuaded him to shave his head, take up the queue, and dress in Chinese clothing - a gesture that amounted to a moral abdication, and one his own chief adviser used exactly that way, writing to the Qing emperor that the king of Annam had settled permanently and safely within the empire's own territory and that there was no longer any reason to continue the war. The emperor accepted the advice, recalled his troops, and received the Tay Son's own envoys instead. Le Chieu Thong, stripped of his throne, was brought to Beijing, arriving in the second month of 1789. He was given a minor honorary rank and a small monthly allowance for himself and his attendants, and was never permitted to leave.