Tay Son

Three brothers at Qui Nhon

formationDrafted from Barrow, A Voyage to Cochinchina, in the Years 1792 and 1793 (1806)

The rebellion broke out in 1774, in the thirty-fifth year of the reigning king's rule and the fiftieth of his own age, at his own capital of Qui Nhon. Three brothers led it: the eldest a wealthy merchant who traded with China and Japan, the second a general of high rank, the third a priest. The king, sickly and indolent, had for years let the real work of government slip into the hands of his own generals - mostly eunuchs - and a fresh poll tax had already turned popular feeling against him. Against that combination of wealth, military command and religious standing, his resistance amounted to little.

A capital emptied to make a point

The brothers moved first to secure the king's own person and to hunt down every member of the royal family within reach, killing all who fell into their hands. Saigon, suspected of favoring the deposed king, was singled out for an army of its own: its walls were leveled and a reported twenty thousand of its inhabitants put to the sword. Trials and executions followed daily elsewhere, staged, the sources say, as much for their effect on public opinion as for any real conspiracy uncovered. The brothers balanced the terror with theater of their own - lavish feasts, fireworks, a general who flattered the army into loyalty, and clergy persuaded to tell the people that heaven itself had chosen these three men to rule them.

A kingdom split three ways

Having won the country, the brothers divided it. The eldest took the southern provinces of Chang and Don-nai; the general took Hue, on the border with Tonquin; the priest became high priest over the whole of Cochinchina. It was, by design, an arrangement that put the general between his own brother and Tonquin's still-independent king to the north - a border Hue's new ruler would not leave undisturbed for long.

National Museum of Vietnamese History, Hanoi · Barrow, A Voyage to Cochinchina, in the Years 1792 and 1793 (1806) · Donald Trung · CC BY-SA 4.0

An island of roots

peakDrafted from Barrow, A Voyage to Cochinchina, in the Years 1792 and 1793 (1806)

Crowned at Saigon under his dead father's name, the young king held the city only long enough to fortify it before disaster returned. Warned that a large army was marching against him and that resistance was hopeless, he gathered his family and a handful of loyal followers, took to the river, and put to sea for a small uninhabited island in the Gulf of Siam called Pulo Wai. There he was joined, in twos and threes, by some twelve hundred subjects still able to carry arms - and there, according to Bishop Adran's own letter describing the meeting, the king's soldiers survived on roots dug out of the ground.

A war fought for a foreign king

Rather than wait passively for the rebels to find his island refuge, the king sailed on to Siam and offered his services, and his roughly thousand armed followers, to the Siamese king, then at war with Burma. Using tactics learned years before from his French tutor - avoiding pitched battle, striking from commanding positions, harassing the enemy's march rather than meeting it head-on - he forced the Burmese to sue for peace on his terms and returned to the Siamese capital loaded with gold, silver and royal gratitude.

A refusal, a plot, and a night escape

Gratitude did not last. The Siamese king, rebuffed when he proposed to take the exiled king's sister as a concubine and then, more brazenly, to share his own throne with her, grew resentful of a guest he had begun to consider above his own station - and Siamese generals, jealous in their own right, are said to have plotted against the exile's life. Warned in time, the king and his family cut their way out of the Siamese capital by night with sword in hand, seized enough vessels in the harbor to carry some fifteen hundred followers, and sailed back to Pulo Wai, which he now fortified with guns taken from the captured ships - secure, for the moment, against either the Siamese king he had just abandoned or the rebels who still held his own country.

A treaty no fleet ever sailed

peakDrafted from Barrow, A Voyage to Cochinchina, in the Years 1792 and 1793 (1806)

The heir the Tay Son brothers had hunted did not stay caught. A French missionary bishop known as Adran, who had tutored the murdered king's young son and heir, smuggled the boy's father, mother, wife, infant son and one sister out of the capital by night; for months the fugitive royal family hid in the branches of a banyan tree, fed at the risk of his own life by a Christian priest named Paul, until the search parties gave up. The survivors made their way to Saigon, where the people crowned the young heir under his late father's name. A purchased fleet's surprise raid on the rebel navy at Qui Nhon failed when the lead French ship ran aground and its Portuguese allies fled to Macao, but it was enough to draw the eldest brother's attention south - and enough to keep the boy-king's cause alive.

Barrow, A Voyage to Cochinchina, in the Years 1792 and 1793 (1806) · Eugénie Marie Salanson · Public domain

A prince at Versailles

Adran did not stop at raids. Judging the cause hopeless without outside help, he carried the young prince first to Pondicherry and then to Paris, arriving in 1787. There, in the space of a few months, he negotiated a treaty between Louis XVI and the exiled King of Cochinchina, signed at Versailles - an alliance promising twenty French ships of war, five European regiments and two colonial ones, a million dollars in specie and military stores, all in exchange for the cession in perpetuity of the bay of Turon and its surrounding territory, French consuls along the whole coast, timber rights in the forests, and a Cochinchinese pledge to raise sixty thousand men in Louis's defense if ever the new French territory were attacked. Adran himself was made Bishop of Cochinchina and appointed Ambassador Plenipotentiary to the court he had once fled.

Barrow, A Voyage to Cochinchina, in the Years 1792 and 1793 (1806) · Maupérin · Public domain

Undone by a jealous mistress

The expedition never sailed. Reaching Pondicherry in 1789 to organize the promised ships and troops, Adran gave offense to Madame de Vienne, mistress of the French governor's aide-de-camp, by refusing to pay her the social call custom expected. She took her revenge by working on the governor's own vanity until he delayed the armament pending further orders from Versailles - and before those orders could arrive, revolution broke out in France and ended the matter for good. Refusing to give up his original plan regardless, Adran gathered what volunteer officers he could and sailed on toward Cochinchina anyway, determined to find the exiled king himself and see the restoration through without an army France had promised and never sent.

Bibliothèque nationale de France · Barrow, A Voyage to Cochinchina, in the Years 1792 and 1793 (1806) · René-Julien Le Floch de la Carrière · Public domain

The mock king of Tonquin

peakDrafted from Barrow, A Voyage to Cochinchina, in the Years 1792 and 1793 (1806)

While the exiled king fought Siam's wars and Bishop Adran carried a treaty to Versailles, the Tay Son general who held Hue was building the dynasty's own high point. He had barely settled into his new capital before quarreling with the neighboring King of Tonquin, a tributary of the Chinese emperor. Tonquin's forces, no match for hardened rebel troops, broke after a single engagement; their king fled to Beijing to beg the Qing emperor for an army to restore him.

An army that starved before it fought

The Qing emperor obliged, ordering the Viceroy of Canton to march on Tonquin at the head of a reported hundred thousand men. Warned well in advance by his own spies, the Tay Son general laid the invasion route waste ahead of the Chinese column, burning towns and villages in its path; by the time the army neared the frontier it was already starving, and the retreat that followed cost, by report, some fifty thousand men to hunger, disease and a harassing rearguard action without a single general battle ever being fought.

A crown taken, a truth hidden

Facing ruin and disgrace rather than risk further losses, the defeated Chinese viceroy opened secret talks instead, and the Tay Son general used the opening to declare himself crowned by the will of heaven and the voice of the people as king of a newly united Tonquin and Cochinchina. A face-saving fiction followed: the viceroy reported a fabricated victory to his own emperor, who in due course confirmed the arrangement and summoned the new king to pay homage in person. Wary of a trap, the general sent a trusted officer to Beijing in his place, posing as king; the impostor was received with full honors and returned home confirmed in a title that was never really his to receive - after which the real ruler at Hue had his own friend and the whole of his suite put to death, the only sure way, it seemed to him, of keeping the deception from ever reaching the ears that mattered.

Barrow, A Voyage to Cochinchina, in the Years 1792 and 1793 (1806) · Unknown · Public domain

A fishing fleet spared

endDrafted from Barrow, A Voyage to Cochinchina, in the Years 1792 and 1793 (1806)

The exiled king did not stay on Pulo Wai forever. After nearly two years living on roots, he judged the moment right - the Tay Son brothers by then exhausted by their own quarrels, each shut up in his own capital expecting attack from the other - and landed once more in his own country. His subjects flocked to his standard; he marched unopposed to Saigon and spent a year rebuilding its defenses, training an army, and gathering a fleet, joined in 1790 by Bishop Adran and his own grown son, newly returned from the failed Versailles mission.

Fire in the harbor

The chance came in 1791, when the Hue general - by then ruling as a self-proclaimed king - died, leaving a twelve-year-old son to hold a throne built entirely on his father's own military reputation. The following spring, the king from Saigon put his fleet under two French officers and struck the rival fleet at anchor in Qui Nhon harbor while its own king and court were thirty miles inland, hunting. One French captain, having done fearsome damage, ran his ship aground pressing the attack too far; the king, watching, is said to have remarked only that he could not complain of an accident that let him have a turn doing his own share of the fighting. The rival fleet was all but destroyed. When his officers pointed out the one grand yacht spared in the confusion, the king refused to have it burned either - observing, with the same dry humor, that its owner would need something to fish from once he tired of hunting.

Death takes the merchant brother too

The eldest of the original three brothers, who had held Qui Nhon throughout, did not long outlive the destruction of that fleet. He died in 1793 - of a disease of the brain, by one account, or of poison administered to end an ungovernable rage, by another - leaving his own son to inherit a capital that had already lost the navy meant to defend it.

Two usurpers, one throne

endDrafted from White, A Voyage to Cochin China (1824)

Where the father had ruled with talent, by every account that survives him, his son ruled with the vices and none of the ability - cruel, deceitful, hated by his own people. In 1796 the king from Saigon marched on Qui Nhon by land; the young ruler mustered a hundred thousand men to meet him, and lost anyway to a far smaller, better-disciplined force. One episode from the fall of the city became, in the retelling, the measure of the victor's own character: a captured officer who had fired on him after the surrender was offered, in the old custom, his choice of poison, cord or dagger rather than the headsman's blade - and instead of choosing, declared he would rather die unbowed and raise an army against his captor again if released. Struck by the defiance, the king freed him outright. The following year that same officer commanded the defense of Qui Nhon against a second siege, and died in it.

The last court at Hue

With Qui Nhon fallen, only the court at Hue remained - held by Quang Trung's own young heir, a boy who had inherited his father's throne but none of the campaigns that might have kept it. For six more years the two sides held an uneasy line at Turon bay while the king from Saigon prepared a final campaign in the north. In 1802 that campaign reached Hue itself, dislodging its last Tay Son ruler and driving him into Tonquin for good. Cochinchina and Tonquin stood reunited under a single sovereign for the first time since three brothers had risen against a sickly king at Qui Nhon twenty-eight years before - the throne that rising had built now entirely erased, and the throne it had once hunted through a forest fully restored.

White, A Voyage to Cochin China (1824) · Vyacheslav Argenberg · CC BY 4.0