In 1527, when Mac Dang Dung made his move, our ancestor was serving at the court, in what capacity we do not know exactly, but considering the circumstances in which the new ruler made him a count, he must have been a viscount holding a deputy ministership or some equivalent post. He would be then in his early fifties. I found nothing in history books indicating that he belonged to the circle of Mac Dang Dung’s followers, or that he was involved in any way in the many episodes which were to bring the Mac to power. It was clear that he was one of the mandarins who kept to their task of administering the country. But events would place him and his fellow mandarins before a choice, perhaps the most momentous that they would ever be called to make. They must decide whether to remain faithful to the Le king, or to transfer their allegiance to a new monarch. In the sixth lunar month of that year of the Pig, Mac Dang Dung left his seaside village of Co Trai, which he used as his headquarters, to return to the capital. He forced the young Le king, whom he himself had put on the throne five years before, to abdicate. Public opinion was favorable to him, as recorded in the History of Dai Viet: “At that time, mandarins and common people in the country all sided with Mac Dang Dung and welcomed him into the capital.” When the mandarins assembled for the regular royal audience of the fifteenth day, the Le king had lost his throne but had not formally abdicated. The atmosphere of the audience, where the king was conspicuously absent, was dramatic. Mac Dang Dung was present, still bearing his title of Prince of An Hung, but power had already been gathered into his hands and the mandarins knew what he wanted. Some manifested their opposition in a violent manner; they shouted insults, even spat and threw ink slabs at him. Others refused to draft the proclamation of abdication when asked to do so. The majority of mandarins however, with our ancestor Nguyen Tue among them, acquiesced to the change of dynasty. Finally, a proclamation was drafted in the name of the Le king. “I am devoid of virtue and unable to carry the burden of state,” said the proclamation. “Recognizing that the mandate of Heaven and the wishes of the population . . . are in favour of Mac Dang Dung, Prince of An Hung, . . . I bow to reason and cede him the throne.” A few months later, the deposed king and his mother were forced to commit suicide.
Some comments need to be made on the attitude of the mandarins, a great many of whom went along with Mac Dang Dung’s action. It would be easy to think that they had bowed to pressure in order to save their lives and positions. No doubt some had. But the true scholars among them were guided by other considerations. Central to Confucian teachings was the relationship between a subject-or mandarin-and his king, a relationship governed by two cardinal rules of conduct as far as the subject was concerned. The first rule expressed the duty of loyalty; it commanded that a loyal subject must not serve two kings. The second rule was a counterpart to the first and took into account the need for change. Taken from the teachings of Mencius, it stipulated that the king must come after the people and that the people’s wishes were one with the mandate of Heaven. The duty of loyalty, therefore, could cease if the king had lost the support of his people.
It took great personal courage to oppose Mac Dang Dung and publicly taunt him; those mandarins who did so knew that they would pay with exile, or their own lives. Their conduct would be duly praised in history books. It required a different kind of courage to assess what the people’s wishes were. Loyalty to the king was a paramount part of the “virtue” for which scholars were selected for public service. Individualistic appraisal was not an intellectual process encouraged by the highly formalistic education system. For those trained in the Western process of intellectual enquiry, it would be difficult to imagine the agony that a true scholar must have gone through before arriving at the decision that the mandate of the Le had ended and that the people needed a new ruler. Old mandarins like Nguyen Tue-who had passed fifty-would have found it easier to stay with the old dynasty than to opt for change, to retire than to cooperate with the new regime. But the country had suffered too long from instability and unrest. The people clearly saw in Mac Dang Dung a strong man capable of restoring peace and stability. I believe those reasons were instrumental in making our ancestor overcome the prohibitions against “serving two kings.” Perhaps in Nguyen Tue, we can also recognize the daring and adventurous side of our family character, which had manifested itself forcefully in recent generations. By coming out in support of Mac Dang Dung against the established monarchy, he showed himself to be a revolutionary unafraid of change.
After elevating himself to the throne, Mac Dang Dung conferred titles and high positions upon his relatives and close followers, an action which went down badly with the public. He was expected to bring in a new and untainted regime, yet had shown favoritism and nepotism. As noted by the historian, “Everyone was disappointed, confusion developed in the country.” Mac Dang Dung saw his mistake. He sent officials out to seek the support of the great mandarinal families and invite their descendants to cooperate with the new regime. He went as far as honoring some of the mandarins who had publicly opposed him. At the same time and in order to create a climate of continuity and normalcy, he decided to retain all the government structure, rules and regulations of the former dynasty. Several months later, a list of fifty-six people, who could be described as the new ruling group assembled by Mac Dang Dung, were given titles and promotions. As we have seen, Nguyen Tue was in that group. Twenty-two high mandarins in that group had their names recorded in history books and among them, only nine were known as longtime supporters of Mac Dang Dung. The majority, our ancestor included, were simply mandarins who opted to serve the new dynasty. Having been accused of favoritism, Mac Dang Dung took care this time to promote the mandarins only to the next higher grade and rank. Nguyen Tue became a count and therefore at the end of the Le, he must have already been a viscount, a title usually given to those holding the position of deputy minister.
Mac Dang Dung would be castigated by later historians as a rebel and usurper who killed the Le king to appropriate the throne. The History of Dai Viet called the Mac rule illegitimate and not worthy to be put on a par with rightful dynasties. As a consequence, the annals of the Mac were written in smaller characters and presented as an appendix to those of the Le, whom the Mac had overthrown. Historian Le Quy Don, writing in the eighteenth century, entitled his account of the Mac period: “The story of rebellious subjects.” However, neither he nor those who wrote in the History of Dai Viet could lay claim to objectivity. They were all mandarins of the Restored Le. The Mirror of Vietnam’s History, written in the nineteenth century under the Nguyen dynasty, continued to chastise the Mac for “having treacherously usurped power.” But the Nguyen emperors also held a grudge; in the sixteenth century, their ancestor Nguyen Kim fought against the Mac and died from poisoning, allegedly at their hands. In the first half of this century, new history books appeared in the modern language with their authors following the line set by ancient texts. Tran Trong Kim, whose Vietnamese History became a standard school textbook, even called Mac Dang Dung a traitor to his country for having “capitulated” to China in an incident we shall discuss later. It was not before the 1950s that efforts were made to more objectively examine Mac Dang Dung’s role and reappraise his place in history. After centuries of being vilified by partisan historians, the Mac dynasty has now been rehabilitated in authoritative works such as A New Vietnamese History by Pham Van Son and A History of Vietnamese Literature by Pham The Ngu.
The Le dynasty started its downward slide before Mac Dang Dung came to the scene. The rot set in with the Devil King, who came to the throne in 1504. The History of Dai Viet had the following commentary about him: “The population became resentful, the roots of turmoil were to be found there.” Only a century before, the Le had come to power as the nation’s saviors. Their founder, Le Loi, brought the Ming domination to an end after an armed struggle lasting ten years. His grandson, Le Thanh Ton, ruled for thirty-seven enlightened years (1460-1497), in what was remembered as a golden age in our history. Our ancestor Nguy
en Tue spent his young and formative years during the reign of that great king. Le Thanh Ton came close to the model kings of ancient China whom Confucian scholars learned about in books; he was intelligent and wise, showed great filial piety towards his mother, chose good men to help him run the country and treated them with regard. Under him, scholarship flourished, the king himself being a prominent scholar and poet. He reorganized the public service, set up a new governmental and administrative structure which was to remain in place for the next several centuries. In 1483, all laws and regulations were assembled and codified in a single text called the Hong Duc code, the first legal code in Vietnam; among its many features was the recognition of women’s rights, probably unequalled anywhere in the world at that time, such as the equal claim of daughters and sons to their parents’ inheritance and the right of women to choose and divorce their husband. Agriculture developed; specialist mandarins were appointed to look after the country’s dike system. Le Thanh Ton strengthened the army and sent it south to conquer the Kingdom of Champa and west to attack Laos, while keeping the borders with our giant neighbor to the north safe. In short, advances were made in every field of national endeavor under this enlightened scholar-king.
But Nguyen Tue’s mandarinal career took place in a quite different climate. Le Thanh Ton’s son was a good king but then a succession of bad kings brought the dynasty into disrepute. For over two decades, the country was in turmoil. The traditional scholar that Nguyen Tue was must have, at first, hoped that the Le would recover and a good and wise king would appear. Instead, conditions kept getting worse. The last two kings were kings only in name. Power rested with military commanders who were fighting among themselves. The people longed for peace, security and the rule of law, something which the Le family looked increasingly incapable of providing. Mac Dang Dung made his reputation as a pacifier and a champion of law and order. He suppressed, in the name of the Le king, several rebellions led by insurgents and insubordinate commanders. He built up a strong following, not only among warriors but also among scholars, who increasingly saw in him a strong leader able to pull the country out of its predicament. More and more, the population looked up to him. When he finally decided to take over the mantle from the Le, in 1527, it was a simple formality. As has already been quoted, from the History of Dai Viet, “mandarins and common people in the country all sided with Mac Dang Dung and welcomed him into the capital.” The historian who wrote this was a mandarin of the Restored Le. Thus, for Nguyen Tue and many of his fellow scholars, the signs were clear: the people had suffered long enough, the time had come for a change.
Later historians who condemned the Mac rule as illegitimate also chose to ignore the fact that, with the end of the Le, our country had entered upon a confused period of division and conflict. From the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, Vietnamese fought among themselves for political power, more or less continually. No dynasty could rule the country long enough to lay an undisputed claim to legitimacy. A decade after the Mac took power in 1527, a movement to restore the Le took hold in the south and civil war started. In 1592, the Mac were defeated. The Le dynasty was restored, but while the Le king represented legitimacy, all power belonged to the Trinh overlord. This state of affairs led to a revolt by the Nguyen under a banner proclaiming “to destroy the Trinh and support the Le.” For nearly two centuries, the country was divided again. War was fought between the Trinh in the north and the Nguyen in the south, both sides claiming to uphold the legitimacy of the Le. In the second half of the eighteenth century, from the Tay Son mountains in the center of the country rose a “hero in rough cloth”-a man of the people-who defeated both Nguyen and Trinh and became emperor under the name of Quang Trung. At the battle of Dong Da in 1789, Quang Trung annihilated a Chinese expeditionary force tens of thousands strong and put his name on one of the most glorious pages of our military history. But he died soon afterwards and, after only two generations in power, the Tay Son dynasty crumbled. In 1802, Emperor Gia Long, a descendant of the Nguyen overlord in the south, succeeded in unifying Vietnam under his rule. Division seemed to have come to an end. But it was not long before our country succumbed to pressure from European powers. France invaded and by 1884 had imposed its domination. With such a prolonged period of upheaval, the notion of legitimacy had lost its clarity. Everyone claimed it. Might decided it. Truly, it was a situation summed up by this proverb: “He who wins becomes the king, he who loses is branded as a bandit.”
Our ancestor may have become a minister right from the beginning of the Mac dynasty, at the same time as he was made a count, for office and title usually went together. I believe that he served under two Mac kings, Dang Dung (1527-1530) and his son Dang Doanh (1530-1540). It was unlikely that he would have stayed in office after 1540, having reached by then the retirement age of sixty-five.
In the hierarchy of mandarinal titles, ministers ranked below the Tam Thai or Three Great Dignitaries-Great Teacher, Great Guardian, Great Protector-and the Tam Thieu or Three Great Dignitaries of second rank. These were exalted titles taken from ancient times in China which the king gave to a few elder statesmen. Great dignitaries, however, were only honorary titles without any specific function. A minister headed one of the six ministries which formed the executive arm of government. He held the lower second mandarinal grade and ranked above the heads of other institutions such as the Censorate, the Eastern Cabinet or the Academy. Nguyen Tue, as I discovered in one of the registers of high graduates, “rose to the position of minister for the Rites.” In the hierarchy of ministries, the Rites stood third, below Public Service and Finance, but above the Army, Justice and Public Works.
The ministry dealt with all matters relating to rituals, ceremonies, protocol, religion, education and examinations. In a society where each man must know his place and codes of behavior were to be strictly followed, rites played an essential role. Everyone knows the Confucian maxim: “Learn the rites first, the letters second.” In addition, the ministry fixed the calendar and chose auspicious dates for the holding of sacrifices and royal audiences. It interpreted the meaning of unusual phenomena such as comets, shooting stars, solar eclipses, even hailstorms, all of which were dutifully recorded in history books. Other information found its way in there too, such as: “Snakes appeared for twenty days in the Co Xa River,” or “On the seventeenth day, a red and yellow mass of air appeared in the east, and yellow air dispersed all over the sky.” Today, such information would be considered as of no relevance to the life of the country. In the old times, they were harbingers of grave events to come, and the role of the Rites was to explain them and propose preventive measures. If the country was affected by persistent troubles, or if bad harvests occurred in successive years, the king would expect his minister for the Rites to advise him on what ceremonies to perform in order to the placate the anger of Heaven. The Rites, thus, had a quasi-religious function. Vietnamese monarchies were not theocracies; still, a minister for the Rites enjoyed high moral prestige. Usually, he was an elderly scholar, belonging to the mainstream of his class, and well respected by his peers. That Nguyen Tue held such a position convinced me that our family’s tradition of scholarship must have gone back long before his time.
Our ancestor may have headed other ministries, but only the Rites was mentioned in his biography because it was the highest position he rose to. He might also have been appointed to other bodies at the court such as the Eastern Cabinet or the Academy. The practice then was not to keep anyone in the same office for longer than two years or so. Mandarins were frequently transferred in application of a Confucian principle which stated that “a gentleman should not be a specialist” and therefore should be called upon to accomplish all kinds of tasks. This was also a good way for the king to prevent his officials from becoming too entrenched in their positions and gaining too much power.
A minister at the court may be called upon to perform a wide range of activities. At the king’s audience, all matters of state were discussed in the pr
esence of the assembly of high mandarins, civil and military. The king could ask anyone for advice and assign any task to him. For their part, all mandarins may submit their opinions, even if the matter under discussion lay outside the scope of their own administration. Such was the rule, although the mandarins would often play it safe and stay silent. The great king Le Thanh Ton tried hard to change that attitude, without much success. He used to make bitter remarks about mandarins who “stood like wooden statues or as if they were made of clay . . . , did not discuss the way to rule the country, had neither commended a good man to their sovereign nor sent away a bad one.” In 1487, he issued an order making it compulsory for all in the audience to participate in policy deliberations. The mandarins were divided into three groups. Censors and inspectors were in one group, ministers and those responsible for implementing policy decisions in another. The last group was composed of dukes, marquesses, counts and military commanders. The order specified that whenever a matter was raised by the king, each group “should give a clear opinion, should not shirk its responsibility by remaining silent, or staying vague and just trying to echo the others.” Officials were appointed to report on those mandarins who did not obey the order. However the atmosphere at the new Mac court would have been different. The Mac had just seized power, amidst popular expectation that the country would see the end of its troubles. The mandarins wanted the situation to change; that was the reason why they had made the difficult decision to break with the Le and rally to the new dynasty. Their part in the conduct of national affairs was an important one, the more so as the new king was prepared to seek out and take their advice in an effort to win over the ruling classes to his cause.
A Vietnamese Family Chronicle Page 25