A Vietnamese Family Chronicle

by Nguyen Trieu Dan

  Tu Nghi’s death did not put an end to the envoy’s woes. For years, he was kept in southern China. In 1563, when he finally reached Peking, he was compelled to stay there for three more years. He came back to Vietnam in 1566, eighteen years after he left. His hair was black and shiny when he set out on his mission; it was white as snow when he returned. He was not the only Mac envoy retained by the Chinese. Ten years before Le Quang Bi’s mission, another envoy had gone and was refused leave by the Ming court. He was Nguyen Van Thai, a colleague of our first ancestor Nguyen Tue who, like him, was made a count by Mac Dang Dung after he seized the throne. Nguyen Van Thai took a Chinese wife and spent the rest of his life in China. Le Quang Bi, for his part, continued to consider himself an envoy of his country during all the years he was kept in China against his will. When he came home, the Mac king sent the highest mandarins of the court to go and greet him at the border. Le Quang Bi was made a marquess and became a popular hero.

  Over a decade followed without a diplomatic mission to China. Meanwhile, war continued between the Mac and the Le, or more exactly the Trinh. After the 1559-1561 campaign in which they were pressed in their last defenses by Trinh Kiem, the Mac recovered. But in the next ten years, the initiative rested with the forces of restoration. The land in the south was poor and every year after the harvest, Trinh Kiem led his troops into the fertile delta to seize rice and other provisions. His objective achieved, he withdrew to start again in the following year. All that time, the Mac were kept on the defensive, except in 1565 when Mac Kinh Dien could mount a counterattack on Thanh Hoa. Trinh Kiem died in 1570 and a new situation developed. Two of his sons, Trinh Coi and Trinh Tung fought for his succession. Mac Kinh Dien in the north saw his opportunity. He led his army south and defeated Trinh Coi, who rallied to the Mac. Trinh Tung’s troops fell back. The initiative now belonged to the Mac, while the Southern court was weakened by more internal conflicts. In 1572 the Le king, whose power was nominal, plotted to kill Trinh Tung, but was himself deposed and killed. Trinh Tung put on the throne a six-year-old son of the deposed king. All through the 1570s, Mac Kinh Dien launched yearly offensives against the Trinh. He was unable to gain any decisive breakthrough, but Trinh Tung was hard put to defend his territory. Such was the military situation in 1580, when our ancestor joined a diplomatic mission to China. It was a good time for the Mac to try and consolidate their external position. They were holding the upper hand in the war. Fourteen years had passed since the previous Vietnamese envoy was “freed” by the Ming court. The bad feelings on both sides had subsided.

  The 1580 mission was special, being three or four times larger than a normal tribute mission sent either by the Mac or by the Le before them. In earlier instances, three or four names of envoys were recorded by the historian. This time there were twelve. With the administrative and support staff which included interpreters, secretaries, physicians and servants, no less than a hundred people must have set out for the trip to Peking. Probably, the delegation was the largest ever in the history of our relations with China. According to the eighteenth century historian Le Quy Don, the 1580 mission was not one but “four missions grouped together to bring to the Ming Court the tribute which had not been presented for many years.” Thus, the large size of the mission was to make up for those missing in the past fourteen years, since Le Quang Bi came home. Being the third-ranked member of such a mission, Nguyen Uyen must have held a high mandarinal rank, certainly higher than a seventh grade reviser at the Academy, or a sixth grade inspector-delegate. He must have been high enough to attend royal audiences and been known personally to the king to be appointed an envoy to China.

  To the Chinese, a tribute was an expression of submission and dependence towards China. To the Vietnamese, it was a means to keep relations with our large neighbor smooth and peaceful. At the start of every Vietnamese dynasty, moves were made to gain peaceful coexistence with China through a recognition by the Chinese emperor, which took the form of the conferring of a title. In most cases, the title was An Nam Quoc Vuong or King of Annam, a king being a vassal of the emperor. The Mac, as we saw, only got the inferior title of An Nam Do Thong Su, or Supreme Commander of Annam. Tribute missions were sent, in order to periodically reaffirm the relationship. But whether considered by China as a vassal or otherwise, Vietnam’s dependence was only nominal. The Vietnamese remained masters in their own country. Besides, Chinese suzerainty did not provide the Vietnamese kings with protection, either against external or internal threat. Vietnamese dynasties were changed when the people willed them to be so, and those dynasties which in desperation turned to China for help as a rule could not save themselves. In the nineteenth century, the French launched their conquest and for the first time in their history, the Vietnamese called for Chinese help against an external enemy. But China proved to be powerless and that put an end to the fiction of suzerainty.

  Since antiquity, the Chinese had been prone to treat any non-Chinese coming to them with presents as subjects bearing tribute. As early as in 1109 B.C., envoys of the Viet people arrived in China bringing a present of white pheasants. Chinese history books recorded it as a tribute but, interestingly, they also recorded what the regent had to say on that occasion. He said that “since imperial authority did not extend over there, it would not be gentlemanly to consider those people as subjects.” He ordered that the envoys be escorted home on “carriages pointing to the south,” which showed that the Chinese knew then how to use the compass. The first real tribute sent by our country was to the Han emperor in 179 B.C. It was handed over to the Chinese envoy who came to Vietnam and consisted of “two tablets of white jade, one thousand sets of kingfisher feathers, ten horns of rhinoceros, five hundred shells with red stripes, one basket of ca cuong [a beetle used as a food condiment], forty pairs of live kingfishers, two pairs of peacocks.” For his part, the Chinese envoy brought, from the Han emperor to King Trieu Da, “fifty quilted robes of high quality, thirty quilted robes of medium quality and twenty quilted robes of low quality [sic].” Through the centuries, the content of tributes changed. In the sixteenth century, tributes sent by the Le and the Mac dynasties were quite costly, including an important amount of gold and silver. I can find no records of what the 1580 mission brought to Peking, but we can get an idea from the following list of presents taken to China by a previous Mac mission in 1542. The list was given in historian Le Quy Don’s book. It included four incense holders and flower vases in gold, two incense holders and flower vases in silver, one gold tortoise and one silver crane (probably serving as candle holders), twelve large silver trays. These were all cult objects made by Vietnamese goldsmiths and silversmiths whose artistry was highly appreciated by the Chinese. Incense also was much sought after and over a hundred kilograms of different kinds of incense made out of sandal and other precious wood were sent. So fond was the Chinese of our incense that once, the Ming Empress had the luggage of the Viet envoys taken to her chambers and searched, for she suspected that the Vietnamese had rare incense which was not in the tribute but which their envoys brought for their personal use. Various silk materials were also sent, in particular the thin black silk used to make turbans and, of course, such favorite items as elephant tusks (thirty pairs) and rhinoceros horns (twenty). The horns were believed to have aphrodisiac qualities as well as being an antidote to poison. Moreover, it was said that one never gets drunk by drinking from a horn! Two items, however, were missing from the above list. They were two human statues of about five hundred centimeters in size and weighing some six kilograms each, one in gold and the other in silver. After the Chinese occupants were defeated and Vietnam recovered its independence in 1427, the Ming court accepted its loss but demanded the statues as a “compensation” for the death of two generals in the battle of Chi Lang, the last battle of the war. It was a demand to save face and the Vietnamese accepted it as a price for normalizing relations. The costly statues were part of every tribute sent by the Le dynasty to China. They were not mentioned in the Mac tribute
recorded by Le Quy Don, but other authors stressed that the Mac king had to provide even bigger statues than those of the Le because the Chinese claimed that he was not a vassal but a dependent and therefore had to make a larger tribute. In any case, the 1580 mission must have brought with it a very rich tribute for it was four missions grouped into one and it would be quite in character for the Chinese to insist on receiving four times the value of a single tribute.

  The sending of the 1580 mission was a diplomatic victory for the Mac. For a long time, they were without direct contact with Peking and had to deal with the provincial authorities in Guangdong and Guangxi. Now, agreement had been obtained for a large delegation to go to the Ming court. Was it just to pay tribute? Of course, a tribute mission never just paid tribute; it had a host of matters to negotiate with the Chinese government. Our envoys’ first task was to establish contact with Chinese officials, those who decided on policy in Peking as well as those in the two Guang provinces who were in charge of the day-to-day relations with our country. Valuable presents were needed to gain audience with them, although the envoys must be careful not to appear as bribing their hosts. Thuyet khach, literally “a guest who talks and convinces,” was our traditional image of a diplomat. It was a role much celebrated in ancient Chinese history. During troubled periods, when that country was divided into small states, a great number of talented men could be found travelling around, expounding their ideas on how to solve the problems confronting China and looking for good rulers to offer their services. Confucius himself was once a thuyet khach, much respected and listened to wherever he went, but able to find only one state where he could exercise his statesmanship, and just for a short period. Many of our envoys gained fame in China. They were trained in the same school of thought as Chinese scholars; like them, they were imbued with the teachings of Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism. They would speak Chinese too, for our scholarly script already used Chinese characters and it was a rather simple matter for them to learn the spoken language. The Chinese, who thought of their country as the center of the world, were surprised to find people from a faraway place in the south who could discuss philosophy, literature and poetry on even terms with them. Such was the impression created by our envoys that a title was conferred on some of them by the Chinese court: “First laureate of both countries,” meaning that they deserved to come first at the doctorate examinations in both China and Vietnam. It was an implied recognition by the Chinese that our culture and civilization were equal to their own. To cite an instance, Phung Khac Khoan, whom I believe was related to Nguyen Uyen’s wife, was an envoy to Peking in 1597. He arrived at the Ming court when festivities were being held to celebrate the Lunar New Year. Chinese mandarins and foreign envoys all presented poems of praise and good wishes to the emperor. While the others wrote one, or perhaps two poems, Phung Khac Khoan wrote thirty. The emperor read them and wrote this commentary: “Which land does not produce men of talent!” There and then, he pronounced him: “First Laureate of both countries.”

  Having won the respect of his hosts with his culture and erudition, half of the envoy’s work was done. He now could raise matters of state with them and be certain to get a sympathetic hearing. A few well-chosen words by the Chinese mandarins in their submission to the Son of Heaven would contribute more to the success of his mission than the rarest and most expensive tribute. In 1580, when our ancestor went to China, Vietnam was a divided country. The Mac had been waging a war with the Le for almost fifty years. They were always apprehensive to be caught between the Le forces in the south and the Chinese army in the north, a situation they had found themselves in prior to 1540. Following the agreement concluded in that year with Mac Dang Dung, China cut off her ties with the Le and maintained relations only with the Mac. Since then, she had stayed out of the Vietnamese conflict. The northern border had remained quiet. The Mac’s foreign policy had one overriding objective: to keep China on their side and prevent any rapprochement between Peking and the Le. 1580 was an opportune time to resume contact with Peking. The Le camp was weakened by internal dissensions. Initiative in the fighting rested with the Mac. Our envoys were in a good position to impress on the Chinese that the Mac were winning the war and, therefore, that China was backing the right side in the Vietnamese conflict. No doubt, the rich tribute and imposing size of the mission were intended to show the increasing strength of the Mac regime.

  Our scholars and poets used a metaphor for the trip from the capital Thang Long (now Hanoi) to Peking. They called it “the three thousand li journey.” The actual journey was much longer, as a li was only about half a kilometer. Furthermore, for reasons of national prestige, the Chinese authorities wanted as many people as possible to see foreigners bringing tribute to Peking. Tribute missions were made to wind their way through the country, from one populated center to another. A mission from Vietnam usually travelled by land and river across the south of China then north through the deltas of the Yangtse and Hwang Ho to Peking. Depending on the itinerary established by the Chinese, it may take five months-as in the case of our ancestor’s mission-or up to twelve months. Our envoys visited important cities, places of great historical significance or scenic beauty, but they also had to climb high mountain passes and float down dangerous rapids. It was a hard and exhausting journey. “As exhausting as going in a diplomatic mission,” a proverb said. For a seventy-year-old man like Nguyen Uyen, and even for younger colleagues in their fifties or sixties, the prospect must have been daunting indeed. Some envoys took their precautions before leaving. “If I die in China,” I can imagine our ancestor telling his family, “and the date is not known to you, the anniversary of the day I leave the country should be taken as that of my death, for the holding of worshipping services.” Besides the dangers of travel, no one knew how long the Chinese would offer their “hospitality” to the mission. If the drama of the previous mission was to be staged again, how many years, or even months, could a seventy-year-old envoy wait to go home? Our family tradition of “people going to faraway places, where from they may not return” may very well have started with Nguyen Uyen’s trip to China.

  Being an envoy to the court of the Son of Heaven carried a prestige perhaps unequalled by any other mandarinal assignment for China, the Empire of the Middle, was the paramount power in our world. To represent the country there was to uphold national honor and prestige. China was also a fountain of culture of which our people had been, since the earliest times, the recipients. We could never forget the thousand years of Chinese domination and could not, for a moment, ignore that massive and threatening presence on our borders. But there was no denying our attachment to the cultural heritage we received from China. Over the centuries, that heritage had been assimilated and had become part of our own culture. The mission “to the north” was a source of inspiration for much poetry, written by those fortunate enough to be in the journey, as well as by friends and colleagues seeing them off. Many poems from the Tran dynasty, the classical period of Vietnamese poetry, have been preserved. The following is a much liked one by Le Quat, a statesman and poet living in the fourteenth century. Then a young man and an untitled scholar, Le Quat lived in the poor and mountainous region of Thanh Hoa in the south of the country. Hearing that a friend was chosen to join a delegation to China, he took a boat up the coastline, passing through all the twelve seaports of the delta, to say farewell to him at the border. His short and melodious poem in the scholarly script was in the pure classical tradition. In just a few words, it evoked in the mind of a Vietnamese reader the long journey of the envoy, his successful career and, by contrast, the life of a recluse in the mountains who chose leisure and peace of mind; the two diverging dreams of any scholar! The poem was one of the very few not written by kings or addressed to them, which found their way into the History of Dai Viet. The historian quoted it in full. Entitled “Sending off Pham Su Math on his journey north,” it ran:

  On horseback, may you safely go on the three thousand li journey,

>   While passing through the twelve seaports, I return to my mountains.

  An envoy to the Empire of the Middle!

  A wanderer in a far corner of the country.

  You have won achievements and fame,

  While what I have is but leisure and peace.

  Those who stayed behind could only imagine what the envoys were going to see: the Wu Ling or Five Mountains Range, north of Guangxi province and long believed to be our ancient borders with China; the Wu Hu or Five Lakes where, in the words of a poem, “the visitor set out on a boat trip, in the clear weather following a snowfall.” So many places and historical events in China had become part of our own literary tradition: the River Wu where Lord Hsiang Wu lost his last battle against the founder of the Han dynasty and saw his dream to rule over China turn into smoke; the imperial city of Loyang whose splendor was immortalized in many Tang poems and the beautiful women of Soochow, sung by generation after generation of Vietnamese poets who had never set foot on China.