Most sons and grandsons of the great families of the regime came to the mandarinate by way of the colleges. Then while working, they tried their luck at the triennial examinations as a means of furthering their careers. Phuc Thien’s father probably did so and had been working for many years before he obtained his doctorate, at close to forty. As for Phuc Thien, whatever college he went to, his future looked assured. Descendants of mandarins usually took the lion’s share at the state examinations. Once in the civil service, they were promoted ahead of others and put in key positions. The regime naturally gave a preferential treatment to families which had served it well, and our ancestors had been high mandarins of the Mac for no less than three generations. Then in 1592, Phuc Thien’s world tumbled. The end of the Mac came swiftly and unexpectedly. Three years before, it was they who sought victory by attacking the south. But, under the attacks of Trinh Tung’s army, the dynasty collapsed. All of a sudden for the young scholar, it was defeat and flight. When his father decided to surrender to the Le, how did Phuc Thien feel? The agony and shame were perhaps no less for him, but whatever his own feelings, he was bound by filial piety and family solidarity to support his father’s decision. He came back to Thang Long with the rest of the family and was probably given a junior post in the Le administration. Then came his father’s death. In the chain of events which started with the Mac defeat and led to tragic events in our family, the young man’s future, his hopes and expectations, were just swept away like those pieces of wood and other debris that one could see carried by the waters of the Red River during the monsoon season.
In the next episode, his mother returned to Kim Bai and claimed back our land, but Phuc Thien’s role in this important endeavor was not known. According to family recollection, he stayed absent for a very long time. In fact, his generation was also considered as ill-fated, like that of his father. What tragic events affected Phuc Thien’s life? I had thought that the bitterness towards the Trinh in our family stemmed from the fact that our ancestors had suffered persecution at their hands, being followers of the defeated Mac dynasty. But now that the story of Nguyen Hoang’s life has come to light, we can see a little more clearly about his son. Trinh Tung’s treacherous withdrawal, which left a great number of mandarins stranded and exposed to the terrible revenge of the Mac, was deeply resented. The old established families in the north intensified their opposition to his rule. They had left the Mac to pledge allegiance to the Le king, not to the Trinh overlord. Trinh Tung for his part, after he had crushed the Mac revival and returned to Thang Long, set out to cut down the scholars’ influence even further. Their cooperation was needed at the beginning to establish his hold over the north, but now his regime had been made more secure. Externally, it had gained recognition from China. In the country, its Mac opponents were soon to be confined to the small valley of Cao Bang in the northern mountains. The future Nguyen overlord who defied Trinh orders and left for the southern province of Quang Nam, stayed quiet in his fief. Trinh Tung started imposing a strict control on recruitment and promotions. The number of graduates at the civil service examinations dropped sharply. Under the Mac an average of between forty and fifty new doctors were chosen at each triennial session. The average fell to seven doctors in the first ten sessions following the restoration. The regime wanted only those who were loyal to the house of Trinh. Families like our own stood little chance of having their members succeed at the examinations.
Phuc Thien must have held the overlord responsible for his father’s death. Did he enter into opposition to the Trinh? I think he did. Mandarins usually protested in a passive manner by resigning from public service and returning to their villages to teach. Phuc Thien may have had recourse to a more active form of opposition and been involved in one of the groups which worked to restore power to the legitimate Le king. For his long absence from Kim Bai looked very much like a form of banishment. Only in his old age could he go back there. The barren life of an exile and the desperate longing for the ancestral land which had marked our family psyche may have come from his generation and not, as I had first thought, from the previous one. The one among our ancestors who stood alone “by the side of the pond,” for whom “the fish had gone deep under the water and the stars in the sky were dim,” was thus Phuc Thien! His life was even more unfortunate than that of his father, I feel, for at least the latter was able to gain recognition for his talents and put them to use. Like his great-grandfather Nguyen Tue, who took part in the overthrow of a dynasty, Phuc Thien may have had in him the boldness of character to stand up to the might of the Trinh. He would not have flinched from such a formidable challenge. But what could a scholar with his writing brush do? The predictable result was for him banishment, making his life a string of wasted years.
Perhaps he could find some comfort in the thought that, in the tormented history of Vietnam, many good and worthy men before him had been given no chance to be of service to the country just because they were not on the “right” side. Ours had been a nation so often divided within itself. Less than forty years after the Mac-Le war, a new war was developing between the Trinh and the Nguyen. Once again, the country had come to a turning point. Perhaps, the following poem written by a scholar-warrior, who fought against domination by the Chinese in the beginning of the fifteenth century but met with failure, was often in Phuc Thien’s mind, as he watched from his place of exile our history unfold its tortuous course:
The game is still being played, why do I have to grow old.
This great wide world! All in a drunkard’s song!
When their time comes, good-for-nothings find success easy to get,
While good men can only swallow their sorrow, after fortune passed them by.
Trinh Tung retained the Le monarchy, still the symbol of legitimacy in the eyes of many Vietnamese, but he was an arrogant man who showed scant regard for the king. He called himself vuong, a title very close to king in its meaning. Like the Shogun in Japan, the Vietnamese overlord became a hereditary ruler. The Le king was given a royal guard of five thousand men and as income the taxes from one thousand villages. His role was purely a ceremonial one. He presided over court functions and received foreign envoys. But all state powers rested with the overlord. King Le Kinh Tong, the twelve-year-old who was put on the throne by Trinh Tung, played the role set for him for twenty years. He grew tired of it and in 1619, plotted with one of Trinh Tung’s sons to assassinate the overlord. The plot failed and the king was allowed to commit suicide by “self-strangulation” with a length of silk, a euphemism to preserve the king’s honor, for actually two aides were there to garrote him. Trinh Tung chose as successor the king’s eldest son, who was also his grandson for the queen was his daughter. Cracks had begun to show in Trinh Tung’s rule. He must be now in his seventies. When he fell ill four years later, in 1623, two of his sons fought for power. Trinh Tung killed the younger one before he himself died, but troubles developed in the capital. In a repeat of the events of 1600 which saw our third ancestor meet his death, Trinh Tung’s eldest son and successor, Trinh Trang, left Thang Long and retreated with the Le king to his home base of Thanh Hoa in the south. Descendants of the Mac, holed up in Cao Bang, seized their chance once again and came down from the mountains. But this time, the Mac did not reach the capital. Trinh Trang quickly recovered and restored the situation. He was back in control, but taking advantage of Trinh Tung’s death and the resulting confusion, descendants of duke Nguyen Hoang in Quang Nam entered into open revolt. They refused to pay taxes to the Trinh government and built walls and fortresses to defend their territory. The Nguyen proclaimed their loyalty to the Le king and vowed to rid the country of the Trinh. Their battle banner read: “To support the Le and destroy the Trinh.” In 1627, Trinh Trang launched his first offensive. Another civil war had started.
It would be around that time that Phuc Thien was allowed to return to his village. He would be close to sixty. His banishment may have lasted a long time, but in other respects our family d
id not seem to have been treated too harshly by the authorities. Had Phuc Thien been considered a “rebel,” his wife, children and properties would have been seized for the state. But such was not the case, thanks probably to the fact that his father had died for the cause of the Le. He married late. In those times, the custom was for a man to marry and establish a family in his early twenties, or even before twenty. Parents started quite early to look around for possible brides to their sons. Young scholars were allowed to stay single a little longer, so that they were not bothered by wife and children and could concentrate on their studies. Thirty, however, was the limit according to Confucian teaching. “At thirty, I stood on my own,” said the Master. His words were interpreted as meaning that by that age, a gentleman should be married and head a separate family unit. In our family, the men were expected to marry young, even though they were scholars, in the hope that an heir would soon come to continue the lineage. From the earliest generations, our people had been worried that sons were so few. But in spite of such expectation, most of our ancestors only married in their thirties. Delays usually occurred, caused by war, insecurity, family bereavement or simply because it took time to find a bride of the same social standing. If it was not one reason, it was another. So much so that our people came to believe they must be under the influence of a certain star, which stood in the way of early marriages. Because of his father’s death and his own troubles with the authorities, Phuc Thien would not have married before his late thirties. His wife came from the village of Van Quan in our prefecture. We know her family name Nguyen and a pseudonym My Hanh. Her own given name, like that of her husband, was not recorded. They had one son.
My Hanh helped her mother-in-law in administering family properties and dealing with tenants. She took over the responsibility when Trinh Khiet died. Like her mother-in-law, My Hanh was much younger than her husband and survived him for many years. She brought into our family a strong Buddhist faith and her influence would make itself felt in the next generations. Both she and her husband were buried in the vicinity of our village, but descendants were dispersed during the long period of insecurity which affected our region in the eighteenth century. Survivors who came back could not remember where Phuc Thien and My Hanh were buried. Fortunately, the Cu Hau papers were found to contain the location of their graves as well as the anniversaries of their death. They are the earliest ancestors about whom we possess such information. Phuc Thien’s death occurred a few days before the Tet, on “the twenty-seventh day of the twelfth month of the lunar year,” a rather inauspicious time for it cast a pall over the New Year festival and, consequently, over the family’s fortunes for the whole of the coming year. My Hanh died on “the eighteenth day of the second month.” The years were unfortunately not given as the papers were only intended to remind Cu Hau of the days and months on which to celebrate the ancestors’ death anniversaries. Cu Hau used the geomantic features of the terrain to describe the graves’ locations. He noted that Phuc Thien’s grave lay “in the area called Ma Dai, in the middle of a geomantic feature bearing the description of a tree.” My Hanh’s grave also lay in the Ma Dai area. Our ancestors were traditionally buried in family land, but as a Buddhist, My Hanh wished to be buried in temple land. In her lifetime, a place of burial was earmarked for her and the rice field where it was located donated by our family to the Buddhist temple of Van Quan, her native village. When she died, she was laid to rest there.
17. Recluse Scholars
Few scholarly families could continue to have high graduates and stay at the top for very long. Success usually lasted for one or two generations. Instances of sons following in their fathers’ footsteps and gaining a doctorate were rare enough to rate a special mention in the registers of high graduates. To have three generations of doctors-as in the case of our family-was exceptional. Then, the cycle of change started to operate and decline set in. Some families were able to climb up again after a few generations. Others were not and they eventually dropped out of the scholarly class. The run of academic successes in our family ended with Phuc Thien. Our fortunes sank further in the next two generations. Phuc Thien was a civil servant, although his career was cut short. His son and grandson did not reach that status. But while Phuc Thien had an unhappy and unfulfilled life, the following generations were characterized by a strong Buddhist faith and an attitude described in Vietnamese by the term an Phan, or peaceful acceptance of one’s lot.
Our fifth ancestor was named Nguyen Luan. His son’s name has been forgotten and the chronicle referred to him by his pen name Khanh Thien. The years of their birth and death are not recorded, but as the average length of a generation in our family is about forty years, we can roughly estimate that Nguyen Luan was born sometime in the 1610s. Given our ancestors’ gift for longevity, he would have seen the better part of the seventeenth century. His son Khanh Thien would have been born during the 1650s and have died sometime in the first two decades of the eighteenth century.
Nguyen Luan lived in a time of war. Fighting between the Trinh and the Nguyen started in 1627 and went on for half a century. Six times during that period, the Trinh launched large scale offensives against the south. The Nguyen, who were kept mostly on the defensive, only attacked the north once. Both sides maintained vast armies and navies. According to Christian missionaries staying in the country at the time, including the Jesuit A. de Rhodes, who along with other priests invented the present-day Vietnamese script, the Trinh’s army had up to one hundred thousand men and five hundred elephants trained to accompany the troops into battle. Their navy counted five hundred large gunboats. The Nguyen could deploy forty thousand troops and two hundred gunboats in the defense of their territory. Most of the fighting took place in the two provinces of Ha Tinh and Quang Binh, a little to the north of the seventeenth parallel which would become the dividing line between South and North Vietnam in our present century. There, the country was a narrow stretch of plain flanked in the west by mountains and in the east by the sea. Taking advantage of the land configuration, the Nguyen fought behind a series of fortified walls, built by Dao Duy Tu, a scholar whom war had turned into a great military engineer and strategist. In spite of their numerical superiority, the Trinh failed in one offensive after another to get through these walls, vestiges of which still remain today. Our home region in the Red River delta was situated far from the battlefield, but war meant conscription and heavy taxes for the population. Local officials were given increased power and they were often petty and corrupt. Our family suffered from their exactions as well as from the tax burden. But neither Nguyen Luan nor his son was conscripted into the army, being both without any male siblings. The law exempted families with only one son from the draft, so that the ancestors’ worship would not be interrupted by the son’s absence. Otherwise, the rule applicable was for one male citizen out of every five to be called up. But even if called, one could get out by paying a tax. In those times of war, many conscripts, even if they survived the fighting in the south, had to stay in the army for life. Old and weak soldiers should be sent home, the rules said, but corrupt practices resulted in many dying of old age away from home. Scholarly families of Kim Bai, even if they were poor, did their best to pay the tax instead of allowing their sons to be conscripted.
1672 saw the last Trinh campaign against the south. After it failed, hostilities petered out and the two sides settled into a de facto division of the country. The Trinh held the richer and more populous north. The Nguyen’s territory was smaller and consisted of a few poor provinces in the south, some of which had been seized from the Champa kingdom not so long ago. Now free from the burden of fratricidal war, both the Trinh and Nguyen regimes could devote their energies to more constructive endeavors. The Nguyen extended the country’s southern borders and led our people’s advance towards the Mekong River delta. The Trinh strengthened their regime by reorganizing the administration and introducing a whole range of reforms in taxation, education and the legal system. In 1667, they finally p
ut an end to the Mac by seizing Cao Bang, their last stronghold. Good relations were obtained with the new Ching dynasty in China which recognized in 1667 the Le king as King of An Nam. For several decades, the north enjoyed peace and good government. Our sixth generation, that of Khanh Thien, lived in what proved to be the best period of Trinh rule.
Nguyen Luan and his son were scholars but both were barred from the public service examinations. Our family had long thought that that was because they were “descendants of Mac followers.” But now we know that Nguyen Hoang, the third ancestor, had submitted to the Le king, received from him title and position and finally died in his service. Surely, Hoang had paid a high enough price to atone for the role played by his forebears under the Mac dynasty. Why then was our family still penalized in such a severe manner? To deprive a scholarly family of its chance at the examinations was nothing less than to force it out of its class. The likely reason was Phuc Thien’s banishment. This could explain not only the exclusion from the examinations, but also another puzzle concerning Nguyen Hoang. Hoang’s death at the hands of Mac troops should have made him a martyr to the cause of the Le. Do Uong, the leader of the northern mandarins, became a martyr after he was killed. The king made him a Phuc Than, or Benevolent Spirit, and ordered that a temple be erected to worship his memory. The title of Benevolent Spirit was the highest recognition that a king could give posthumously to a subject. It was awarded only to mandarins who gave exceptional services to the nation. Nguyen Hoang did not hold as high a mandarinal rank as Do Uong but there was no doubt that he, like Do Uong, died in the service of the Le king. However, as far as can be ascertained, no posthumous honors were given to him. Usually, such honors were not given soon after death, but many years and possibly decades later. It was clear that, in the meantime, Hoang’s son had gone into opposition to the Trinh overlord; consequently, there was no more question of royal recognition for his father’s sacrifice.
A Vietnamese Family Chronicle Page 35