But Quang So, who liked poetry and even wrote some, was not one to spend long hours memorizing ancient texts and pondering over commentaries made by ancient authors. He was an adolescent eager for action. “Like an arrow ready to be dispatched to the four corners of the world,” later generations would often quote this popular saying when they recalled him. Quang So could not wait to be on his own and move out of the bamboo enclosure of his village. Physically tall and strong, adept at martial arts, his real vocation may have been a career in the army. He grew up in a time of war, where heroes and those holding the highest positions in society were warriors. Then, the ambition of young men was to fight for their king and gain fame on the battlefield.
Putting down my brush and ink-slab,
I prepared myself for the business of war....
On the walls of the citadel, the sound of drums made the moon shake.
The smokes of war rose to hide the clouds above.
I was ushered into the king’s chambers to be given my sword of command.
At midnight, a proclamation was read to the troops. The date for their departure had been decided.
These are extracts of the Song of a Warrior’s Wife, a long poem in popular language by Doan Thi Diem, a celebrated poetess living in the first half of the eighteenth century. Long poems, as a genre, were much prized by Vietnamese authors. This piece totaling 412 verses expressed the feelings of longing and loneliness of a wife whose husband was called up and who lived for the day he would return home, his task done. In the continuing climate of war, it was quickly adopted by the public and was so well-liked that many people could memorize it from beginning to end. It was ranked as one of our most beautiful and melodious literary works, until the Story of Kieu appeared at the beginning of the nineteenth century and became the accepted masterpiece of its genre. The Warrior’s Wife was my great-great-grandfather’s favorite poem. He was fond of reciting its verses in a chanting voice and never failed to do so when friends came to share with him a pot of tea. If he was born a generation earlier, when leaders like Quang Trung and Gia Long were fighting for the control of the country, I think that Quang So would be glad to drop his brush and ink slab for a sword and a bow. He would have been the first one to part with the family tradition of being scholars. But his time was one of return to peace and unified rule. Eventually, he would still break with tradition and strike out in an entirely new direction. He would hold a very special place in our family history, although not as a warrior.
For the time being, however, Quang So was staying within the family path and studying for a career in letters. He got through the preliminary test held in our prefecture to select candidates for the regional examinations. At these, which at that time took place only once every six years, he failed twice. Clearly, he was not cut out for academic success. He could work as a teacher like his father, or join the subordinate ranks of the public service as a clerk, but did not want either of these. In his late twenties, he left home and village to make a fortune in business. He went to Thang Long, then no longer the capital-the Nguyen emperor ruling from present-day Hue-but still the principal commercial and cultural center of the country.
Quang So belonged to the tenth generation of our extended family and its youngest branch. In the last hundred years, the other branches had quickly multiplied. Elder ones had reached the eleventh, some even the twelfth, generation. Ours was singularly slow and unprolific. Ancestors in our branch stubbornly tried to cling to the old conception of scholarship. They went for the state examinations to become public servants; failing that, they would settle for a teaching career and nothing else. In the other branches, however, members had gone into a wide range of occupations. Thus, we had a practicing of eastern medicine reputed for treating bone fractures with a dressing made of herbs, chicken bones and other products. The formula of his dressing was a trade secret known only to his descendants. A geomancer relative of ours was often called to other villages on consultation; yet within his own family he was no prophet. When the need was felt to change the orientation of our ancestral home, it was a Chinese geomancer who was called instead. There were also astrologers among our people. Parents came to them to be told the future of their children, sons in particular, through the stars which governed their lives. Before a marriage could be agreed upon, the families must consult an astrologer to see whether the stars and age of the young man were suited to those of the girl. The astrologer would also decide on an auspicious date and time for the wedding. Other Nguyen Dinh had left Kim Bai to work as clerks or scribes in public administration. All the above occupations, although they did not enjoy the same status as the mandarinate or teaching, were still considered as fitting for a scholar. Village hierarchy put a clerk or eastern physician above the peasants, artisans and traders. Those who learned from books and worked “with their brain” stood apart from the mass of people who had to sweat and toil for a living.
By then, there were also members of our extended family who had dropped out of their class. Some stayed in Kim Bai to work on their fields as peasants, but most left to “go into business in town,” a vague expression which could mean anything from owning a shop or a stall in the market to hawking one’s produce in the streets. To leave one’s village and cease being a scholar was a sad happening; no one would think of asking them for details about their “business.” If successful, they would one day come back to tell their stories. If not, the family would be unlikely to see them again. In the past, going away meant moving to one of the many towns in the populous Red River delta. The more adventurous, or more desperate, would go farther north, into the mountainous country next to China. There, rebels and brigands maintained a chronic insecurity and in the insalubrious climate one risked a life cut short by illness. But land in the valleys was fertile and trade with the Chinese was always a ready source of income. Few of Kim Bai’s people had ever migrated to the south. For nearly two centuries, the country had been divided between the Trinh and the Nguyen. The great Vietnamese advance towards the Mekong River took place under the Nguyen, ruler of the south. That advance changed the balance of forces between north and south. The new land, fertilized by the Mekong River and its tributaries, was scarcely populated and hardly put to use before the Vietnamese came; in terms of exploitation, it was as new as the Canadian prairie. Its acquisition increased manyfold the wealth of the south while providing an outlet for its expanding population. The masses of the north, for their part, had nowhere to go for although the two halves of the country were not totally cut off from each other-people could still cross the dividing line-the Trinh Nguyen conflict made it impossible for any sizeable movement of population to take place. Population pressure, combined with maladministration and corruption, exploded into rebellions and jacqueries, the culmination of which was “the great calamity” of the eighteenth century. Moreover, the south was young and vital, not bound by such rigid tradition as the division of society into four classes. Leaders there proved themselves by the deeds they performed in war or in colonizing the new lands, not by the diplomas that they may have. The House of Tay Son and their followers, for instance, were “people wearing rough cloth,” traders, descendants of colons sent into the highlands, hill tribesmen, descendants of the Chams whose country was taken over not so long ago by the Vietnamese, Chinese migrants, outlaws, all of whom would rank at the bottom of the traditional society. A revealing incident was told about Emperor Quang Trung when he went north and met a scholar holding the title of Searching Among the Blossoms, a title given to the third-ranked doctor at a triennial session. No one in the north could ignore what that title meant and such a graduate was destined for the highest positions in government. Yet Quang Trung asked him: “What does Searching Among the Blossoms mean? Can you administer a group of villages?”
Those may have been the reasons why victory in successive conflicts went to the side which held the south. Firstly, the Tay Son army marched north to destroy the Trinh. Then, it was the turn of the future emperor Gia L
ong to lead his troops from the south to vanquish the Tay Son. Reunification under Gia Long opened the Mekong delta to migrants from the north. There was vacant land everywhere in the south for the taking. Tales of miraculous wealth were told by the conquering troops. Fields yielded up to ten times as much as those in the north, so it was said. Only later did it become known that Marshall Le Van Duyet, the legendary governor of the south, had instructed all those going north to multiply the yield of their fields by ten, in order to attract more population to the new land. Other information that circulated about the country bathed by the Mekong-in Vietnamese Cuu Long or the Nine Dragons, the dragon being a symbol of power and fecundity and nine a most auspicious number-were true, however. Rice culture was easier as there was no need to transplant the young rice plants for them to bear grain. The soil was so rich that rice seeds had only to be sown; the plants would grow fast, faster even than the speed with which the waters rose in the monsoon season. There, instead of land being parceled into small plots as in the Red River delta, a man could own wide-opened fields, over which “the egret could fly until it got tired.” The south, where the climate was warm all year round, was our Eldorado and our Wild West.
Some in our family, as well as other villagers, quickly seized their chance. They took the risk of venturing thousands of kilometers away, to places they had only heard of and where “looking into the four directions, one would not be able to see a familiar face.” They were young and animated with a pioneering spirit which cast them apart from those who also left their village but stayed within the traditional limits of the north. Mostly, they were younger sons who did not have the responsibility of celebrating the ancestors’ cult and looking after ancestral graves. Thus, of the five original branches of the Nguyen Dinh which came out of the seventh generation, some ended up with only one descendant remaining in Kim Bai. Our chronicle had a brief comment on those who went south. “Their trace was lost,” it said. Indeed, members who left for other parts of the north would send word home, or return occasionally. But the family would not hear from their sons who migrated south. Whether they made good their new life or not was not known. The nineteenth century marked a turning point for our family. Until then, our people were attached to their native place to such a point that war, persecution, even calamitous events like those of the last century, could not sever their ties with it. They always tried to return and live within its bamboo enclosure. Now, many among them were prepared to go to distant lands in search for a better life. The Nguyen Dinh had grown out of their village.
In leaving home and village to “go into business,” my ancestor Quang So was thus doing something that many of his relatives had done before him. Still, his decision was most distressing to his parents. They were proud that for many generations and in spite of adverse circumstances, our family had been able to keep “the spine of the book” intact. Now their only son was doing away with his books and writing brush to become a trader.
The four classes of scholars, farmers, artisans and traders reflected social attitudes more than any legal or economic reality. Thus, the peasantry came second but the lot of farmers was often better than that of impoverished scholars, as expressed in this piece of popular wisdom:
The scholar ranks first and the farmer second.
But when you run out of rice
And roam about everywhere to get it,
It is the farmer first and the scholar second.
Life would have been easier for our impoverished forebears had they cultivated themselves the land they owned. Yet, they continued to farm it out to tenants while pursuing their teaching career. As for traders, who ranked last in the social scale, they could be wealthier than most people. “One cannot become rich without being a trader,” a proverb said. Early European travellers were impressed with the high level of trading in the country. In the seventeenth century, the Jesuit Alexandre de Rhodes wrote:
Thanks to the convenience and great number of ports, the country’s traders worked so actively and advantageously for profit that they doubled their capital two or three times a year without running the risks going elsewhere with maritime trade. Along the country’s coastline, which extended to more than three hundred and fifty French leagues, there were up to fifty ports to which flowed quantities of rivers, so that those who sailed could stay every night in one of those ports.
But there was never a strong class of traders. Vietnamese were mostly involved in small trade and someone with a few boats to ferry goods from one region to another was already considered a big businessman. Wholesale trade, in particular the important trade with China, was in the hands of the Chinese. Even though trade may have been highly profitable, there were few families with a strong trading tradition. The scholar’s class had such prestige and held such an unchallenged position in society that a successful trader would want his sons to study, sit for the examinations and become mandarins instead of following on his footsteps.
In our family, the women had been involved in petty trade at local markets. Like other women in Kim Bai, they had been selling rice, cloth and other things that village folks needed. Their activities earned the family a complement of income, often a very useful one, for their teacher-husbands were not paid much. The men, however, were not involved in such activities; so when Quang So decided to make trade his profession, opposition to his move was strong. The more so as he was not only an only son, but also the only descendant in our branch. The tradition established by our teachers and scholar-mandarins would be lost to the branch. But Quang So’s mind was made up and his parents finally had to give their consent. He went to Thang Long. The beginnings of his endeavor seemed to be difficult. He came back from time to time and said little about his business. The family only knew that he had travelled widely, for he brought home gifts from many places, including Laos which was then a sort of protectorate of Vietnam. He also had a great many tales to tell relatives and village folks, being an excellent raconteur. At each of his visits home, it was recalled that his mother tried to talk him into taking a wife and settling down. He was approaching thirty. His parents were getting old. They wanted their only son to give them a grandchild before they died. A number of possible matches had been lined up. It only depended on him to indicate his choice and marriage proceedings could start immediately. But Quang So always had good excuses for delay. He only married after both his parents had died.
The time was right for our ancestor to go into trade. Peace and a unified regime had brought an upsurge of economic activity. For the first time, people and goods could move freely between the populous delta of the north and the rich new land of the south. Vast opportunities offered themselves and, as usual, the Chinese were the first to take advantage of them. “Almost all trade [in the south] was in the hands of the Chinese,” wrote J.B. Chaigneau, a Frenchman who served Emperor Gia Long for many years and became a high mandarin. “Nothing can equal the activity of these traders. It is only since very recently that one could see some [local people] go into that field.” Chaigneau noted that in the 1810s, “about three hundred Chinese ships, with a capacity varying from 100 to 600 tons, entered each year into the ports of the south.” Merchant ships from Europe had been coming to our shores since the last century or so. They were few and far between. But now France and England took a more concrete interest in commercial relations. When he returned to France in 1820, Chaigneau was asked to make for the French government a report on Cochinchina, the name that Europeans called the south. He detailed the possibilities for trade and stressed the immense potential: “Cochinchina, fertile in all its areas, has no more than 5% of its soil exploited . . .. What that country can already produce in sugar, areca, pepper, silk, etc. . . . is little compared to what it would if commerce was developed.” In 1822 John Crawford, the governor of Singapore, visited Hue. French shipowners reported in 1820 that their ships were well-received in Cochinchina and allowed to bring in goods, as well as buying out produce, “without any kind of duties.” The shipowners presse
d the French government to move into the market, because “the nation that this prince [Emperor Gia Long] dreads is the empire of the English in the East Indies. France is the only nation that he loves and held in high esteem, in gratitude for the services that she had been willing to provide him,” an allusion to the assistance given by the French when Gia Long was fighting against the Tay Son.
Quang So had no experience or training in commerce, yet he went boldly into it. Not for him the small retail shop. From the beginning, he aimed for wholesale trade and travelled, buying things in one region and selling them in another. It took him many years to establish himself. He made frequent trips to the northern highlands, probably bringing to settlers tucked away in valleys the products that they missed from the delta, such as silk from our province Ha Dong, high quality nuoc mam or fish sauce and other foodstuffs. In return, he would take down to the delta tea and precious medicinal products of the mountain such as cinnamon, ginseng, young antler and tiger-bone jelly. Every Tet he came home with bulbs of rock narcissi from the mountains. Their flowers, when they came out with the new year were unequalled in beauty and fragrance by anything that could be bought at the local markets. His trips to the highlands caused great anxiety to the family, as malaria incurred there was often fatal or otherwise could make a man suffer for life; but Quang So was blessed with a strong constitution. He went to the regions bordering China and to Laos without his health being adversely affected.
A Vietnamese Family Chronicle Page 40