A Vietnamese Family Chronicle

by Nguyen Trieu Dan

  The 1862 peace treaty was followed by a five-year pause in the fighting. Diplomacy took over during that period. Phan Thanh Giana mandarin in his seventies and one of the highest ranking ministers in the government-was appointed to lead a delegation to France, with the unrealistic task of “buying back” the lost provinces in the south. He returned empty-handed but convinced that the country was not in a position to fight a war with France and that therefore, it should seek peace and take the path of modernization. The French also sent a delegation to Hue to discuss a new peace treaty. Meanwhile, they consolidated their occupation. The Vietnamese, for their part, were unable to take advantage of the lull in the fighting. The court was fully engaged in putting down a series of rebellions in the north fomented by the Catholics and followers of the Le. In the capital Hue itself, an uprising by soldiers aimed at killing the emperor and replacing him with another member of the royal family was crushed. Religious antagonism intensified in the country following the invasion. Popular suspicion grew against the Catholic converts, especially as French priests in the south openly called on their flocks to cooperate with the occupying forces. In 1867, the French set out to conquer the rest of the south. The Royal Delegate there was Phan Thanh Gian, the envoy who advocated peace. He offered no resistance, believing it to be futile and only causing death and destruction to the population. But he drank poison to take his own life. “My duty as a subject is to die,” he wrote in a last petition to the emperor, “. . . [but if] Your Majesty would make the appropriate changes, our strength would still allow us to succeed.” Tu Duc was furious at the loss of the last southern provinces without a fight. Phan Thanh Gian was tried posthumously and condemned. But many in the country understood the reason of his action. If a man like him, who had faithfully served three kings and was renowned for his integrity, chose to kill himself rather than fight, then the situation must be truly desperate. They reckoned that Phan Thanh Gian had wanted to jolt the country into doing something to save itself, before it was too late.

  By then, Dinh Dat had reached his thirties. He was among a small number of scholars in the north who supported the call for reforms, but without a diploma he did not have a voice. Nor was he in a position to send petitions; coming from an untitled scholar, they would be unceremoniously dismissed by the mandarins. Only with success at the examination could he aspire to play an active role. Although time had started to run out on him, at each new session he set out to try again. For scholars of his caliber little stood in reality between failure and success. If he got through the regional examinations and obtained there a licentiate degree, he would qualify to go to the capital Hue in the following year to sit for a doctorate. If successful, and he would join the elite of the nation. In the space of just over a year, an obscure village teacher could become someone whose opinions on modernization and reforms would carry weight with the high mandarins and with the emperor himself. For this to happen, Dinh Dat knew that he needed only a small measure of luck.

  At the beginning of the 1870s, word came that Japan under a new emperor had embarked on a policy of modernization. The Japanese army and navy were reorganized according to the Western model; industry and transport were developed; the education system was reformed. Students were sent abroad to learn and teachers were recruited from Europe and America. A whole nation had taken down the barriers in an effort to catch up with the West. The news thrilled Dinh Dat. He was sure the Japanese example would have an impact on his country. Here was an Asian ruler leading his people in a revolutionary transformation; if Emperor Tu Duc was still hesitant about reforms, this should convince him. But Dinh Dat was wrong. No attempt was made by the court of Hue to follow Japan’s lead.

  Having taken over the rest of the south in 1867, the French made another pause. Again, the Vietnamese were given a breathing space in which to implement reforms and strengthen the country’s defenses. But for much of the time, the attention of the court was again taken up by the situation in the north, where remnants of a Chinese rebellion against the Ching dynasty had crossed the border and taken control of several provinces. Their two main groups were called the Black Flags and the Yellow Flags, from the colors of their banners. Between 1868 and 1871, a succession of campaigns by government troops failed to dislodge them. Thus, the Vietnamese were no better prepared to meet the next phase of the French advance when it took place in 1873. From the south, the French had been casting their eyes over the north, which they saw as a door to the vast market of China. When a dispute arose between the authorities there and a French trader, and the Vietnamese court made the mistake of asking them to help settle it, they immediately seized upon the opportunity. Navy Lieutenant F. Gamier was dispatched to Hanoi with a small force of 170 soldiers and some gunboats. The Vietnamese were not unduly worried by F. Garnier’s mission. Hanoi, the old capital, was defended by seven thousand troops under the command of a celebrated commander, Marshall Nguyen Tri Phuong. The French intention was probably only to establish a presence in the north, but once in Hanoi, F. Gamier decided that he could take the town by a bold raid. Under the cover fire of his gunboats, he attacked the citadel, which fell after an hour of fighting. Taken prisoner, Nguyen Tri Phuong fasted to death. Like the Gia Dinh defender and Phan Thanh Gian before him, he could only find in death the way to eradicate his shame and pay his debt to the country.

  The fall of Hanoi brought home to the population of the north the specter of domination by the white man. Resistance of it would later develop, but for the moment, the feeling was one of utter despair and helplessness. Hanoi, the ancient seat of Vietnamese dynasties and through the centuries a proud symbol of our nationhood, could not be defended against a few hundred Frenchmen. What hope therefore was left? In a matter of weeks, French forces captured several other towns in the Red River delta. Vietnamese troops had no answer to the superior French weapons, from the rifles used by infantrymen to the cannons which reduced fortifications to rubble in the first minutes of an attack. In desperation, the government enlisted the services of the Chinese Black Flags. The Yellow Flags, for their part, worked as mercenaries for the French. From the northern mountains, the Black Flags came down to the delta through the province of Son Tay which lay next to our province. They engaged French troops in the vicinity of Hanoi and won an important victory. F. Gamier, the leader of the French expedition, was killed. With so few troops, the French could not hope to hold the north, but their lightning attack had produced its effect. The Vietnamese court sued for peace. Under a treaty signed in 1874, Vietnam ceded the whole of the south to France. For its part, France returned the towns it had seized and withdrew its troops from the north, except for two small garrisons in Hanoi and in the port of Haiphong.

  From their village, the Kim Bai people could hear the sound of the battle in Hanoi. But neither the French troops, nor their Chinese Yellow Flag mercenaries, ventured to our region. The Black Flags, however, stayed in Vietnam for several years, long after the French had withdrawn. They were fighting on our side. Their chief was given the rank of a Vietnamese general following their success against the enemy, but the Black Flags were an undisciplined lot. When I was a boy, stories of killing, rape and destruction by the “pig-tailed bandits,” as the Black Flags were called after the pigtail hairstyle worn by Chinese men, were still being told by villagers. Several generations had passed, yet the fear of those bandits remained very much alive.

  Eighteen hundred and seventy-four was the blackest year in Dinh Dat’s life, the year when his wife died. With his family life in tatters and his country’s independence all but lost, the scholar underwent a personal crisis. Like the emperor he admired, his hair soon turned white like that of an old man. More and more, his mind turned away from the Confucian ideal of public service to move towards the mystical world of Taoism. When his young son died too, he left his village. If the country had been at peace, I think that he would have gone very far away, perhaps to the south like his father. But there could be no question of him doing so, now that the south w
as under foreign occupation. Dinh Dat went to Hanoi, where he hoped to continue his teaching activities. In the troubled period following the French attack and with bands of Black Flags roaming our region, not much work occupied him in Kim Bai. He stayed in the former capital for some length of time, but could not make a living and returned home. Fortunately, his two sisters were there to help him in his crisis. They reared his daughter and looked after the ancestral home while he was away. Three years after his wife died, they found a bride for him and Dinh Dat remarried. The new spouse came from the same Chu family in Kim Bai; she was a niece of his first wife. Seventeen years younger than her husband-she was twenty-four and he forty-one when they married-she brought him a new reason for living, and more. For the couple would lay the foundations for the family to grow and expand into the many branches that we know today.

  When regional examinations were resumed after the hostilities, Dinh Dat sat for them a few more times. He was pursuing a dream rather than aiming for a mandarinal career. His white hair made him stand out in the crowd of candidates. People thought that he must be one of the oldest to go after the golden board. In fact, he was only in his mid-forties, while other candidates could be found in their fifties, some even in their sixties. In 1879, a son arrived in the family. He was my grandfather. As Dinh Dat’s life was rebuilt, success returned to his work. His school flourished and other villages again invited him to come and hold classes. The white-haired scholar of Kim Bai was kept busy teaching and was constantly on the move, staying for a few months at one place, then on to another village and another group of students.

  The events of 1873-74 shook Dinh Dat’s faith in Tu Duc, the emperor whom he so much admired. Until then, he was inclined to blame the mandarins for failing to modernize the army, mobilize the population and adopt the necessary reforms. For him, the emperor stood above reproach. With Tu Duc at the helm, Dinh Dat believed that, somehow, our country would be safe and would survive the aggression. But the speed and ease with which the French took Hanoi and other towns showed how hopeless our situation had become. Vietnamese troops used to fight better at the beginning of the war; now they were demoralized and leaderless. Nguyen Tri Phuong was the same commander who stopped the French advance towards the imperial capital Hue in 1858. Three years later, in the defense of the Ky Hoa fortress in the south, he engaged the enemy forces in fierce fighting and inflicted on them heavy losses. In Hanoi, he suffered a humiliating defeat that ended his life. Since the invasion started some fifteen years ago, the country had been on a downward slope. With the tricolor flag flying over the old capital, Dinh Dat felt that all was lost.

  But then, the 1874 treaty was concluded and French troops withdrew. Government control resumed over the north. Confidence returned to the population. Some people thought that the French had been defeated, others that they were compelled to leave because China threatened that she would intervene to help Vietnam. They seemed to forget that the enemy had already reaped the benefits of its action with the treaty which ceded all the south to France and that, in any case, its small force could only make a raid against the north but not occupy it. Still, another breathing space was given to the Vietnamese. This would prove to be their last. The reformists again pleaded for change, but theirs remained a minority voice in the country. The mass of scholars continued to be against it. At the triennial examinations in Hue in 1876, candidates were asked to write a paper on the policy of opening and modernization initiated by Emperor Meiji in Japan. Was it beneficial to Japan? Most gave a negative appraisal. As for Dinh Dat, he again placed his faith in Emperor Tu Duc as the only authority who could override the immobility of the mandarins. By the late 1870s, the court did show a more favorable disposition towards reforms. A small number of students were sent to France, Spain and to British schools in Hong Kong to learn western technology. Important changes were made in the civil service: people with knowledge of foreign languages, experts in ship building, mining, arms manufacturing, military training, etc. . . . were given degrees and recruited as mandarins. Diplomatic missions were sent to Hong Kong and Siam to try and establish relations with other countries. An unofficial envoy visited Washington and obtained an audience with the American president. He pleaded for American help against French colonialism. However, all those measures proved to be too little and too late. Emperor Tu Duc showed that he was well aware of the urgency of the situation, but he had to deal with a recalcitrant bureaucracy which, even at that late hour, still could not bring itself to accept change. In 1881, a member of the Academy submitted another proposal for modernizing commerce and industry. The high mandarins again rejected it. A despondent emperor remonstrated with them. “As old servants of the state concerned with its well-being,” he told them, “you never fail to examine carefully each problem, but you should bear in mind the need for making progress, for not to progress means to move backwards.”

  The country continued to be plagued by disorder and rebellion. After the French withdrew from the north, massacres took place against the Catholics who were accused of having cooperated with the enemy. In the central provinces of Nghe An and Ha Tinh, scholars rose up in arms to protest against negotiation with France. Their mobs went on rampage, burning and destroying Catholic villages. Loyalists of the former Le dynasty, who fought on the side of the French when they attacked the north, kept on harassing several provinces. Chinese bands were in control of large areas of the northern mountains. Government troops succeeded in killing the leader of the Yellow Flags in 1875, but the fight against other bands went on for years. The court had its hands full dealing with internal emergencies; thus, the breathing space once again proved to be of no benefit. The French sat back for nearly a decade after the 1874 treaty. Then in 1882, they made their final move. What was going to happen was a strange case of history repeating itself. As in 1873, a dispute involving their traders in the north gave the French a pretext. They dispatched a small force of some three hundred troops to Hanoi, under the command of Colonel H. Riviere. This time, the Vietnamese were on their guard, but just as F. Gamier did before him, H. Riviere launched an attack against the citadel of Hanoi. He took it after a battle lasting a few hours. The Vietnamese governor, Hoang Dieu, chose to die by hanging himself. The Black Flags who, after 1874, had been persuaded to return to their bases in the northern mountains, were again asked to come to fight the French and they repeated the success they achieved ten years before by killing the leader of the French expedition. The court thought that the French could again be persuaded to withdraw. But there ended the similarities with events in 1873. The French now intended to stay. From the south, they sent in reinforcements. The parliament in France voted for a massive increase of money to the Indochinese venture. The Vietnamese sought help from China and Chinese troops intervened. As the twenty-five-year conflict move toward its climax, Emperor Tu Duc died.

  For many Vietnamese his passing marked the end, not just of a reign, but of an era. They saw in it the portent of a great calamity that would descend upon their country. The war would soon be lost and Vietnam placed under foreign rule. Dinh Dat mourned a king whom, in his youth, he had seen as a model of a Confucian scholar. He had hoped to gain diplomas and serve under him. When Vietnam fell victim of French aggression, he had trusted that Tu Duc would save the country with a policy of bold reforms. Now with the emperor gone, Dinh Dat felt that he was mourning at the same time the sad fate of the nation and his own lost opportunities. In a period of peace and stability, Tu Duc the Confucian scholar would have made a good king. But the nineteenth century was the time when Western imperialism spread to Asia. What Vietnam needed was a leader who could keep it at bay while leading his country into the modern world. Tu Duc proved himself woefully ill-adapted to be such a leader. He was not really committed to reforms. Petitions were referred by him to mandarins who found various reasons for rejecting them. Instead of imposing his authority, Tu Duc let the matter pass. He ruled over a divided nation. Partisans of the old Le dynasty, Catholics and other opponen
ts were in rebellion. Tu Duc was never able to unify his people against the French invader. In particular, he failed to deal effectively with the Catholic problem and let it become the pretext for French aggression as well as a festering division among the Vietnamese.

  The emperor’s death immediately sparked trouble at the court. Two high mandarins nominated by Tu Duc as regents usurped power and put on the throne, not his chosen heir, but a young prince more to their liking. A month later, in August 1883, a French naval force attacked the fortifications defending the imperial capital. The capital itself was going to be bombarded when the mandarins capitulated. By the Peace Treaty of 1883, French rule was extended over the whole of Vietnam, with the south-Cochinchina-being a French colony, while the rest of the country-Tonkin and Annam-were placed under a regime of protectorate. Vietnam had ceased to be independent. In his village, now constantly exposed to sorties by French troops, Dinh Dat received the news with resignation. The nationalist and monarchist in him suffered. Not only had his country lost its sovereignty, Dinh Dat found it hard to accept that the emperor could remain on the throne and serve a foreign power. In the long history of our country, it had never happened that way. If a king was defeated, he died and his dynasty died with him. Dinh Dat knew that it was the regents who signed the treaty establishing the protectorate and that Tu Duc’s successor was only a tool in their hands. That made him even more bitter about those regents who had, firstly, violated their emperor’s trust and accumulated power to themselves at a time when defeat was staring the nation in the face. Then they capitulated to the enemy, bringing dishonor to the king and the nation. “Emperor Tu Duc was the pillar,” he said. “When it fell down, the entire house and everything else came down with it, the country’s independence, the moral principles, the duty of loyalty owed by mandarins to their king.” His white hair became, if anything, even whiter. When he did not wear a turban and it was just tied loosely in a chignon at the back of his head, he was the picture of a Taoist recluse in the mountain. Some people called him ong tien, or an immortal, one who had through the study of Taoist texts and meditation found the secret of long life. But when teaching a class, dressed in a black tunic with a large black turban wrapped around his head, he looked a dozen years younger. By now, he had built a strong following of students, some with examination success to their credit.