Inter-Ethnic Violence in the Nguyen Lands
While the Trinh regime was facing numerous rebellions over the course of the eighteenth century, the southern Nguyen state confronted its own internal challenges. In particular, the court at Phu Xuan saw growing threats from upland ethnic populations.
Such groups had long been a distinctive feature of the Vietnamese political landscape, but during the early modern period there was an increasing level of engagement between lowland Vietnamese populations and upland communities with distinct cultural, linguistic and social contours. Oftentimes contact had been limited by choice on both sides, but mutually desirable commodities encouraged at least periodic trading encounters. Those Vietnamese who lived in the liminal spaces where the plains gave way to the uplands naturally had more regular contact, to the point where the fifteenth-century Le Code felt it necessary to stipulate that marriage between Vietnamese and tribal populations was illegal. Relations between the two sides vacillated between cooperation and hostility. This was dictated to an extent by the relative strength of the Vietnamese polities: stronger regimes often sought to extend their influence into the resource-rich upland territories, while weaker ones were inclined to pursue a more cooperative strategy.Although such upland populations also inhabited the peripheries of the northern Vietnamese realm and occasionally engaged with the lowland state, the degree of contact was limited by geography and demographics that kept the vast majority of the Viet people at a considerable distance from other ethnic groups. By contrast, in the southern Nguyen realm there was a much greater degree of geographical proximity as the narrow coastal strip on which the Vietnamese had settled was rarely far from the uplands to their west. As Vietnamese populations in the south increased, growing contact between the groups was almost inevitable.
Furthermore, by the eighteenth century the Nguyen rulers in the southern Vietnamese territories were increasingly trying to impose their authority upon the upland groups, seeking both their labour and the resources they controlled, and were using an armed military presence to ‘pacify' local populations. The more aggressive lowland state efforts provoked responses from uplanders who engaged in periodic raids upon the Vietnamese in an effort to keep them at arm's length. The Nguyen state's tolerance of abuses by private merchants as well as its failure to crack down on lowlanders who hunted in the uplands and stirred up trouble led to growing unrest among the upland populations, particularly in Quang Ngai. There, beginning in the 1740s, an upland group known in the Vietnamese chronicles as the Da Vach began to conduct regular attacks on Vietnamese settlements along the upland-lowland borders and into the lowlands as well. These attacks persisted through the 1750s and 1760s, and were not brought under control until the early 1770s, just before the Tay Son Uprising threw the Nguyen lands into turmoil.Thus, ethnic relations in Vietnam frequently involved violence. While at times this violence took the form of warfare between lowland ethnic Vietnamese and upland ethnic populations, periodically complex alliances emerged in which ethnic communities would side with lowland Vietnamese. In any case, warfare of the early modern period frequently saw such ethnic complexities, and these tensions would continue into the modern period itself over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.