Tay Son Uprising (1771-1802)

The outbreak of the Tay Son rebellion in the Nguyen lands in 1771 marked a new stage in the complex ethnic dynamics of conflict in Vietnam.^[689] This uprising broke out just as the Trinh lords had managed to quell the most serious rebellions in the north, and just after the Nguyen lords had brought an end to the regular threat posed by the Da Vach ethnic group's attacks upon the lowlands.

The rebel leaders were from a village that straddled the lowland and rising upland region west of Qui Nhon, which enabled them to develop connec­tions to people from both territories. The eldest rebel leader, Nguyen Nhac, had been a tax collector and part-time betel trader whose routes frequently took him into the upland regions around An Khe. Unable to submit the tax revenues he was to have collected, and encouraged by the prophecy and the advice of his village tutor, Nhac, joined by his brothers, Hue and Lu, fled into the uplands and began to assemble an army of sympathetic peasants and local ethnic populations. As a result, the rebel army took on a distinctly complex ethnic cast.

In the coastal region the rebel army expanded its ranks, incorporating new ethnic elements including lowland Vietnamese agriculturalists, Cham peo­ples and ethnic Chinese. The Cham were the survivors of a once powerful kingdom in this coastal region, and some were happy to fight their Nguyen foes. The ethnic Chinese were transplanted political exiles from the Ming dynasty, and included several prominent merchants whose financial well­being was closely tied to foreign trade, which had suffered under the Nguyen. The Tay Son ethnic eclecticism was mirrored by that of their Nguyen rivals who themselves recruited a military from among ethnic Chinese and Chams, as well as Khmer populations of the Mekong delta regions.

As the Tay Son brothers rapidly extended their territorial claims, Lord Trinh Sam, the ruler of the northern territories, saw an opportunity to expand his realm. In 1774 he assembled a large force, which marched south­ward, soon overwhelming the Nguyen defences and capturing Truong Phuc Loan, the Nguyen regent, whose young protege fled. To more than a few in the Nguyen capital, this appeared to be salvation after nearly a decade of corruption and decline. Having achieved their initial goal, the Trinh armies began to head south, crossing the Hai Van pass and moving deeper into Nguyen territory. In doing so they began to approach the Tay Son positions further down the coast. Although considerably strengthened by their expan­sion into the lowland coastal realm, the Tay Son forces were still no match for the large northern army, but circumstances intervened as the Trinh forces, including some of their key generals, began to succumb to diseases endemic to the central coast.

What followed was a bloody and often violent decade-long struggle punctuated by significant amounts of violence, particularly on the part of the rebel army. The most dramatic manifestation of this violence was the large-scale massacre of perhaps as many as 10,000 ethnic Chinese in Gia Dinh (Saigon) in 1782, after which the rivers ran with blood. It is likely this brutal event was an act of vengeance in response to the defection of an ethnic Chinese general to the Nguyen side. While the most dramatic of the Tay Son atrocities, the killing of ethnic Chinese was only one of many acts of brutality by the rebel forces, who were noted for their aggressive fight­ing. Weapons such as spiked wooden clubs coated with tar and set alight were among the gruesome devices put to use by the Tay Son soldiers. Indeed, incendiary weapons of numerous kinds, including flaming arrows and spears, were frequently used on the battlefields and in sieges of walled compounds.^[690]

As the Tay Son fought their Nguyen rivals, they slowly morphed into an organised, albeit rudimentary state. Nguyen Nhac, having taken the former Cham capital of Vijaya as his political centre, named himself chua (lord) in 1775, thus claiming the title once used by the Nguyen lords. Not long thereafter he took the title of vuong (king), and then, in 1778, he had himself crowned the Thai Duc Emperor. Consequently, what had begun as a rebellion had now become a civil war, one pitting the Tay Son court against its Nguyen rivals.

The Tay Son campaigns against the Nguyen continued until 1785 when the rebel armies managed to push the Nguyen from their precarious perch in the deep south of the country, driving them to seek refuge in neighbouring Siam.

The turmoil had caused the recently enthroned Le emperor to flee into southern China, where he appealed to the governor general of Guangdong, Sun Shiyi, for assistance. Assured that a Chinese advance would encounter no significant resistance, the Qing ruler authorised a campaign to restore the Vietnamese ruler. As predicted, the Chinese advance met little opposition from Tay Son troops, who prudently retreated southwards. From his base in Phu Xuan, Nguyen Hue planned his response and prepared his troops.

The rout of the Qing gave the Tay Son ruler a brief respite from military campaigns, allowing him to consolidate his rule. Quang Trung encouraged border trade with the Chinese, made overtures to the European outposts in Manila and Macau, and generally sought to stimulate the economy. Other policies also reflected the end of warfare, including requiring peasants to return to their home villages and enacting regulations that encouraged the reclaiming of abandoned farmlands as well as the expansion of previously untilled lands. Social policies encouraged educational reforms, increased use of the vernacular script, and a large-scale project to translate the Confucian classics into the vernacular to make them more accessible to a larger popula­tion. While Christians were largely left in peace, as numerous missionary letters attest, the state did attempt (as earlier regimes had done) to limit the power of institutional Buddhism, notably limiting the construction of new monasteries and consolidating existing ones.^{[691] [692]}

The peace was short-lived. While the central and northern Vietnamese territories were calm, the Nguyen had returned from a Siamese exile in 1788, established a beachhead in the far south, and began a slow campaign to defeat the Tay Son. Over the next decade the Nguyen recruited troops, consolidated their political position and incrementally extended the territory under their control.

Even with the Tay Son regime under the rule of young emperors aided by regents, its dynasty managed to survive the deaths of its founders for another decade. The wars and attendant demands upon the populace accelerated, particularly in the area caught between the Nguyen and the southern out­posts of the Tay Son. Although the northern populations remained sheltered from direct fighting until the very final year of the war, the regime continued to extract resources in the form of supplies and labour and military service. In part, the persistence of the Tay Son regime can be attributed to its control over these populations, but another important element was its alliance with Chinese pirates operating in the coastal waters of the Gulf of Tonkin. The Tay Son leaders had issued a series of edicts to recruit pirates in the early 1790s, trading sheltered harbours and access to the spoils of pirate raids for an important layer of coastal protection. Just as importantly, the agreement with the pirates netted the regime significant amounts of booty to bolster its economy. These pirates continued to serve the Tay Son regime to its final days, even as their alliance with the Vietnamese regime was a source of considerable tension between the Tay Son and Qing authorities.¹¹

The pirate alliance, however, only helped to delay the inexorable Nguyen advance. Once the Nguyen had re-established a base in Gia Dinh (Saigon) they were able to tap into the resources of the south to expand their army. They also benefited from the assistance of European mercenaries and several European vessels that had been added to their ranks. An attempt to forge a military arrangement with the French court collapsed despite the signing of a preliminary treaty, and the French Revolution brought any prospect of renewing the effort to a halt. But, the missionary who served as the Nguyen envoy to Versailles, Bishop Pigneaux de Behaine, served as an effective recruiter of an assortment of European soldiers. While the number of Europeans in the Nguyen armies probably never exceeded a few dozen, a combination of their military training and the armed vessels that they brought, as well as their skills in citadel building, were all notable elements of the Nguyen attacks on the Tay Son.

As with earlier clashes between the Nguyen and the Tay Son in the 1780s, the wars of the later 1790s were dictated by the monsoon winds, which allowed the large-scale transport of troops up and down the coast following these natural rhythms. This time it was the Nguyen, rather than their Tay Son rivals, who were able slowly to extend the territory under their influence northwards towards the Tay Son political centre near Qui Nhon. The Nguyen capture of the Dien Khanh citadel, near Nha Trang, in 1794 was an important victory that enabled sustained attacks against more northerly Tay Son positions. Six years later, in 1800 Qui Nhon fell to the Nguyen forces, giving them the beachhead they needed to extend their attacks northwards. A rapid campaign in the summer of 1802 allowed the Nguyen to move their armies into the Red River Delta, and Thang Long fell to the advancing forces on 20 July. More than thirty years of sustained warfare had finally come to an end, marking the beginnings of both a new and the last Vietnamese dynasty, and with it the dawn of the modern period in Viet Nam.