Cần Vương movement

Cần Vương (Vietnamese:Protect the King) was a Vietnamese military movement between 1885 and 1888 to rise up against French colonial rule. Its objective was to expel the French and install the boy Emperor Ham Nghi as the leader of an independent Vietnam. The movement lacked a coherent national structure, and consisted mainly of regional leaders who attacked French troops in their own provinces.

The movement initially prospered, as there were only a few French garrisons in nominally-independent Annam, but was doomed to failure once the French recovered from the surprise of the insurgency and poured troops into Annam from their adjacent bases in Tonkin and Cochin China. The insurrection in Annam spread and flourished in 1886, reached its climax in 1887, and gradually faded out in 1888 and 1889. Two events, in retrospect, marked the turning point for the French. The first was a military victory at Ba Dinh in January 1887 which inflicted enormous casualties on the Vietnamese insurgents and severely impaired their ability to fight on. The second, in 1888, was the lucky capture of the Vietnamese king Ham Nghi, which deprived the resistance movement of its figurehead.

The 'Hue ambush'

The movement started in July 1885, when General Roussel de Courcy and an escort of French troops of the Tonkin Expeditionary Corps were attacked at Hue on 2 July in the so-called 'Hue Ambush'. The French fought off the attacks on their positions and captured the imperial palace. The 'Hue ambush' initiated the Annamese insurrection. The regent Ton That Thuyet took Ham Nghi and escaped from the imperial palace in Huế to go to a mountainous military base in Tan So. There, Thuyet had Ham Nghi proclaim his Can Vuong edict calling for the people to rise up.

French invasion of Annam

The French were slow to respond to the challenge posed by the can vuong movement. Initially forbidden by the French government to launch a full-scale invasion of Annam, de Courcy landed troops along the vulnerable coastline of central Vietnam to seize a number of strategic points and to protect Vietnamese Catholic communities in the wake of massacres of Christians by the Annamese insurgents at Quang Ngai and Binh Dinh. Key moments in de Courcy's intervention were the occupation of Vinh by Lieutenant-Colonel Chaumont in August, and the relief of Qui Nhon and capture of Binh Dinh by General Prud'homme in September. In November 1885 a so-called 'Annam column' under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel Mignot set off from Ninh Binh in southern Tonkin and marched down the narrow spine of Vietnam as far as Hue, scattering any insurgent bands that attempted to dispute its progress.

Siege of Ba Dinh

The Siege of Ba Dinh (December 1886 to January 1887) in Thanh Hoa province was a decisive engagement between the insurgents and the French. The siege was deliberately willed by the Vietnamese resistance leader Dinh Cong Trang, who built an enormous fortified camp near the Tonkin-Annam border, crammed it full of Annamese and Tonkinese insurgents, and dared the French to attack him there. The French obliged, and after a two-month siege in which the defenders were exposed to relentless bombardment by French artillery, the surviving insurgents were forced to break out of Ba Dinh on 20 January 1887. The French entered the abandoned Vietnamese stronghold the following day, without the loss of a single man. The Vietnamese defeat at Ba Dinh highlighted the disunity of the can vuong movement. Dinh Cong Trang had gambled that his fellow resistance leaders would harass the French lines from the rear while he held them frontally, but little or no help reached him.

Capture of Ham Nghi

In 1888, Ham Nghi was captured and deported to Algeria and the Can Vuong movement was over, although most of his supporters continued to fight on until they were killed or captured and executed.

References

• Huard, La guerre du Tonkin (Paris, 1887)
• Huguet, E., En colonne: souvenirs d'Extrême-Orient (Paris, 1888)
• Sarrat, L., Journal d'un marsouin au Tonkin, 1883–1886 (Paris, 1887)
• Thomazi, A., La conquête de l'Indochine (Paris, 1934)
• Thomazi, A., Histoire militaire de l'Indochine français (Hanoi, 1931)