Lê Huyền Tông

Lê Huyền Tông ( chữ Hán : 黎玄宗; * 1654 in Đông Kinh (Hanoi); † October 15, 1671 ibid) was the eighth Vietnamese emperor from the restored Lê dynasty . He sat on the throne from the end of 1662 until his untimely death nine years later and, like all monarchs of his line, was a puppet ruler of the Trịnh princes who actually ruled .

His reign, which bears the era name Cảnh Trị (景 治), is considered a high point of the strictly Confucian court ceremony .

Life

Before his accession to the throne, his name was Lê Duy Vũ (黎維 禑). He was the second son of the emperor Lê Thần Tông . He abdicated in favor of his eldest son Lê Chân Tông in 1643. The son died childless in 1649, after which the father ascended the throne again and served as emperor until his death in autumn 1662. He was succeeded by the eight-year-old Lê Huyền Tông, who was put on the throne by the actual ruler Trịnh Tạc .

Lê Huyền Tông's reign was considered by the Confucian court scholars as a prime example of orderly governance and in this respect as the best period since the rule of Lê Thánh Tông (1460-1497). The imperial court was dominated by Confucian Orthodoxy, and all processes at the court were strictly based on traditional ceremonies. In 1663 an edict consisting of 47 articles was proclaimed calling people to lead a moral and productive way of life in the Confucian sense. A large number of officials ensured the continuous dissemination of legal texts and ordinances, with which the greatest reform of the state system since the Lê-Thánh-Tông period should be carried out. In contrast to then, the monarch was a powerless child and the government was therefore much more unstable. The de facto ruler Trịnh Tạc had placed the day-to-day business of governing in the hands of a group of aspiring officials, who in turn were supervised by some older scholars under the leadership of Phạm Công Trứ . This system soon led to an internal power struggle, primarily between officials from the Red River Plain and those from the old military clans of Thanh Hóa and Nghệ An provinces . The main point of contention was the question of whether to continue or end the decades-long, unsuccessful war against the Nguyễn princes of the south, as well as reforming the official examinations suspected of corruption . None of these issues was finally clarified during the lifetime of Emperor Lê Huyền Tông.

However, a reform of the taxation of arable land was implemented in 1664, combined with a five-year campaign to measure and register all land holdings. The ownership structure recorded in this way served as a new basis for the taxation of the rural population. Unlike in the past, the village chiefs were supposed to collect the taxes themselves and pass them on to the district officials - in fact, the state administration had become too weak and inefficient to be active at village level.

In early 1667 the Vietnamese court established official diplomatic contacts with the new Chinese Qing dynasty , which a few years earlier had defeated the last of the Ming's supporters . As usual, the Vietnamese monarch paid a ceremonial tribute to the Chinese emperor. Trịnh Tạc took this as an opportunity to militarily occupy the province of Cao Bằng in the autumn of the same year , where the Mạc dynasty still ruled, until then under the - now no longer existing - protection of the Ming. However, the head of the Mạc fled to China and persuaded the Qing to continue the protection of their predecessor dynasty. Trịnh Tạc had to bow to Chinese pressure and vacate the Cao Bằng province in favor of the Mạc. It was not until 1677 that they were finally to be defeated.

In October 1671, Emperor Lê Huyền Tông died at the age of only about seventeen; he had officiated nine of them as emperor. Since he had no children, Trịnh Tạc made his younger brother Lê Gia Tông his successor.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Văn Thư Hà, Hồng Đức Trần: Tóm tắt niên biểu lịch sử Việt Nam , Verlag Nhà Xuất Bản Văn Hoá Thông Tin, Hanoi 2004, p. 154 (entry Lê Huyền Tông )
2. ↑ KW Taylor : A History of the Vietnamese , Cambridge University Press, 2013, pp. 312/313, 317
3. ↑ KW Taylor: A History of the Vietnamese , Cambridge University Press, 2013, pp. 316/317
4. ↑ KW Taylor: A History of the Vietnamese , Cambridge University Press, 2013, p. 314

predecessor	Office	successor
Lê Thần Tông	Emperor of Đại Việt Restored Lê dynasty 1662–1671	Lê Gia Tông