Tây Sơn dynasty

Flag of the Tây Sơn dynasty (under Nguyễn Huệ)

The Tây Sơn dynasty ( vietn . Tây Sơn triều or Nhà Tây Sơn ; chữ Nôm : 家 西山, chữ Hán : 西山 朝) was the emperor in Vietnam (then Đại Việt ) from 1778 to 1802. It emerged from the Tây-Sơn rebellion of the three brothers Nguyễn Nhạc , Nguyễn Huệ and Nguyễn Lữ , which broke out in 1771 . In contrast to all other Vietnamese dynasties , it is not named after the brothers' surname Nguyễn , but after their home village Tây Sơn in the province of Bình Định , as their main opponents also had the same name.

The Tây-Sơn brothers succeeded in overthrowing the Nguyễn princes ruling in the south and the Trịnh princes ruling in the north, as well as the powerless Lê imperial dynasty , and thus reuniting the country after about two and a half centuries of division. With decisive victories against Siamese and Qing Chinese invasion armies, Vietnam could be externally secured militarily. Internally, the dynasty was characterized by a relatively progressive social and cultural policy; at the same time the population was subjected to restrictive control and militarization. For almost the entire period of existence of the dynasty, the country was in a state of war. In the meantime, the brothers also fought among themselves.

The core area of ​​the Tây Sơn was today's south-central Vietnam ; Chà Bàn (near Quy Nhơn ) and from 1788 Phú Xuân (Huế) acted as capitals .

As early as the end of the 1780s, Nguyễn Phúc Ánh , a surviving member of the Nguyễn princely family, was able to recapture the south of the country from the Tây-Sơn forces. After the death of the three brothers, their dynasty collapsed quickly from the mid-1790s and was finally replaced by the Nguyễn imperial dynasty in 1802 .

While the Tây Sơn were considered bandits and illegal usurpers in the 19th century , they were "rediscovered" by the communist-dominated independence movement at the beginning of the 20th century and revered as early socialist revolutionaries and national heroes.

The Tây Sơn Brothers

Modern group of statues of the three Tây Sơn brothers in the Quang Trung Museum, Bình Định. Their actual appearance is not known, as almost all works of the Tây-Sơn period were destroyed by the subsequent Nguyễn dynasty ( Damnatio memoriae ).

The Tây-Sơn brothers were relatively simple, of rural origin. Her ancestors came from the northern province of Nghệ An and had the family name Hồ . Later, therefore, a descent from Emperor Hồ Quý Ly (ruled 1400–1401) was claimed, for which there is no evidence other than the common name. The great-great-grandfather of the brothers fought on the side of the Trịnh princes in the Trịnh Nguyễn War , was captured in the mid-1650s and, like many other prisoners of war, by the Nguyễn princes as part of the Vietnamese expansion into the hinterland of the Bình Định province (then Quy Nhơn Province ). Initially working as farmers, the family eventually achieved a certain wealth in the betel nut trade. It was not until the father of the three brothers changed the family name from Hồ to Nguy vermutlichn , presumably to increase his career opportunities under the Nguyễn princes.

The three brothers were:

• Nguyễn Nhạc (1743? –1793), from 1778 Emperor Thái Đức
• Nguyễn Huệ (1753? –1792), 1786 titled Bắc Bình Vương (“King of the Northern Pacification”), from 1788 Emperor Quang Trung
• Nguyễn Lữ (1754? –1787), 1786 titled Đông Định Vương ("King of Eastern Stabilization")

The brothers' dates of birth are not saved. The two younger ones, Nguyễn Huệ and Nguyễn Lữ, were about the same age, which is why there are contradicting statements about who was older and who was younger.

historical overview

Rise and establishment of rule under Nguyễn Nhạc

Vietnam a few years before the Tây Sơn rebellion: The Trịnh princes rule the north, called Đàng Ngoài (red), the Nguyễn princes the center and south of the country, called Đàng Trong (blue).

After the peace agreement with the Trịnh princes in 1672, the Nguyễn princes ruling in the south of the country had greatly expanded their territory, mainly at the expense of Cambodia . The almost unchecked expansion of the Nguyễn came to an end around 1771 in the costly war against the new Siamese empire under King Taksin . The war effort, combined with years of mismanagement and a trade crisis, resulted in great burdens for the common people, who suffered from ever-increasing taxes and duties.

In 1771 the eldest brother Nguyễn Nhạc, at that time a simple tax collector, started an uprising in the remote hill regions of the province of Quy Nhơn (Bình Định). The trigger for his uprising was the allegation of embezzlement of tax revenues, although it is unclear whether Nguyễn Nhạc lost the money gambling, distributed it to the needy or was never able to collect it in view of the general poverty. Nguyễn Nhạc was also encouraged to rebel by his former teacher, the disgraced court scholar Trương Văn Hiến . The aim of the revolt was initially to overthrow the corrupt and greedy minister Trương Phúc Loan , who had actually been in power since the death of the old prince Nguyễn Phúc Khoát a few years earlier. Nguyễn Nhạc was initially regarded by his government as a local bandit leader and his steadily growing movement was completely underestimated. The rebels received support not only from the impoverished rural population, but also from the Cham minority, various mountain peoples and even Chinese business people who felt harassed by the harsh tax laws. Two influential Chinese merchants formed their own armies from their compatriots and joined the uprising.

In 1773, the rebels surprisingly conquered the port city of Quy Nhơn by means of a ruse , with which the Tây Sơn brothers obtained both the income from the lucrative overseas trade and the support of southern Chinese pirates . The Nguyễn now mobilized all their forces against the Tây-Sơn rebels, but it was too late: Prince Trịnh Sâm , who ruled the north of the country, saw the uprising as his chance, broke the peace that had lasted for over a hundred years and marched with them entered the Nguyễn territory in autumn 1774. The Nguyễn were now embroiled in a two- front war . The minister Trương Phúc Loan was overthrown and extradited to the Trịnh, but the Tây-Sơn rebels could no longer be appeased. The Nguyễn princely family finally gave up the capital Phú Xuân (Huế) at the end of the year and fled together with the government, first to the south bordering Quảng Nam , then - surrendering their heartlands - by ship to Gia Định (Saigon).

As a result of this shift, the Tây Sơn between the Trịnh in the north and the Nguyễn in the south threatened to be wiped out. However, the insurgent leader Nguyễn Nh konntec was able to conclude a short-lived alliance with the Tr ,nh by formally "submitting" and being recognized in return as general and governor of the south.

In 1776 Nguyễn Nhạc declared himself king (breaking the agreement with the Trịnh). He chose the former Champa town of Chà Bàn (Vijaya) near Quy Nhơn as his residence . In 1777 Gia Định was conquered by the Tây-Sơn troops. Almost the entire Nguyễn princely family was massacred. In the following year Nguyễn Nhạc assumed the title of emperor - although there was already a (powerless) Vietnamese emperor from the Lê dynasty in the north, in the territory of the Trịnh .

A few members of the Nguyon family had escaped and fled to an offshore island under the leadership of the young prince Nguyon Phúc Ánh . After almost a year the majority of the Tây-Sơn troops had withdrawn north, they returned to the mainland and captured Gia Định. This marked the beginning of a war in the south that had lasted for years and was very changeable. Gia Định was conquered and retaken several times, and Nguyễn Phúc Ánh was driven from the mainland several times, only to come back a little later with new troops. The conflict also spread to neighboring Cambodia, where partisans of the Nguyễn, Tây Sơn and Siamese fought against each other. The Tây-Sơn leader had significantly more troops available than the Nguygun prince, but had to withhold a substantial part of them in the north in order to protect himself against the Trnh, with whom an uncertain truce existed. In the area around Gia Định and in the Mekong Delta, the Tây-Sơn troops carried out pogrom-like massacres of the Chinese settlers who lived there after their leaders had professed to support the Nguyễn; tens of thousands of civilians were believed to have been murdered.

In 1780, Nguyễn Phúc Ánh, who had come of age, assumed the title of king and officially assumed the inheritance of the Nguyễn princes. Three years later, however, he was again on the verge of defeat. He found a powerful ally in the new Siamese King Rama I , who sent him twenty thousand soldiers and a fleet to support him. However, this new alliance was defeated by the Tây Sơn in January 1785 in the battle of Rạch Gầm-Xoài Mút . Nguyễn Phúc Ánh fled to Siam. The younger brother Nguyễn Huệ , who had become the most active and dominant member of the family in military affairs , was in command of the Tây-Sơn troops .

After securing the south, the Tây Sơn dynasty turned north against the Trịnh in 1786. The trigger for this new campaign was the former Nguyễn capital Phú Xuân (Huế), which had been controlled by the Trịnh since 1775 but was claimed by the Tây Sơn. The Trịnh had torn each other apart in a war of succession in 1782 and were no longer a major problem for the experienced Tây-Sơn veterans. After the rapid conquest of the city, the commander-in-chief Nguyễn Huệ allowed himself to be persuaded by an overflowing general named Nguyễn Hữu Chỉnh not to be satisfied with this success. Arbitrarily, he decided to advance further north and eliminate the Trịnh princes. After decades of mismanagement and famine, the population of the north had grown weary of Trịnh rule, so that the Tây Sơn were greeted enthusiastically in many places. After Prince Trịnh Khải had committed suicide and the Tây-Sơn troops marched into the northern capital Đông Kinh (Hanoi), Nguyễn Huệ visited the powerless Lê puppet emperor Lê Hiển Tông and secured his support and the continuation of the Lê dynasty to. The aged emperor thereupon appointed him commander in chief, gave him a high title of nobility and gave him his daughter as a wife. A few days later he died. Nguyễn Huệ made the grandson Lê Chiêu Thống his successor. For the first time since the 1530s, the whole of Vietnam was reunited, but now in an area that it had never had before.

Fratricidal war, loss of the south and victory over China under Nguyễn Huệ

The eldest brother and emperor Nguyễn Nhạc, who had remained in his residence in the south, had previously only agreed to a limited offensive on Phú Xuân and firmly refused an advance further north. North Vietnam to the Trvnh was a foreign country to the Tây Sơn, and Nguyễn Nhạc had evidently intended to stay out of the power struggles there. All of his political actions indicate that he saw the future of the dynasty in the south, where he intended to establish the Tây-Sơn state as an independent empire centered on Quy Nhơn. As a result, he hated the idea of ​​a large Vietnamese unified state, ruled from one of the major cities in the north. His brother Nguyễn Huệ, on the other hand, had precisely such pan-Vietnamese ambitions and felt personally called to implement them. With his unsettled campaign to overthrow the Trịnh, he had not only disobeyed orders and thrown his brother's strategic plans upside down, but had also earned the glory of victory single-handedly. Furious, Nguyễn Nhạc went north in August 1786 and called his brother back.

After their return, the brothers divided the land among themselves: The third brother Nguyễn Lữ , who had not yet made a particular appearance, received the extreme south, which he administered as king from Gia Định. Nguyễn Huệ received north-central Vietnam with the residence Phú Xuân and also the title of king. The intermediate core area of ​​the dynasty, south-central Vietnam, continued to be ruled directly by Nguyễn Nhạc, who assumed the additional imperial title Trung ương Hoàng đế ("Central Emperor") as a sign of his supremacy . In the far north, the Lê monarchs should rule autonomously.

Vietnam 1788–1792: The rulership of the brother Nguyễn Huệ in blue, that of Nguyễn Nhạc in yellow. The third brother Nguyễn Lữ has already been defeated in the south by Nguyễn Phúc Ánh , whose sphere of influence is shown in green.

This system failed after just a few months. Since Nguyễn Nhạc kept most of the treasures stolen in the north for himself, his brother rebelled against his supremacy. The war broke out. Nguyễn Huệ, who could count on the support of the great majority of the soldiers, led his troops south, defeated his brother's forces in mid-1787 and finally besieged his residence. Nguyễn Nhạc called the troops of the third brother from the south to help, but they were also defeated. However, during the height of the fighting, the brothers eventually returned to their common family origins and agreed on a truce. In fact, Nguyễn Nhạc was defeated and demoted to a petty ruler. Nguyễn Huệ returned to Phú Xuân and declared himself the new head of the dynasty, which was recognized by the vast majority of the population and dignitaries.

Meanwhile, when Nguyễn Phúc Ánh heard the news of the fratricidal war, he had left his Siamese exile and had returned to the Mekong Delta with some of his followers. After a while, a local general was persuaded to defeat. Nguyễn Lữ, who had neither the statesmanlike nor the military skills of his two brothers and had also sent the majority of his troops north, was deceived by a ruse and fled, a little later he died humiliated at his brother's court. In September 1788, the Nguyễn troops finally captured Gia Định (Saigon). The French advisor Nguyễn Phúc Ánhs, the priest Pierre Pigneau de Behaine , had in the meantime recruited some French veterans to help the Nguyễn prince organize a modern navy and build a fortress in the Vauban style . From now on, the Tây Sơn forces were no longer able to drive the Nguyễn Alliance out of the south - however, under Nguyễn Huệ the focus of the dynasty had shifted to the north anyway.

At the end of 1788, Qing troops cross a river in northern Vietnam under enemy fire. Chinese-French painting from the series Les conquêtes de l'empereur de la Chine , late 18th century.

Meanwhile, the north of the country had sunk into chaos and the Lê empire had once again become a plaything of competing interest groups. In Đông Kinh (Hanoi) a Trịnh descendant had initially taken power again; But this was overthrown a little later by the defector general Nguyễn Hữu Chỉnh, who subsequently took over the rule himself. Nguyễn Huệ accused him of rebellion and sent the troops under Vũ Văn Nhậm to the north. Nguyễn Hữu Chỉnh was quickly defeated and killed while the Lê emperor fled to China. Vũ Văn Nhậm now appointed a Lê prince controlled by him as the “prince regent”, which was viewed by other Tây-Sn officers as treason. At their urging, Nguyễn Huệ finally came north in 1788 and had Vũ Văn Nhậm executed. Presumably, both Nguyễn Hữu Chỉnh and Vũ Văn Nhậm were fatal because they were considered partisans of the older Tây-Sơn brother, which is why Nguyễn Huệ used the pretext of rebellion to eliminate them.

In China, meanwhile, the mother of the Lê emperor successfully lobbied for support from the ruling Qing dynasty . The Qianlong emperor decided to send several invading armies, allegedly with up to two hundred thousand men, to bring the Lê back to the throne as his loyal vassals. At the end of the year, Chinese troops led by Viceroy Sun Shiyi overran the north and took Đông Kinh (Hanoi) without a fight - the Tây-Sơn troops had withdrawn to the south. In response to the invasion, on December 22, 1788, Nguyễn Huệ declared the “treacherous” Lê dynasty deposed and crowned himself emperor. The Chinese did not advance further in the meantime, as Viceroy Sun Shiyi had received orders not to undertake any further offensives after conquering the capital in order to reduce the Chinese war strains to a minimum. During the Sino-Vietnamese New Year celebrations (late January 1789), the Tây Sơn launched a surprise attack on the Chinese associations encamped around the capital. Among other things, a large number of war elephants were used. The Chinese suffered a crushing defeat at the Battle of Ngọc Hồi-Đống Đa ; probably tens of thousands of soldiers drowned while fleeing in the Red River. With the victory, Nguyễn Huệ had secured his position of power, and even his brother had to grudgingly acknowledge his supremacy.

A Vietnamese envoy is received in Beijing for the peace negotiations. Depiction of a Qing court painter, probably mid-1789.

After the withdrawal of the Chinese troops, negotiations between Nguyễn Huệ and the new viceroy Fuk'anggan took place . It was agreed that Nguyễn Huệ should “apologize” to the Chinese emperor and pay a ceremonial annual tribute as a sign of his “submission”. In return, Nguyễn Huệ was recognized as King of Annam - like the Lê monarchs before. In effect, this meant that the Qing surrendered, recognized the Tây-S -n rule as legitimate, and stopped supporting the Lê. Part of the peace agreement, however, was that the Vietnamese monarch should personally visit the Chinese emperor - at his express request - at his court. This posed major problems for Nguyễn Huệ, after all he could not and did not want to leave his kingdom for a journey of several months and meanwhile place himself in the hands of a foreign power. Because of his simple origins, he was also unfamiliar with the complex imperial court ceremonies and probably spoke very little Chinese. He finally dispatched an educated doppelganger - at the advice of Fuk'anggans . He arrived in the summer palace in Jehol in mid-1790 and took part in the celebrations for the eightieth birthday of the delighted emperor. It is believed that all high-ranking Chinese officials were aware of the deception, but no one disclosed it to the emperor.

Despite the expressions of friendship, Nguyễn Huệ remained generally hostile to the Chinese Empire, so he continued to support the pirates in the South China Sea as well as anti -Qing groups such as the Tiandihui . Despite the ongoing Nguyễn threat in the south, he also planned an invasion of southern China to “recapture” Liangguang ( Guangxi and Guangdong ) - after all , these areas had once been settled by the Hundred Việt tribes , the ancestors of the Vietnamese .

Tây-Sơn foot soldier ( Cochin-chinese soldier ). Depiction of the British painter William Alexander who, as a member of the Macartney Mission on his way to China, made a short stopover in Vietnam in the spring of 1793. Illustration from John Barrow : A Voyage to Cochin China , Cadell & Davies, London 1806, p. 333

Parallel to the diplomatic recognition by China, Nguyễn Huệ set about consolidating his rule domestically through administrative and representative measures. The most important project in this sense was the planned construction of a new monumental capital called Phượng Hoàng Trung Đô (“Imperial Phoenix Central Capital”) in Nghệ An , the home province of his ancestors. The chosen place (today's Vinh ) was in a region of little importance, but strategically sensible in the middle of the area he controlled. During the construction work - which was never to be completed - Nguyễn Huệ continued to rule from Phu Xuân.

In 1790 and 1791, Tây-Sơn armies raided Laos . Officially, it was about the fight against Lê and Nguyễn sympathizers, more likely reasons are the demand for tribute payments, a show of force in the direction of China and Siam and employment for the otherwise inactive military, the core element of the Tây-Sơn state. In the first attack, about fifty thousand men advanced from Nghệ An province into the neighboring principality of Muang Phuan . The second attack in the following year only included around ten thousand soldiers, but they advanced into the Siamese vassal kingdoms of Luang Prabang and Vientiane . In autumn 1791 even the city of Luang Prabang was conquered and sacked by the Tây-S -n troops. King Nanthesan of Vientiane, at that time the strong man in Laos, tried to play off the Tây Sơn, the Nguyễn and the Siamese against each other. Due to the rapid withdrawal of the Vietnamese, however, the Siamese supremacy remained over large parts of the region.

Decline under Nguyễn Quang Toản

In 1792, Nguyễn Hu wurde suddenly became seriously ill. On his deathbed he had to learn that the Nguyễn, equipped with superior sailing ships of western design, had invaded far south into his brother's territory. He finally died on September 16, 1792 at the age of about forty. His last projects, the construction of the new capital and the invasion of southern China, died with him. He was succeeded by his eldest son Nguyễn Quang Toản (1783-1802), who took the emperor name Cảnh Thịnh . The new emperor was only about ten years old, which is why a group of generals and officials took over the reign . The young emperor and his government continued to reside in Phu Xuân (Huế). A half-brother named Nguyễn Quang Thùy was formally appointed viceroy for North Vietnam and also placed under a regent in Đông Kinh (Hanoi).

In the south, the Nguyễn forces pushed further and further north and finally stood in front of Quy Nhơn in 1793. Nguyễn Nhạc, aged prematurely and tired of office, was forced to call on the hated general clique of his deceased brother for help. The Tây-Sơn troops from the north drove the Nguyễn back, but then also deposed Nguyễn Nhạc. A little later he died full of bitterness. Nguyễn Nhạc's eldest son Nguyễn Bảo was resigned with an apanage and placed under supervision.

Trần Quang Diệu , one of the leading generals towards the end of the Tây Sơn dynasty, husband of the Bùi Thị Xuân
(modern statue in the Quang Trung Museum, Bình Dịnh)

The French builder of the Nguyễn, Puymanel , had a mighty citadel built near Diên Khánh within a short time in 1793–94 to protect the recently conquered port city of Nha Trang - already in the middle of the old Tây-Sơn heartlands. The Tây-Sơn army under General Trần Quang Diệu advanced against this "thorn in the flesh" and began the siege.

In the meantime, in the capital Phú Xuân, the court official (and uncle of the maternal emperor) Bùi úc Tuyên had risen to the de facto ruler. Through his autocratic demeanor and his actions against political opponents at court, he made many enemies. In 1795 , some generals led by the Võ Văn Dũng successfully carried out a coup against him and drowned him and his supporters in the Perfume River - to the dismay of the emperor, whose powerlessness became evident. General Trần Quang Diệu - an ally of the dead man - broke off the siege of the Nguyễn fortress and marched with his troops north against the putschists. The impending civil war was only averted at the last moment when the generals agreed on a negotiated solution. However, when the siege was broken off, the plan to expel the Nguyễn from the southern coastal region had failed - all of the land south of the citadel was now undoubtedly in their hands.

In 1798, the politically sidelined Nguyễn Bảo, the son of Nguyễn Nhạc, rebelled against his cousin's rule. He conquered Quy Nh undn and called Nguy Phn Phúc Ánh to help. The rebellion was put down before the Nguyễn troops arrived; Nguyễn Bảo was executed.

Remains of the walls of the imperial citadel of Chà Bàn near Quy Nhơn

During these years, the Nguyễn forces pushed the fleet north every spring, when the south wind prevailed, and attacked there via Tây-Sơn bases in the summer before returning to the shelter of their fortresses with the north winds that set in in autumn wintered there. In the summer of 1799 they managed to take Chà Bàn rather surprisingly. The Tây-Sơn army dispatched to defend had fled without touching the enemy after misunderstood calls from the vanguard had triggered a mass panic. The two leading Tây-Sơn generals Võ Văn Dũng and Trần Quang Diệu recognized the gravity of the situation. Despite their former hostility, they marched together with the majority of all available troops against Chà Bàn and put the heavily fortified place under siege at the beginning of 1800. The Nguyễn tried to relieve their troops in Chà Bàn during the following summer , but could not break through the siege ring . Nguyễn Phúc Ánh now made the decision not to retreat to the south as usual in autumn, but to leave the troops stationed on site, which was a great challenge, as the wind coming from the wrong direction made the supply situation extremely difficult. It was indeed possible to keep the supply lines open through the winter despite the wind. A new wave of mobilization and the arrival of Cambodian support then ensured that a large number of additional soldiers were available at the beginning of 1801. However, the Nguyễn prince now changed his plans and decided to make a risky advance in early summer: instead of attempting relief with the fresh troops, he shipped his men further north and thus carried out a surprise attack against the hostile capital Phú Xuân. Since most of the Tay-Sơn troops was bound by the siege and many more fighting in the border regions against invading Laotians, the capital in June was virtually in the coup be taken. The surrounding provinces - and thus almost all of Central Vietnam - defected to the Nguyễn without a fight. Emperor Nguyễn Quang Toản fled to the north. A little later, after a year and a half of siege, Chà Bàn fell to the Tây Sơn, but the victory meant little: Since the Nguyễn fleet had meanwhile also conquered the nearby port of Quy Nhơn, a large part of the Tây Sơn army was far from the decisive events stuck without supplies and threatened to be surrounded.

In view of the impending doom, Emperor Nguyễn Quang Toản became active himself. During the autumn he organized his dispersed troops in the north. After the end of the rainy season, around the turn of the year 1801/02, he, his brother and General Bùi Thị Xuân returned with an army, supported by a huge fleet of over a hundred pirate ships. Their associations suffered heavy losses when attempting to overcome the old border fortifications that the Nguyễn princes had once built against the Trịnh. On the water, despite their numerical superiority, the South Chinese pirates had no chance against the professionally trained Nguyễn Navy and fled. The Nguyễn ships now advanced into the former border river Gianh and hijacked the Tây Sơn transport and supply fleet as it was about to transfer the troops to the other bank. When Siamese-Laotian combat units also appeared in the hinterland, the young emperor fled back to Đông Kinh (Hanoi).

After the annihilation of the Tây Sơn, Nguyễn Phúc Ánh assumed the imperial title of Gia Long and founded the Nguyễn dynasty in 1802

The Nguyon Alliance had thus won. The great Tây Sơn armies in the south broke up and were eventually wiped out in late spring when they tried to break through by land to the north. Nguyễn Phúc Ánh declared himself emperor in Phú Xuân (soon afterwards renamed Hu bald ) on May 31, 1802, and took the name Gia Long , which began the Nguyễn imperial dynasty . A little later he advanced to North Vietnam. After only thirty days and without significant resistance, he took the northern capital in July. The new Chinese emperor, Jiaqing , supported the advance after Nguyễn envoys had informed him of the Tây Sơn piracy. The Tây-Sơn emperor and his followers were quickly caught. Nguyễn Phúc Ánh - now Emperor Gia Long - took cruel revenge for the murder of his family twenty-five years earlier: All family members of the Tây Sơn dynasty and their generals were executed. Emperor Nguyễn Quang Toản was torn to pieces by elephants after seeing his parents' graves desecrated and destroyed.

Marks of the Tây-Sơn rule

Egalitarian beginnings: the "redistribution of wealth"

In the early years of the rebellion, the Tây-Sơn leaders seem to have had no specific long-term strategy. Rather, their changeable actions indicate that they reacted extremely opportunistically to the rapidly changing political situation and adapted their approach to current circumstances at short notice. This pragmatic and flexible approach was a major factor in the success of the survey.

The main effort of the Tây Sơn at this early stage was to gain popular support in order to base their rebellion on a mass base. In addition to the charismatic demeanor of the leaders - Nguyễn Nhạc and Nguyễn Huệ were considered rousing speakers - it was above all their demonstratively implemented egalitarian principles that brought large sections of the common people on their side:

So every time the Tây-Sơn rebels had conquered a town, they opened the state granaries and forced the upper class to hand over their treasures, largely without violence. Both the food and the valuables were then distributed among the common people, while the rebels kept only the most necessary reserves for themselves. Often the local tax registers were burned during these redistribution campaigns and the abolition of almost all taxes was announced. Furthermore, Nguyễn Nhạc had some of the tax collectors hated by the people persecuted at great expense and finally had them publicly executed after their capture. Thanks to such radical actions, which were carried out primarily because of their dramatic symbolism, the Tây Sơn brothers were able to present themselves credibly as inexorable enemies of a depraved state and fighters for the cause of the oppressed people. The rebels were seen by the people as “charitable thieves” who, in the style of Robin Hood, stole from the rich and gave gifts to those in need. Later Tây-Sơn-friendly authors spoke euphemistically in this context of the “redistribution of wealth”. Since food distributions and temporary tax breaks had also occurred in earlier times during major emergencies such as natural disasters (albeit never to this extent), the rebels could plead and argue that they were only doing what was actually a good's duty Ruler would be. The Tây-Sơn brothers achieved great popularity through this procedure among the people from the lower classes of the population, who joined the rebellion in large numbers. In keeping with this, the brothers always portrayed themselves as of the poorest origin - they literally spoke of the fact that they would only wear the “simplest of fabrics” on their bodies - even if their family was in reality quite wealthy.

The support from the population for the Tây Sơn was not limited to the impoverished small farmers. Most of the merchants, mostly ethnic Chinese, were sympathetic to the rebellion. The Nguyễn and Trịnh rulers had taxed long-distance trade more and more and thus created an oppressive economic situation. The Tây-Sơn rebels, who loudly celebrated the abolition of taxes, were accordingly well received. Many traders provided the rebels with substantial funds in return for allowing them to go about their business unhindered (and untaxed).

Another Tây-Sơn measure that was popular with farmers and merchants alike was the minting and distribution of new coins . The Nguyễn government had previously begun in the decades, coins because copper absence from the significantly lower zinc to mint. Since the zinc coins had a significantly lower material value than the old copper coins and the state had set a fixed exchange rate of one to one, this measure had caused a lot of bitterness. The population had started to hoard the old coins; In many places people had returned to bartering in kind . As a result, the country's economy continued to collapse.

Vietnamese coins during the rule of the Nguyễn Nhạc ( Thái Đức Thông Bảo )

As a countermeasure, the Tây Sơn began minting their own copper coins in the mid-1770s. This was not only extremely popular, but also served to legitimize it, after all, coinage was a classic privilege of the ruler. Since the Tây Sơn also did not have copper, they mainly collected the material through looting: Palaces, temples and monasteries were robbed of their ceremonial objects such as bells, gongs, drums, candlesticks and vases, as these were usually made of copper. The cult objects were melted down and made into coins.

This looting was initially directed against the buildings of the Nguyễn, later also those of the Trịnh and Lê. For example, the ancestral temples and mausoleums of the Nguyễn princes were deliberately and demonstratively destroyed - a particularly serious crime in the East Asian culture. The looting was also increasingly directed against the shrines and private households in the villages, which led to resentment among the affected population.

However, as the Tây Sơn army grew in the course of the rebellion, the looting continued to expand. There was now extensive looting of entire regions, in which even the simplest utensils were stolen, mostly in connection with the subsequent burning of the villages. Since the Tây-Sơn leaders only began collecting taxes in later years, looting was their soldiers' pay and their state administration (along with piracy) the most important source of income. Worst hit by the looting and pillage the north central Vietnam ; the rebels invaded here repeatedly in the 1770s and 1780s. In the end, the Tây Sơn harmed themselves with the looting, as after the final conquest of the region by Nguyễn Huệ, the destroyed infrastructure had to be laboriously rebuilt and the displaced population had to be moved to return to their villages.

In conclusion, it can be assumed that the number of people who suffered from the redistribution and the associated looting is significantly higher than the number of those whose social situation improved as a result.

Administration of the Tây Sơn state: Restrictive population control

It was only very late that the Tây-Sơn brothers began to set up state administrative structures. Nguyễn Nhạc had already formally put together a government in 1775 and set up the classic six ministries . However, actual administrative activities such as conducting censuses and collecting taxes do not appear to have been carried out until the mid-1780s. A reform of the regional administration at the provincial and county level was only carried out in the north under Nguyễn Hu,, which also gave priority to military officials over civil officials. A judicial system was never established during the Tây Sơn dynasty - although a code of law was compiled on behalf of Nguyễn Huệ , it was never officially introduced.

A group of Vietnamese in the countryside ( A Group of Cochinchinese ). Depiction of William Alexander from 1793, illustration from Barrow: A Voyage to Cochin China , Cadell & Davies, London 1806, p. 362

The main task of the Tây-Sơn administration was to return the displaced rural population to their villages. The acts of war and famine had turned large numbers of Vietnamese into wandering vagabonds . According to contemporary reports, by the 1780s up to two-thirds of the total population had left their villages due to looting, droughts, floods, land grabbing or oppressive taxation. About ten to twenty percent of the villages had been completely abandoned. Many of the refugees lived as bandits who attacked other villages, making the situation even worse. Large areas of valuable arable land remained untilled. The wandering, landless population produced nothing and could not be recorded administratively, so they could not be used for taxation, forced labor or the military.

The most comprehensive measures for resettlement of the displaced were enacted in 1789 by Nguyễn Huệ. In order to persuade the population to return and to revive the agriculture lying on the ground, he ordered the re-establishment of the old land registers . In the previous crisis years, corrupt dignitaries and local rulers had in many cases illegally appropriated the communal land or the private land owned by small farmers. This land grab should be reversed through the reform of the land registers. Only those who had lived there for more than three years could be included in the register. The registered fallow arable land had to be cultivated up to a certain point in time, otherwise high penalties could be imposed. These conditions served to return the dispersed population to their old home villages and to force them to quickly resume their agricultural activities. Real land reform , however, was never carried out.

As a further incentive, taxes on the fields have meanwhile been lowered. Both municipal fields and private land were taxed in three categories each, the latter at a lower rate. The farmers usually paid these taxes in the form of rice. In addition to the regular taxes, the population was repeatedly burdened by high special taxes that were collected for members of the ruling dynasty on the occasion of funeral ceremonies. Furthermore, corruption among local officials was a widespread problem. In some cases, members of the old elite had come to terms with the Tây-Sơn rule and retained their lucrative official positions; Tây-Sơn followers were sometimes loyal but completely ignorant of administrative matters and were rewarded with administrative posts. In any case, the population suffered from the pronounced self-enrichment of the state representatives assigned to them. Due to the weakness (or, in large parts, non-existence) of the judicial system, corruption could not be combated effectively.

A systematic census was linked to the measures to return the displaced rural population. The information gathered in this way should be used to determine the number of conscripts and compulsory military service as well as the future tax burden for each village. Such censuses took place regularly in Vietnam, usually every few decades. In the south, Nguyễn Nhạc was able to fall back on the census data from 1769 before he had his own census carried out for the first time in 1784. In the north, however, due to the mismanagement of the Trịnh, no census had been carried out for over a century, which is why Nguyễn Huệ attached great importance to the census of 1789 and ordered an even more comprehensive census in 1792. The census was hated by the population because it usually resulted in higher taxes and higher compulsory labor, which is why attempts were made everywhere to evade registration. It is estimated that many village communities reported only about ten percent of the actual population. The Tây Sơn therefore strived for more extensive surveillance and control of the villages.

The counted population was classically divided into different categories according to age, gender, military fitness and property. Under Nguyễn Huệ this categorization was simplified and only limited to age as a classification feature. In addition, children from the age of nine were also recorded and not only adults as before. As a result, every Vietnamese between nine and fifty-five years of age could potentially be used for civil service and the military.

Immediately after the 1789 census, Nguyễn Huệ ordered the introduction of identity cards (identity cards ) - an innovation that had never been seen before in Vietnam. The ID cards bore an official seal and the motto “Great Trust in the Reich”, which is why they became known as trust cards . The name of each person, their ancestors, their home village and an imprint of the left thumb were recorded on them. It was compulsory to carry your ID. If a Vietnamese was found outside his village by representatives of the state without an identity card, he was arrested and forced directly into the army or assigned to do forced labor. The cards were not only used to monitor the villages, but were primarily intended to deter the rural population from migrating and to bind them firmly to their land by threatening drastic penalties. In this way, men could also be forcibly recruited quickly and easily in order to meet the permanently high demand for new soldiers.

While conscription was limited even under the Tây Sơn on men, so was forced labor (or the forced labor) extended to almost the entire population. In contrast to the previous dynasties, women, children, the elderly and Buddhist monks were also forced to carry out state work, with the exception of small children and nursing mothers. The duty of compulsory labor was traditionally common in peasant Vietnamese society, but was demanded by the Tây-Sơn rulers much more frequently and extensively than in earlier times. This was particularly due to the fact that the Tây-Sơn rebels burned down state facilities on their military campaigns on a large scale and the destroyed infrastructure then had to be laboriously rebuilt. While the construction or repair of dams, roads and canals was accepted as necessary by the executing population, the people had no understanding of the work on fortifications, administrative buildings or palaces and only carried out this work extremely reluctantly under duress. The greatest need for slave labor - often hard physical labor such as the transport of stones - caused the capital projects of the two brothers: Nguyễn Nhạc had the ruined Cham city Chà Bàn (Vijaya) rebuilt, while Nguyễn Huệ had its phoenix capital as a purely planned city built from scratch. Since the peasants could not till their fields during the hard labor, these prestige building projects led to the neglect of agriculture and thus to a shortage of food.

Thus, the Tây-S Dynn dynasty, which had begun so promisingly for the peasant population, quickly developed into a system of rule that differed from the previous dynasties in almost nothing. None of the few reforms initiated by the Tây-Sơn brothers changed the lot of the peasants for the better; however, many measures made her life difficult. In fact, the entire policy of the Tây Sơn was instead aimed, directly or indirectly, at consolidating the primacy of the military. It becomes clear that the Tây Sơn brothers viewed the struggle for a more just society primarily as a means to an end. After they had gained power, they based their rule largely on the same elites as the previous dynasties.

Due to the extensive militarization and surveillance of the village communities, there were no significant uprisings against the Tây-Sơn regime despite the adverse living conditions. Local uprisings were quickly crushed by the Tây-Sơn military before they could become a serious problem for the rulers. Instead, people turned their hopes on omens and prophecies; Mystics and diviners soon found themselves in most places.

The situation was generally better in cities, where the population was only a small fraction of the total population. The dominant class of traders here had benefited significantly from the rise of the Tây Sơn, who had radically lowered taxes, introduced a more stable currency, promoted trade with China and also brutally eliminated competition loyal to Nguyễn. However, the permanent state of war and the superior diplomacy of Nguyễn Phúc Ánhs caused a lasting trade crisis, so that many merchants gradually turned away from the dynasty, disappointed.

The social policy of the Tây Sơn dynasty was relatively progressive. Minorities such as the Cham, the mountain peoples of the Central Highlands (especially the Bahnar ) and Qing Chinese were not perceived as a disruptive factor as before, but were integrated into the Tây-Sơn state. Nguyễn Nhạc in particular - who was married to a Bahnar woman - presented himself not only as the ruler of the Vietnamese, but also as the king of the Cham. This positive image of a multicultural society is, however, heavily tarnished by the massacres that the Tây-Sơn troops carried out on the Chinese settlers of the south (descendants of fled Ming supporters).

After centuries of confucian-based confinement to the home and hearth, Vietnamese women achieved a large degree of independence and equality. But now they also had to do hard labor. The Englishman Charles Chapman , who visited the Tây-Sơn domain on behalf of the East India Company in 1778 , reported that the Vietnamese women were the clearly more active sex and often had the say in economic and financial matters. After many centuries in which only a few wives or concubines of rulers had achieved historical importance, numerous Vietnamese women now actively stepped into the light of history. The poet Hồ Xuân Hương and the female generals (the so-called five phoenix general women ), including Bùi Thị Xuân, should be mentioned here .

Culture: reform of the writing system

Depiction of a ceremony of popular belief ( An Offering of First-fruits to the God Fo ). William Alexander, 1793, illustration from Barrow: A Voyage to Cochin China , Cadell & Davies, London 1806, p. 385

Religion was not an essential part of the Tây Sơn dynasty; it was even latently hostile to religion. In contrast to many comparable uprising movements in South and East Asia, the Tây-Sơn rulers were never propagated as messianic redeeming figures, even if they did make use of local folk beliefs in their early days. Numerous popular sagas were created early on in which supernatural powers were ascribed to the Tây-Sơn brothers. The brothers are also said to have come into possession of magical weapons; which has been a typical feature of Vietnamese heroes at least since Lê L wari and the story about his heavenly sword . Belief in prophecy was widespread; cryptic prophecies by eminent mystics circulated across the country. Two such prophecies in particular were taken up by the Tây-Sơn brothers: One said that the Nguyễn dynasty would perish after eight generations - fittingly, the eighth Nguyễn prince had died a few years before the start of the rebellion, whereupon the minister Trương Phúc Loan had usurped power. The second prophecy read "There is a righteous revolt in the west, great deeds are being done in the north." Since the home village of Tây Sơn literally means "western mountain", the brothers saw their revolt as divinely legitimized. The Tây-Sơn brothers also invoked the classical philosophy of the Mandate of Heaven to justify their rebellion and rule. Since their rebellion was successful, but the Nguyễn, Trịnh and Lê perished, their empire was evidently the “will of heaven”. According to this religious-philosophical point of view, the Tây-Sơn brothers were consequently not illegal usurpers, but fighters for the restoration of a heavenly order.

The Tây Sơn were largely opposed to Buddhist monasticism and tried to curtail the power and wealth of the monasteries and to reduce the number of "unproductive" monks. Thus the monks were tested in their knowledge of the Buddhist canon ; those who did not pass the exam had to return to lay life . Smaller monasteries were also dissolved and their monks were grouped together in larger monastery complexes. However, these secularization measures never had a high priority and were only pursued casually.

Statue of the Zen Buddhist Patriarch Rahulata . Lacquer-coated wooden statue from the Tây Phương Pagoda from 1794, now in the National Museum of Fine Arts .

In connection with the amalgamation of the monasteries, the Tây Phương Pagoda west of Hanoi was also fundamentally renovated and expanded under Emperor Nguyễn Quang Toản in 1794 . The lacquer-coated wooden statues created for this purpose are considered to be a highlight of Vietnamese wood carving and lacquer art and masterpieces of their time due to the lively representations . Despite the pragmatic, military and anti-Buddhist program of the Tây Sơn, great works of art were created during their rule.

Seal of the Tây Sơn dynasty

The attitude of the Tây Sơn dynasty towards Confucianism , the traditional state doctrine, can be described as contradicting itself. The Confucian state and court ceremonies were largely abolished. The cultural influence of China should be pushed back, which is why the Indian heritage of Champas was propagated. The Tây-Sơn period is therefore often referred to as the low point of Confucianism in the pre-colonial history of Vietnam. On the other hand, the Tây-Sơn monarchs very often invoked the Confucian core concepts of virtue and righteousness , for example their armies were officially referred to as "righteous troops". They were also active promoters and innovators of the education system as well as the official examinations and relied on a Confucian-influenced civil service apparatus.

Nguyễn Huệ in particular can be seen as a staunch supporter of Confucian ideas of rule. After conquering the north, the center of Vietnamese scholarship - in the south there was no institution comparable to a temple of literature - he called on scholars to support the new dynasty. He had the previous court officials gather around him and asked them to swear allegiance to him. One of the scholars refused to betray the Lê dynasty and committed suicide by ingesting poison, another faked a serious illness in order not to appear. All others, however, affirmed their loyalty to the Tây Sastn dynasty. In the coming years of his brief reign, Nguyễn Huệ left most of the country's government and administrative duties to the scholars. After his death most of them turned away from the Tây Sơn again; his son could hardly count on Confucian support. The most important scholars in Tây-Sơn ministries were Trần Văn Kỷ , Nguyễn Thiếp and especially Ngô Thì Nhậm , later also Phan Huy Ích .

The Tây-Sơn measures to strengthen and renew the education system went hand in hand with the spread of Confucian scriptures. These were usually written in Hán - classical Chinese - and were therefore not understood by a large part of the population. Hán was also the language of administration, court and scholars; all official documents were written in classical Chinese, the role of which is roughly comparable to that of Latin in medieval and early modern Europe. Nguyễn Huệ, who himself possessed mediocre knowledge of Chinese at best, therefore pushed through the change of the official language. Hán was abolished in favor of the Vietnamese language ( vernacular language ), which was written in Chữ Nôm . Nôm combines Chinese characters with the Vietnamese vocabulary. This writing system emerged around the 10th century and was used in parallel to Hán from the 13th century, as it was the only way to write the Vietnamese language. While artistic works such as poetry and folk literature were mostly written in Nôm, Hán remained the official language for centuries, as most court officials viewed Nôm as a perversion of the Chinese characters. It was only Nguyễn Huệ's anti-Chinese attitude and his penchant for symbolic actions that finally brought about the change: the Confucian classics were translated. All government documents, laws and ordinances, military proclamations and ceremonial cult prayers were to be written in Nôm from now on. Even with the official examinations only Nôm should be allowed.

Due to the rapid decline of the Tây-Sơn dynasty, this progressive language and writing reform was only partially implemented. The majority of scholars firmly opposed Nôm and therefore slowed down the implementation of the measures. Nôm was also never standardized and was difficult to learn due to the ambiguity of the characters, so it was not suitable for literacy of the masses. Under the Nguyễn dynasty, the conversion was reversed and the Nôm official texts destroyed. Hán became the state's written language again, until three quarters of a century later the French colonial power enforced the Latin script Quốc ngữ .

A page from the national epic “The History of the Kiều” ( Truyện Kiều ) by Nguyễn Du , written in Chữ Nôm .

Although the reform had ultimately failed, it had significantly upgraded the status of the written Vietnamese language and had a decisive influence on the development of Vietnamese literature . Both Nguyễn Du , the author of the Vietnamese national epic Truyện Kiều , and the poet Hồ Xuân Hương witnessed the rise and fall of the Tây Sơn. Her works, which are written in Chữ Nôm, are clearly marked by the social upheavals of the time and differ greatly from the moralism of previous Confucian literature in their popular and socially critical content. A few years after the end of the Tây Sơn, Vietnamese literature reached an unprecedented bloom.

Christianity: Between Persecution and Tolerance

The Catholic Christianity in Vietnam went through during the Tây-Sơn time changeable years; the position of the emperors fluctuated between brutal persecution and official tolerance. In this respect, the dynasty did not differ very much from the previous and subsequent Nguy -n rulers, who also had extremely inconsistent and changing views on the Christian church.

Christianity had gained a foothold in Vietnam at the beginning of the 17th century and was quickly spread, especially through the missionary work of Alexandre de Rhodes (1627–1645 with interruptions in the country). The ruling Trịnh and Nguyễn princes, however, were hostile to the new religion: Since the Christians largely rejected the ancestor cult and the Confucian worship of rulers as idolatry , they were considered a subversive danger to the state and society. The missionaries were also suspected of being involved in overturning plans as agents of the European colonial powers. Christianity was eventually banned in both parts of the country and its followers persecuted. However, despite occasional pogroms against the Christian minority, the ban remained largely ineffective and did not prevent the religion from spreading further. The somewhat more tolerant Nguyễn princes also employed Jesuits at their court for decades . At the time of the Tây Sơn rebellion, there were roughly up to 400,000 Christians in Vietnam (almost all of whom lived in the much more densely populated north), out of a total population of around 5.5 to 10 million.

In the early stages of the uprising, Christianity played no role. The Tây-Sơn rebels looted the treasures of churches, but because of their fundamental disinterest in religious issues, they had no objections to Christian proselytizing in their territory. Rumor has it that the Tây Sơn brothers themselves came from a former Christian, apostatic family. An aunt on the brothers' mother's side was also known as a Christian. However, there are no indications that this family background - if at all correct - had an impact on the later Tây-Sơn religious policy.

Bishop Pierre Pigneau de Behaine , one of the most important followers of Nguyễn Phúc Ánh and an enemy of the Tây Sơn
(oil painting in the MEP family house, probably by Maupérin , 1787)

In 1779, after his victory over the Nguyễn princely family, the first Tây-Sơn leader Nguyễn Nhạc issued an edict proclaiming universal freedom of religion. Presumably he was primarily interested in gaining European support for his new regime. He also had permits issued, assuring missionaries around his capital the free exercise of their activities, and recruited two Spanish Dominican priests as mathematicians and astronomers for his court. However, this phase of tolerance ended the next year when Nguyễn Nh ließc arrested the only French missionary in his area of ​​influence - he probably had learned about the collaboration between Pierre Pigneau de Behaine and Nguyễn Phúc Ánh.

The situation escalated in 1782 when Nguyễn Nhạc had the Spanish priest Ferdinand Olmedilla captured and then executed. Nguyễn Nhạc accused Olmedilla of having promised him a shipment of copper, which was essential for the war effort, but of having handed the material over to the Nguyễn instead. When the prisoner was transferred by sea to the Tây-Sơn capital, the escort fleet sank in a storm, whereupon Nguyễn Nhạc furiously gave the order for execution. In the following two years (1783/84) he then carried out extensive persecution of Christians. For the first time, there was also a major dispute between the Tây-Sơn brothers, as Nguyễn Huệ appeared as an advocate for Christians and rejected the persecution as a politically counterproductive measure. In the summer of 1785 the missionaries were again assured that they would be free to exercise their spiritual activities. However, this short period of tolerance ended in November when Nguyễn Nh erklärtec declared Christianity illegal in a new edict. As in earlier times, the prohibition was formally justified with the allegedly socially degrading effect of religion. All Christian men strong enough to carry weapons should be forcibly recruited into the Tây-Sơn army. A little later this regulation was supplemented to the effect that Christians could alternatively exempt themselves from military service by paying a special tax. The antichristian edict was thus extremely useful for the Tây-Sơn dynasty from a secular point of view, as it filled the ranks of the army with soldiers and the treasuries with money. Over the next few years, the repression - as a result of the territorial gains of the Nguyễn in the south - continued to increase. Nguyễn Nhạc's brutal actions against the Christians drove them to the side of Nguyễn Phúc Ánh in large numbers, which in turn worsened the situation in the Tây Sơn area.

However, the anti-Christian measures were limited to the territory of the oldest Tây-Sơn brother. Nguyễn Huệ was relatively positive about the Christian religion. Christians in his territory were allowed to live out their faith completely freely, even if they also had to pay an additional tax. The emperor also had the French missionary Girard brought to his court and made him his advisor in medical and astronomical questions. Girard even undertook a diplomatic mission to Macau, Portugal, on behalf of the emperor .

After Nguyễn Huệ's untimely death in 1792, his policy of religious tolerance was initially continued. French missionaries reported that the situation for Christians in Vietnam was much better than in their homeland, which was shaken by the revolution at the time . In early 1795, however, the regent Bùi Đắc Tuyên issued two edicts in response to the advance of the Nguyễn Alliance, in which Christianity was again forbidden. Although the edicts were declared invalid a little later after the regent was overthrown, the persecution of Christians was largely continued by the now ruling generals. The violence reached its final climax in early autumn 1798 when two Vietnamese priests, Emmanuel Triu and Johannes Đạt , were executed.

With the victory of Nguyễn Phúc Ánh, religious freedom finally prevailed in the whole of Vietnam - his successors on the throne would later become the worst persecutors of Christians in Vietnamese history.

In later times the Tây-Sơn monarchs were often portrayed as xenophobic Christian haters. However, this traditional picture cannot be maintained, especially with regard to Nguyễn Huệ.

The heyday of piracy

Ships in an estuary on the Vietnamese coast, probably near Hội An ( Cochinchinese Shipping on the River Taifo ). Depiction of William Alexander from 1793, illustration from Barrow: A Voyage to Cochin China , Cadell & Davies, London 1806, p. 375

In view of the state of war with almost all neighboring states, the economy suffered from a lack of trade relations. Attempts to establish economic contacts with the British East India Company , the Portuguese in Macau and the Spaniards in the Philippines failed due to the diplomatically insensitive approach of the Tây-Sơn rulers. Instead, they promoted on a large scale, the piracy and hired en masse privateer from southern Chinese fishing villages.

A large part of the fishermen in southern China were living on the verge of subsistence at the time; many struggled to survive on a daily basis and only kept afloat thanks to petty criminal activities such as smuggling and beach raiding . Others had given up fishing entirely and became pirates . It was therefore easy for the Tây Sơn to recruit a large number of Chinese with both the seafaring expertise and the necessary ruthlessness. The men were promised a righteous career in the service of the Tây-Sơn state, with which they could make up for misdeeds of their past - in fact, however, from now on they should practice state piracy. The privateers hired in this way were given Vietnamese nobility titles and military ranks and were thus formally incorporated into the Tây-Sơn military system. In addition, safe harbors and protected anchorages along the long Vietnamese coast were made available as bases of operations. In return, the Tây Sơn expected about 60–80% share of the prey.

This arrangement was extremely profitable for both the privateers and the Tây Sơn dynasty. Starting from their bases in the Gulf of Tonkin , pirates soon invaded the entire South China Sea ; in the north their radius of action extended to Zhejiang . As Canton (Guangzhou) was the only Chinese port open to European traders at the time, there was no shortage of lucrative destinations in the region, with pirates attacking European and Asian ships indiscriminately. Sometimes only the loaded goods were stolen during the raids, sometimes the ship was also taken over and the crew either massacred or captured and forced to do hard labor.

The naval units sent by the Chinese state to combat piracy remained powerless, as Tây-Sơn officials politely but firmly forbade them to enter the Vietnamese rivers and bays, so that the pirate shelters could not be attacked. After the disaster at the turn of the year 1788/89, a renewed war with Vietnam should be avoided at all costs, which is why the empire refrained from further political or military measures against the Tây Sơn despite the specific suspicion of support for piracy.

The time of the dynasty therefore quickly developed into a "Golden Age" of piracy in the South China Sea . For the Tây Sơn, piracy became the central industry and one of the most important sources of income. The pirate ships also made up almost the entire Tây Sơn Navy, the number of ships being so large that the Tây Sơn can also be considered a sea power. The pirates also served as a kind of coast guard , thus preventing both the infiltration of Nguyễn agents and the emigration of the increasingly oppressed population. Most of the pirates remained loyal to the Tây Sơn dynasty until its fall - the last contingent at the turn of the year 1801/02 consisted to a large extent of pirate ships, even if these were clearly inferior to the better equipped Nguyễn fleet.

The most important pirate in the Vietnamese service was Chen Tianbao , who rose to the de facto commander of all Tây-Syn naval activities and also directed the recruitment of other pirates. Two other important pirate leaders , Mo Guanfu and Wushi Er , were given the title of king ( vương ) by the Tây Sơn monarch . Mo Guanfu temporarily commanded over a thousand men. Another pirate captain, Zheng Qi , controlled a fleet of over two hundred ships. His cousin Zheng Yi was also in alliance with the Tây Sơn. After his death in 1807, his widow Zheng Yisao took over the leadership of the Pirate Alliance and rose to be the most powerful female pirate of all time. As early as 1810, she and her partner Zhang Baozai accepted an offer of amnesty from the Chinese state, which marked the end of piracy in southern China, as all other pirate leaders had been defeated in previous years.

Military: Ambushes and Psychological Warfare

The military system was the core element of the Tây-Sơn state. In no other period of pre-colonial Vietnamese history was the population subject to such extensive militarization as during the Tây-Sơn dynasty. The administrative system was also dominated by the military for the first time since civil servants came into being, as civil servants were subordinated to military servants - previously it had been the other way around.

Unlike earlier dynasties, at the time of their usurpation, the Tây-Sơn brothers had neither ties to the imperial court nor the support of scholars or religious dignitaries. Military successes thus became the most important means of legitimizing their claim to power. This is especially true of Nguyễn Huệ, who owed his rule to the personal loyalty of his troops and justified his empire, similar to Lê L ähnlichi, with his fight against China. Under his leadership, the country was permanently at war. When there was no invasion army to be fought off, he instigated conflicts himself, for example in the case of the unsettled attack against the Trịnh, the incursion into Laos and finally the gigantic campaign of conquest against southern China - which was never implemented due to his death.

The military successes of the Tây-Sơn troops, the "righteous army", were largely based on the skillful exploitation of lists of wars, ambushes and psychological warfare . The first notable success of the rebels, the conquest of Quy Nhơn, came about through a ruse reminiscent of the Trojan horse : for example, the insurgent leader Nguyễn Nh übergebenc was handed over to the city garrison as a supposed prisoner in a cage. After dark he freed himself from the cage and opened the city gates to his waiting troops.

War drum of the Tây Sơn army

In the run-up to battles, the Tây-Sơn troops made noise by clashing their weapons and made loud hissing noises. This approach became so characteristic that they were mostly only called the “hissing army” by their opponents. Combined with drums and a huge red banner, the mere appearance of the ominously noisy Tây-Sơn soldiers caused the morally weak enemy troops to quickly flee. The Nguyễn and Trịnh princes had severely neglected the military system during the long period of peace; the majority of their soldiers were poorly trained and poorly paid and accordingly showed little fighting spirit. In contrast, the early Tây-Sơn rebels were highly motivated volunteers who could also quickly gain wealth through looting. In 1774 about 25,000 men had volunteered to join the rebellion.

In battle, the Tây Sơn relied on shock troops, which were supposed to attack in a concentrated manner and create panic. This included tall members of the mountain peoples, who were completely naked except for Qing hair fashion and gold foil stuck to their bodies and who stormed forward like a berserk in the intoxication of alcohol . Above all, however, war elephants were used in large numbers . The Tây-Sơn wars were probably the last conflict in which elephants still played a decisive role - especially against the Chinese, who did not know war elephants (anymore). Nguyễn Huệ and his generals used to ride elephants into battle. Huge elephant transport ships were also built for the planned invasion of China, which in the end were never used.

Cannon from the Tây Sơn period found in the port of Quy Nhơn

The training and deployment focus of the foot troops was on hand-to-hand combat (probably due to the lack of firearms). The fighting techniques taught to men were later summarized as Võ Bình Định (or Võ Tây Sơn ) and are now considered a style of Vietnamese martial arts .

Since their enemies were usually clearly outnumbered, the Tây Sơn avoided open field battles and instead attacked when the enemy did not expect it. In 1785, the Siamese fleet, unknown to the region, was ambushed into a river, while in 1789 the Chinese army was attacked off Hanoi during the New Year celebrations. Such tactics were not new, but they worked because of the incompetence of the enemy commanders, who felt themselves to be in a false sense of security due to their numerical superiority.

Despite the victories, the Tây Sơn suffered high losses in the brutal battles. It is estimated that several hundred thousand men were killed during the Tây-Sơn wars. The losses tore large gaps in the ranks of the combat units, which were to be replenished through strict conscription. The Tây-Sơn rulers benefited from comprehensive population registration and control. In theory, any male Vietnamese between the ages of nine and fifty could be drafted into military service. In contrast to the compulsory service, only men were still conscripted; Women could, however, join the troops voluntarily and also acquire general ranks. Depending on the region and time, every third to every seventh conscript in a village had to take up active service, and in some cases all capable men in a town were forced into the army at once. Attempts to evade recruitment were immediately punished with death. Anyone found outside their home village without an identity card was directly forcibly recruited, as were all Christians who were unable to pay the special tax imposed on them. In addition, the Tây-Sơn leaders incorporated many bandits ( robber gangs ) into the army as irregular groups. These plundered and pillaged on a large scale and thus contributed significantly to the impoverishment of entire regions. The former volunteer army became a force made up of masses of force-recruited peasants, adventurers and bandits. In the late 1780s and early 1790s, the Tây Sơn were able to lead around 50,000 to 60,000 men into the field.

The soldiers should be hardened by a brutal drill and consciously motivated to behave cruelly. Accordingly, many recruits did not survive basic training. It is said that cannibalistic rituals to brutalize the men were also carried out. In the last years of the Tây Sơn dynasty, this system based on coercion and brutality no longer seems to have worked, which is why an attempt was made to keep the soldiers happy with the inflationary allocation of officer ranks and titles of nobility. In some villages around 1800 about half of the men liable to military service had either a title of nobility or a high military rank.

However, these measures could not prevent the rapid military collapse of the Tây-Sơn dynasty. Unlike the Tây-Sơn brothers, who had conquered a huge empire within a few years, Nguyễn Phúc Ánh proceeded slowly. He stayed in Saigon for about a decade and organized the administration there, had fortresses built, ships built and his troops trained with modern weapons. When he then slowly but steadily advanced north, it became apparent that the once feared Tây-Sơn troops had lost their military superiority.

List of emperors of the Tây Sơn dynasty

(according to Trần Trọng Kim )

Emperor of Đại Việt 1778–1802

Personal name	Era name	Temple name	Posthumous title	Government years	Remarks
阮 岳 Nguyễn Nhạc	泰德 Thái Đức	-	-	1778–1788 (as emperor)	Counter-emperor to Lê Hiển Tông and Lê Chiêu Thống
阮 惠 Nguyễn Huệ	光 中 Quang Trung	太祖 Thái Tổ	武 皇帝 Võ Hoàng đế	1788-1792
阮 光 纘 Nguyễn Quang Toản	景 盛 Cảnh Thịnh (1793–1801) , 寶興 Bảo Hưng (1801–1802)	-	-	1792-1802

reception

No other period in Vietnam's pre-colonial history was discussed and judged as controversially as the Tây-Sơn dynasty. There is only general agreement on the point that the Tây-Sơn rebellion represents a major upheaval ( caesura ) in Vietnamese history.

At first, the historians of the Nguyễn imperial court tried to deny the Tây-Sơn brothers any dynastic legitimacy. The Tây-Sơn leaders were only "bandits" and "rebels" in official parlance and thus unlawful usurpers of state power. In the court chronicle Đại Nam thực lục , which was written from the middle of the 19th century, the term Tây Sơn is always preceded by the addition “false” to indicate the supposed illegitimacy of the dynasty. Likewise, the events of the Tây-Sơn period were dated with the era name of the penultimate Lê emperor (although he died in 1786); the Lê dynasty was thus extended on paper until the beginning of the Nguyễn empire in 1802. The mobilization of broad strata of the population for the Tây-Sơn cause took place according to this view first through deception and later through coercion and oppression. The Tây-Sơn leaders were recognized for their military achievements, but at the same time discredited as cruel despots. This illegitimation of the Tây Sơn dynasty was only accepted with approval outside the imperial court in Nguyễn strongholds such as Saigon. In the former Tây Sơn core area around Quy Nhơn, the brothers Nguyễn Nhạc and Nguyễn Huệ were increasingly nostalgically glorified as folk heroes, while many scholars in Hanoi viewed both the Tây Sơn and the Nguyễn as foreign rulers from the south. To make matters worse, the sinophile Nguyễn in particular could not deny the Chinese emperor's recognition of the Tây-Sơn rulers.

With the fall of the Nguyễn dynasty and its subjugation by France at the end of the century, the picture began to change. As puppets of the colonial rulers, the Nguyễn monarchs finally lost all popular support. In the first decades of the 20th century, the view of the legitimate Tây-Sơn empire prevailed among the renowned scholars, even if the brothers were not judged particularly positively (for example with Trần Trọng Kim ).

Modern monument commemorating the victory of the Tây-Sơn brothers over Siam and the Nguyễn in the Battle of Rạch Gầm-Xoài Mút ( Tiền Giang Province ).

Modern statue of Nguyễn Huệ (Emperor Quang Trung) in front of the Quang Trung Museum (Tây Sơn, Bình Định Province).

In 1938 the historian Đào Duy Anh, who was active in the communist independence movement, presented the Tây-Sơn rebellion for the first time as a peasant-dominated mass movement. His colleague Trần Huy Liệu further developed this interpretation; he saw a revolution in the rebellion and rule of the Tây Sơn . This elaboration became part of the official historiography of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam after the August Revolution in 1945 . The Tây-Sơn brothers were now regarded as early socialist revolutionaries and patriotic fighters for the unity and independence of the country - and thus as forerunners of the Việt Minh . While the Tây Sơn were seen in the Marxist sense as representatives of the will of the peasant class, the Nguyễn were seen as oppressive feudal lords who had ultimately won the day solely because of the support of foreign imperialists.

Nguyễn Huệ on the South Vietnamese 200 Đồng banknote

The Tây-Sơn brothers were also considered national heroes in South Vietnam . In addition to the military aspect (victory over China), their southern origin was the main reason for the veneration: only the Tây Sơn and the Nguyễn ruled from the south - and since the Nguyễn, as collaborators of colonialism, were no longer suitable as a role model, the Tây became Sơn stylized as the forerunners of a South Vietnamese state.

In the history of Vietnam today, the interpretation of the Vietnamese independence movement continues to dominate. Although more recent works by Vietnamese historians usually no longer portray the Tây Sơn as Marxist class fighters. Nevertheless, the brothers are always considered to be patriots who first rebelled against the Nguyễn in order to lift the common people out of poverty and then overthrew the Trịnh to do so Unite land before defeating the Chinese invaders to secure national independence. This portrayal of the Tây Sơn as the patriotic champions of a popular unification movement cannot be substantiated in any way by contemporary sources.

Little attention is paid to the Tây-Sơn period in Chinese and Siamese (or Thai) historiography. In China, the events of 1788/89 were counted among the Ten Great Campaigns of the Qing Dynasty and the "victory" over the rebellious Vietnamese was propagandistically processed, for example in the paintings and engravings in the series Les conquêtes de l'empereur de la Chine , which were made in France according to the specifications of Jesuits living at the Chinese court. Since the Nguyễn dynasty recognized the supremacy of the Chinese emperor after it came to power, established a Chinese court ceremony and generally pursued a China-friendly policy, the Tây-Sơn epoch had come to a conciliatory end for China.

From a Thai point of view, the Tây-Sơn wars are only part of the much longer power struggle between Siam and Vietnam for supremacy over Cambodia and Laos. Since the alliance between Gia Long and King Rama I quickly broke up after the latter's death in 1809 and a new war broke out, little importance is attached to the brief period in which Nguyễn and Siamese were on the same side.

For a long time, the Tây-Sơn dynasty was largely ignored in western history. Contemporary reports from missionaries portrayed the Tây-Sơn brothers as anti-Christian warlords and compared them with Alexander the Great and Attila in their urge to conquer . Early French-language works largely adopted the Nguyễn view, but placed French support for Nguyễn Phúc Ánh in the foreground. The Vietnamese scholar Lê Thành Khôi , who lives in France , provided a relatively balanced representation of time for the first time in his overview presentation Viêt-Nam, Histoire et Civilization in 1955 . From the 1970s onwards, there were also several English-language works that dealt with the Tây-Sơn dynasty, if only as a subsidiary aspect of earlier or later events. In his work Vietnam and the Chinese Model (1971) , for example, Alexander Woodside characterizes the Tây-Sơn rebellion as the beginning of “modern Vietnamese history”. In Nguyễn Cochinchina (1998), Tana Li describes in detail the beginnings of the Tây Sơn and comes to the conclusion that their rebellion was not a peasant movement but a “provincial revolt”. Both Lockhart and Duiker ( Historical Dictionary of Vietnam , 2006) and Christopher Goscha ( Penguin History of Modern Vietnam , 2016) compare the Tây-Sơn rebellion in terms of its causes and goals, its course, the degree of violence and the significance for the History of the country with the Taiping Rising in China. KW Taylor argues in his overview presentation A History of the Vietnamese (2013) that the Tây-Sơn period was primarily a struggle for dominance over the south of Vietnam, while the former center of power, the north, could only passively follow the events. With the victory of the Nguyễn, Saigon finally rose to the status of a metropolis, while Quy Nhơn never again achieved supra-regional importance.

The only non-Vietnamese-language work to date that illuminates the Tây-Sơn dynasty in detail is, however, The Tây Son Uprising: Society and Rebellion in Eighteenth-Century Vietnam by George E. Dutton , published in 2006 . Dutton analyzes in detail the legitimation of rule of the Tây Son brothers and their relationship to the various social, ethnic, economic and cultural groups of the Vietnamese society of that time. He explains that the reason for the success of the uprising was not the supposed political will of the people, but economic hardship and social turmoil combined with the charisma and personal ambition of the opportunist leaders. The Tây-Son rulers are therefore not national heroes or revolutionaries, but "overrated rebels".

literature

• George Dutton: The Tây Son Uprising: Society and Rebellion in Eighteenth-Century Vietnam , University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu 2006, ISBN 978-0824829841
• KW Taylor : A History of the Vietnamese , Cambridge University Press, 2013, ISBN 978-0521875868 , chapter "The Thirty Years War"
• Ben Kiernan : Viet Nam: A History from Earliest Times to the Present , Oxford University Press, 2017, ISBN 978-0195160765 , chapter "Alternative Unifications: Rebellion and Restoration, 1771-1859"
• Lê Thành Khôi , Otto Karow (editor), Wolfgang Helbich (translator): 3000 Years of Vietnam: Fate and Culture of a Country , Kindler, Munich 1969 (Original edition: Le Viet-Nam. Histoire et Civilization , Éditions de Minuit, Paris 1955), Chapter "The restoration of unity"
• Tana Li: Nguyễn Cochinchina: Southern Vietnam in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries , Cornell University Press, Ithaca NY 1998, ISBN 978-0877277224 , chapter "The Tây Sơn"

Web links

Commons : Tây Sơn dynasty  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Lê Thành Khôi: 3000 Years of Vietnam , p. 248;
   Taylor: A History of the Vietnamese , p. 366;
   Dutton: The Tây Son Uprising , pp. 39, 47
2. ↑ Taylor: A History of the Vietnamese , pp. 365-366;
   Dutton: The Tây Son Uprising , pp. 30-36
3. ↑ Lê Thành Khôi: 3000 Years of Vietnam , pp. 247–248;
   Taylor: A History of the Vietnamese , p. 367;
   Dutton: The Tây Son Uprising , pp. 36, 39-42, 90-93, 199-200
4. ↑ Lê Thành Khôi: 3000 Years of Vietnam , pp. 248–250;
   Taylor: A History of the Vietnamese , pp. 366-370;
   Dutton: The Tây Son Uprising , pp. 40-45, 95
5. ↑ Lê Thành Khôi: 3000 Years of Vietnam , pp. 250-252;
   Taylor: A History of the Vietnamese , pp. 370-374;
   Dutton: The Tây Son Uprising , pp. 44-45
6. ↑ Lê Thành Khôi: 3000 Years of Vietnam , pp. 251-253;
   Taylor: A History of the Vietnamese , pp. 373-375;
   Dutton: The Tây Son Uprising , pp. 45-46
7. ↑ Lê Thành Khôi: 3000 Years of Vietnam , pp. 254-257;
   Taylor: A History of the Vietnamese , pp. 375-376;
   Dutton: The Tây Son Uprising , pp. 46-47, 97-102
8. ^ Taylor: A History of the Vietnamese , p. 396;
   Dutton: The Tây Son Uprising , pp. 47, 102-103
9. ↑ Lê Thành Khôi: 3000 Years of Vietnam , pp. 257-258;
   Taylor: A History of the Vietnamese , pp. 376-377;
   Kiernan: Việt Nam , p. 262;
   Dutton: The Tây Son Uprising , pp. 47, 103-104
10. ↑ Lê Thành Khôi: 3000 Years of Vietnam , pp. 267–270;
    Taylor: A History of the Vietnamese , pp. 376-377;
    Dutton: The Tây Son Uprising , pp. 51-52
11. ↑ Lê Thành Khôi: 3000 Years of Vietnam , p. 258;
    Taylor: A History of the Vietnamese , pp. 377-378;
    Dutton: The Tây Son Uprising , pp. 47-48, 104-105
12. ↑ Lê Thành Khôi: 3000 Years of Vietnam , pp. 259–260;
    Taylor: A History of the Vietnamese , p. 378;
    Dutton: The Tây Son Uprising , pp. 48-49, 105-107
13. ↑ Lê Thành Khôi: 3000 Years of Vietnam , p. 261;
    Taylor: A History of the Vietnamese , pp. 378-379;
    Dutton: The Tây Son Uprising , pp. 49, 108-109
14. ↑ Lê Thành Khôi: 3000 Years of Vietnam , p. 265;
    Taylor: A History of the Vietnamese , p. 380;
    Dutton: The Tây Son Uprising , pp. 113-116
15. ↑ Dutton: The Tây Son Uprising , pp. 109-110
16. ↑ Lê Thành Khôi: 3000 Years of Vietnam , p. 261;
    Taylor: A History of the Vietnamese , p. 380;
    Dutton: The Tây Son Uprising , p. 50
17. ↑ Mayoury Ngaosyvathn, Pheuiphanh Ngaosyvathn: Paths to Conflagration: Fifty Years of Diplomacy and Warfare in Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam, 1778-1828 , SEAP Publications, Cornell University, Ithaca 1998, pp. 65-66, 93-94
18. ↑ Lê Thành Khôi: 3000 Years of Vietnam , p. 265;
    Taylor: A History of the Vietnamese , p. 380;
    Dutton: The Tây Son Uprising , p. 51
19. ↑ Phút Tấn Nguyễn: A Modern History of Viet-nam (1802-1954) , Nhà sách Khai-Trí, Saigon 1964, p. 148
20. ↑ Lê Thành Khôi: 3000 Years of Vietnam , p. 272;
    Taylor: A History of the Vietnamese , p. 388;
    Dutton: The Tây Son Uprising , p. 52
21. ↑ Lê Thành Khôi: 3000 Years of Vietnam , pp. 271–272;
    Taylor: A History of the Vietnamese , pp. 386-389;
    Dutton: The Tây Son Uprising , pp. 53-54
22. ↑ Lê Thành Khôi: 3000 Years of Vietnam , p. 273;
    Taylor: A History of the Vietnamese , pp. 389-390
23. ↑ Lê Thành Khôi: 3000 Years of Vietnam , p. 273
    
24. ↑ Lê Thành Khôi: 3000 Years of Vietnam , pp. 271–275;
    Taylor: A History of the Vietnamese , pp. 386-393;
    Dutton: The Tây Son Uprising , pp. 54-56
25. ↑ Lê Thành Khôi: 3000 Years of Vietnam , p. 275;
    Taylor: A History of the Vietnamese , pp. 393-394
26. ↑ Lê Thành Khôi: 3000 Years of Vietnam , pp. 276–277;
    Taylor: A History of the Vietnamese , pp. 394-395;
    Dutton: The Tây Son Uprising , pp. 230-231
27. ^ Dutton: The Tây Son Uprising , p. 116
28. ^ Dutton: The Tây Son Uprising , pp. 15, 41, 78-82, 143
29. ↑ Dutton: The Tây Son Uprising , pp. 31-32, 42
30. ↑ Dutton: The Tây Son Uprising , pp. 32-33, 80-81
31. ^ Dutton: The Tây Son Uprising , pp. 94, 145
32. ^ Dutton: The Tây Son Uprising , pp. 143-145
33. ^ Dutton: The Tây Son Uprising , pp. 15, 121-122, 143
34. ^ Dutton: The Tây Son Uprising , pp. 94, 124, 146
35. ↑ Lê Thành Khôi: 3000 Years of Vietnam , p. 262
36. ^ Dutton: The Tây Son Uprising , p. 149
37. ^ Dutton: The Tây Son Uprising , pp. 125, 212-213
38. ↑ Lê Thành Khôi: 3000 Years of Vietnam , p. 262;
    Dutton: The Tây Son Uprising , p. 15
39. ↑ Lê Thành Khôi: 3000 Years of Vietnam , p. 262;
    Dutton: The Tây Son Uprising , pp. 15, 146-152;
    Taylor: A History of the Vietnamese , p. 379
40. ↑ Dutton: The Tây Son Uprising , pp. 123-126
41. ↑ Dutton: The Tây Son Uprising , pp. 127-128
42. ↑ Dutton: The Tây Son Uprising , pp. 128-130
43. ↑ Dutton: The Tây Son Uprising , pp. 137-142
44. ↑ Lê Thành Khôi: 3000 Years of Vietnam , p. 264;
    Dutton: The Tây Son Uprising , pp. 15, 121-122, 171;
    Taylor: A History of the Vietnamese , p. 379
45. ↑ Dutton: The Tây Son Uprising , pp. 152-170
46. ↑ Lê Thành Khôi: 3000 Years of Vietnam , p. 264
47. ↑ Kiernan: Việt Nam , p. 257;
    Dutton: The Tây Son Uprising , pp. 90-93, 196-211
48. ↑ In-Sun Yu: Law and Society in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Vietnam , Asiatic Research Center, Korea University, Seoul 1990, p 65
49. ↑ see for example Karen Turner: Bui Thi Xuan . In: Bonnie G. Smith (Ed.): The Oxford Encyclopedia of Women in World History , Volume 1, Oxford University Press, 2008, p. 265
50. ↑ Dutton: The Tây Son Uprising , pp. 60, 63, 69-73
51. ↑ Dutton: The Tây Son Uprising , pp. 39-40, 69, 154-155
52. ↑ Dutton: The Tây Son Uprising , pp. 64-69, 83-84
53. ^ Dutton: The Tây Son Uprising , pp. 53, 59, 141;
    Lê Thành Khôi: 3000 Years of Vietnam , pp. 263–264
54. ↑ Catherine Noppe, Jean-François Hubert: Art of Vietnam , Parkstone International, New York, 2018, p. 144
55. ↑ George Dutton: Reassessing Confucianism in the Tây Sơn regime (1788-1802) . In: South East Asia Research , Vol. 13, No. 2, July 2005, pp. 157-183;
    Dutton: The Tây Son Uprising , pp. 74-78
56. ↑ Dutton: The Tây Son Uprising , pp. 53, 110-113
57. ^ William C. Hannas: Asia's Orthographic Dilemma , University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu 1997, pp. 82-84
58. ↑ Taylor: A History of the Vietnamese , pp. 379-380;
    Lê Thành Khôi: 3000 Years of Vietnam , pp. 262–264;
    Dutton: The Tây Son Uprising , pp. 17, 28, 50, 113
59. ↑ Dutton: The Tây Son Uprising , pp. 175-179
60. ↑ Dutton: The Tây Son Uprising , pp. 179-191
61. ^ Nhung Tuyet Tran, Anthony Reid: Viet Nam: Borderless Histories , University of Wisconsin Press, Madison 2006, p. 203
62. ↑ Alban Butler, Paul Burns: Butler's Lives of the Saints. New full edition. February , Burns & Oates, Tunbridge Wells 1998, p. 23
63. ↑ Dutton: The Tây Son Uprising , pp. 191-196
64. ^ Dutton: The Tây Son Uprising , pp. 219-227. Dutton's illustration is based on Dian H Murray: Pirates of the South China Coast, 1790-1810 , Stanford University Press, 1987.
65. ↑ Lê Thành Khôi: 3000 Years of Vietnam , p. 262
66. ^ Dutton: The Tây Son Uprising , pp. 130-131
67. ↑ Dutton: The Tây Son Uprising , pp. 40-41, 76
68. ↑ Dutton: The Tây Son Uprising , pp. 42-43, 131-132;
    Taylor: A History of the Vietnamese , p. 367
69. ↑ Dutton: The Tây Son Uprising , pp. 42-43;
    Taylor: A History of the Vietnamese , p. 367
70. ↑ Dutton: The Tây Son Uprising , pp. 55-56, 114;
    Lê Thành Khôi: 3000 Years of Vietnam , p. 260
71. ↑ Thomas A. Green: Martial Arts of the World: AQ , ABC-CLIO, Santa Barbara 2001, p. 548
72. ↑ Dutton: The Tây Son Uprising , pp. 45-46
    Taylor: A History of the Vietnamese , pp. 374
73. ^ Dutton: The Tây Son Uprising , p. 132
74. ^ Dutton: The Tây Son Uprising , pp. 132-133
75. ^ Dutton: The Tây Son Uprising , pp. 133-137
76. ↑ Taylor: A History of the Vietnamese , pp. 390-391
77. ^ Trần Trọng Kim : Việt Nam sử lược , 1919/20. Digitized version available in the Internet Archive . The Tây Sơn dynasty is discussed in Chapter XI (pp. 127–166). A family tree can be found on p. 166.
78. ^ Dutton: The Tây Son Uprising , pp. 9-10, 106
79. ^ Dutton: The Tây Son Uprising , pp. 10-13, 57
80. ^ Dutton: The Tây Son Uprising , p. 13
81. ^ Diana Lary: Chinese Migrations: The Movement of People, Goods, and Ideas Over Four Millennia, Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham 2012, p. 75
82. ↑ Louvre : Les Batailles de l'empereur de Chine. Quand l'empereur Qianlong adressait ses commandes d'estampes à Louis XV , press release on the exhibition, February – May 2009
83. ^ Taylor: A History of the Vietnamese , pp. 409-410
84. ↑ Dutton: The Tây Son Uprising , pp. 2-3
85. ^ Dutton: The Tây Son Uprising , pp. 6-9
86. ↑ Bruce M. Lockhart, William J. Duiker, Jon Woronoff (Eds.): Historical Dictionary of Vietnam , Scarecrow Press, Lanham MD 2006, pp. 356-357
87. ↑ Christopher Goscha: The Penguin History of Modern Vietnam , Penguin UK, London 2016, chapter "Civil War and three Vietnams: The Tay Son Rebellion"
88. ↑ Taylor: A History of the Vietnamese , pp. 395-397
89. ^ UCLA Center for Chinese Studies: Overrated Rebels : George Edson Dutton. The Tay Son Uprising: Society and Rebellion in Eighteenth-Century Vietnam. Reviewed for H-War by Eva Goldschmidt, Department of Chinese Studies, University of Heidelberg , November 20, 2007