User:Howard C. Berkowitz/Sandbox-VNH

While there have been variations in names and borders, the history of Vietnam goes back to prehistoric times. There has been distinct Vietnamese culture, and a sense of ethnicity, going back more than two millenia. Until the 19th century, China attempted to control Vietnam, and then France imposed colonial rule.

Compared with many countries of the same time, it is notable that several of the rebellions, and the leaders afterward, were women, conflicting with the Confucian beliefs of the Chinese. but there have been relatively brief periods of independence:

• 111 BC to 43 AD
• 44 to 543
• 503 to 939
• 1407 to 1427 .

The intervening years involved both domination by, and struggle with, China and France, and, since World War II, a variety of powers engaging in proxy war.

Prehistoric

In the Neolithic Age (New Stone Age), Hoa Binh - Bac Son cultures (about 10,000 BC) had witnessed the development of agriculture and animal husbandry, including even the technique of paddy rice cultivation.

The earliest inhabitants of Vietnam are believed to have migrated from the islands of Indonesia and settled on the edges of the Red River in the Tonkin Delta. The origin of a Vietnamese ethnic identity, called the Lac, is placed in the Red River and Ma River deltas of what became North Vietnam.

Other peoples moved to the lowlands from the mountains. A basic element of the culture appears to have been based on the need to irrigate rice paddies; the idea of communal work to create irrigation systems seems to have evolved very early, not under a strong leader. At the time of Chinese conquest, the "proto-Vietnamese" were effective farmers.

Linguistic research, which offers a relatively reliable way of distinguishing the various ethnic groups of Southeast Asia, supports the mixed ethnic and cultural provenance of the Vietnamese people. Modern linguistics places the origin of Vietnamese in the Austronesian language group on the basis of similarities in morphology and consonant clusters. It is largely this linguistic link that has led scholars to speculate that Austronesians formed at least a part of the Lac population. However, like Tai, Vietnamese evolved away from the Austronesian language group as it acquired tones as part of its phonemic structure. This may have been the consequence of interaction with Chinese languages, to which Vietnamese (again, like Tai) bears some similarity of tones, but it is also possible that elements of tonality and grammar might have been adopted directly from Tai. From the monotonic Mon-Khmer language family, Vietnamese derived its fundamental structure and many of its basic words. Early script—as well as much political, literary, philosophical, and technical vocabulary—again trace to the Chinese, who at that time were more culturally advanced than the peoples of the Red River delta.

Ethnographic study also reveals the degree to which ancient Vietnamese culture combined elements found among many other peoples within the region. Totemism, animism, tattooing, the chewing of betel nuts, teeth blackening, and many marriage rituals and seasonal festivals indicate the relationship between the Vietnamese and the neighbouring peoples in Southeast Asia. Although Chinese civilization later became the main force in shaping Vietnamese culture, the failure of the Chinese to assimilate the Vietnamese people underscores the fact that strong elements of an authentic local culture must have emerged in the Red River valley long before China established its millennium of rule over Vietnam.

Hung Dynasty

According to Vietnamese historical folklore, De Minh, a third generation descendent of Shen Nong, fled to the southern territory of the Five Mounts and married Princess Vu Tien. Their son, Loc Tuc, became king of the south and called himself Kinh Duong Vuong, King of the Kinh and Duong Territory. He married one of the daughters of Dong DinhQuang, a king from the lake of Dong Dinh territory. Their son, Sung Lam, succeeded his father to become Lac Long Quan, .

Vietnam's National Annals tell of the marriage between King Lac Long Quan, the Dragon Lord of the Mighty Seas, and the beautiful Princess Au Co, descendant of the Immortals of the High Mountains, the daughter of King De Lai.

De Minh and an immortal fairy of the mountains produced Kinh Duong, ruler of the Land of Red Demons, who married the daughter of the Dragon Lord of the Sea. Their son, Lac Long Quan (“Dragon Lord of Lac”), was, according to legend, the first truly Vietnamese king.

Their union gave birth to one hundred sons and the Kingdom of Each Viet, whose principalities extended from the lower Yang Tse Kiang to the north of Indochina. The Kingdom prospered, but the Lord of the Dragon and the Princess of the Mountains, convinced that the difference in their origins would always deny them earthly happiness, decided to separate. Half the children returned with their mother to the mountains, the others followed their father and established themselves beside the eastem sea.

The symbolism of Lac Long Quan's descendancy from the Dragon Lord and Au Co from the Immortals, holds significance for the Vietnamese as the Dragon symbolizes yang and Immortal is the symbol for ying. Thus the Vietnamese believe they are the descendents of Tien Pong, the Immortal and the Dragon, and these symbols constitute their earliest totems.

Hung Dynasty

The Vietnamese people represent a fusion of races, languages, and cultures, the elements of which are still being sorted out by ethnologists, linguists, and archaeologists. As was true for most areas of Southeast Asia, the Indochina Peninsula was a crossroads for many migrations of peoples, including speakers of Austronesian, Mon-Khmer, and Tai languages. The Vietnamese language provides some clues to the cultural mixture of the Vietnamese people. Although a separate and distinct language, Vietnamese borrows much of its basic vocabulary from Mon-Khmer, tonality from the Tai languages, and some grammatical features from both Mon-Khmer and Tai. Vietnamese also exhibits some influence from Austronesian languages, as well as large infusions of Chinese literary, political, and philosophical terminology of a later period.

The area now known as Vietnam has been inhabited since Paleolithic times, with some archaeological sites in Thanh Hoa Province reportedly dating back several thousand years. Archaeologists link the beginnings of Vietnamese civilization to the late Neolithic, early Bronze Age, Phung-nguyen culture, which was centered in Vinh Phu Province of contemporary Vietnam from about 2000 to 1400 B.C.. By about 1200 B.C., the development of wet-rice cultivation and bronze casting in the Ma River and Red River plains led to the development of the Dong Son culture, notable for its elaborate bronze drums. The bronze weapons, tools, and drums of Dong Sonian sites show a Southeast Asian influence that indicates an indigenous origin for the bronze-casting technology. Many small, ancient copper mine sites have been found in northern Vietnam. Some of the similarities between the Dong Sonian sites and other Southeast Asian sites include the presence of boat-shaped coffins and burial jars, stilt dwellings, and evidence of the customs of betel-nut-chewing and teeth-blackening.

According to the earliest Vietnamese traditions, the founder of the Vietnamese nation was Hung Vuong, the first ruler of the semilegendary Hung dynasty (2879-258 B.C., mythological dates) of the kingdom of Van Lang. Hung Vuong, in Vietnamese mythology, was the oldest son of Lac Long Quan (Lac Dragon Lord), who came to the Red River Delta from his home in the sea, and Au Co, a Chinese immortal. Lac Long Quan, a Vietnamese cultural hero, is credited with teaching the people how to cultivate rice. The Hung dynasty, which according to tradition ruled Van Lang for eighteen generations, is associated by Vietnamese scholars with Dong Sonian culture. An important aspect of this culture by the sixth century B.C. was the tidal irrigation of rice fields through an elaborate system of canals and dikes. The fields were called Lac fields, and Lac, mentioned in Chinese annals, is the earliest recorded name for the Vietnamese people.

Dong Son culture

In the Bronze Age, a unique and distinct civilization had been formed that reached a high level in technical skill as well as art - the brilliant Dong Son culture.

Tribal Viets inhabiting the Red River delta entered written history when China’s southward expansion reached them in the 3rd century bc. From that time onward, a dominant theme of Vietnam’s history has been interaction with China, the source of most of Vietnam’s high culture. As a tribute-paying state after throwing off Chinese rule in ad 938, Vietnam sent lacquerware, animal skins, ivory, and tropical products to the Chinese emperor and received scrolls on philosophy, administration, and literature in return.

Ancient History (257 BCE-938 CE)

Kingdom of Au Lac (257-208 BCE)

The recent ethnological, historical and archaeological studies and researches have asserted the existence of the Hung Kings' period in Van Lang Kingdom (later Au Lac Kingdom) about 1000 years BC.

The period of Van Lang-Au Lac culture (lasting for nearly 3,000 years up to the end of the first millenium before Christ) in the early Bronze Age with 18 Hung kings was regarded as the first apogee in the history of the Vietnamese culture, which was typified by the Dong Son bronze drum and stable technique of cultivating water rice.

That was Dong Son cultural community. This culture attained a degree of development higher than that of others at that time in the region and had its own characteristics but still bore the features of Southeast Asian culture because of the common South Asian racial root (Southern Mongoloid) and the water rice culture. Different development routes of local cultures in various areas (in the deltas of Hong (Red) river, Ma (Horse) river, Ca river and so on...) joined together to form Dong Son culture. This was also the period of the very "embryonic" state of Vietnam in the form of inter- and super-village community, which come into being and existed in order to resist invaders and to build and maintain dykes for rice cultivation. From this pattern of "embryo" state, primitive tribes grew into nations.

Chinese Feudal Domination with Periods of Independence (111 BCE-939 CE)

From 200 BC to 100AD, many changes took place throughout China, northern Vietnam, and Southeast Asia as peoples migrated, and bases of power shifted and expanded. In China, as the Qin Dynasty lost power to the Han Dynasty in 206 BC, deposed members of the military and government began to trickle into Vietnam's Tonkin or Red River Delta. The people who arrived in this area brought their technology, language, and culture, beginning the Sinicization of Northern Vietnam which continued into the 20th century.

Sinic culture seeped deeply into society, but it shaped the aristocracy and mandarinal families more than it did the peasantry, which preserved distinctive customs, beliefs, vocabulary, lifeways, and gender relations. Modeling themselves on Chinese emperors, Vietnam’s kings exacted tribute from ethnic minorities on the periphery of the Vietnamese state and called themselves emperors when not addressing the Chinese court. Although cultural and spatial gaps between the Vietnamese court and the farthest reaches of society were not as great as they were in China (Vietnam is about the size of a Chinese province, with a comparable population), the Vietnamese state’s capacity to rule diminished with distance from the capital. The refractory character of bamboo-hedged peasant communes was captured in the cliché, "The emperor’s writ stops at the village gate."(Brit)

Northern Vietnam was officially annexed and colonized in 111BC by the Han Dynasty. Chinese historians described the Vietnamese people they encountered as barbarian and uncivilized. The Chinese colonists set out to reform Vietnamese culture along Chinese lines but village life did not change substantially. At first, the Chinese only established trading centers so they could conduct business from the coast of Vietnam. In about 100BC two Chinese-run prefectures, Giao Chi and Cuu Chan, were established in the Au Lac Kingdom in the Tonkin Delta.

Han Conquest

"In 111 B.C., the victorious Han crushed the young Vietnamese state, and save for a few brief but glorious rebellions, it remained a Chinese colony for more than 1,000 years.

"Viet-Nam became a Chinese protectorate ruled by a governor and subdivided into military districts. By the beginning of the first century A.D., the country had absorbed along with many Chinese settlers – a great many of them the refugees from the Han dysnaty – much of what was worthwhile in the culture of the occupying power: the difficult art of rice planting in artificially irrigated areas, Chinese writing skills. Chinese philosophy, and even Chinese social customs and beliefs. But – and in this the Vietnamese are unique – they succeeded in maintaining their national identity in spite of the fact that everything else about them had become “Chinese.”

Au Lac

In 200 BC, the Au Lac Kingdom was invaded and annexed into the giant empire of the Han feudalism in the north. Nevertheless, the ten-century domination of Chinese feudalism could not assimilate Vietnamese culture and break the Viet people's brave resistance.

a common view is that Vietnam hd a fairly large cultural community, formed around the first half of the first millenium before Christ and flourished in the middle of the next millenium.

The aristocracy of the Au Lac kingdom, the Lac Lords, initially accepted the Chinese and worked with them. They looked to the Chinese to help them in maintaining power over their own kingdoms. Unfortunately, this resulted in a loss of respect for the Vietnamese lords by their own people. The Vietnamese peasants turned to their own extended families for protection against the excesses of the Chinese and their rulers. Chinese colonization and pressure increased with the collapse of the Western Han Dynasty in 9AD which caused a large migration of Chinese aristocrats into Southern China and later into Vietnam. There was a massive immigration of scholars, officers, and wealthy Chinese and many local rulers were replaced by Chinese officials. Some of these officials married into the Vietnamese aristocracy, creating what became a major force in Vietnam-an educated class of Sino-Vietnamese, or people of mixed Chinese and Vietnamese origin. Chinese immigrants built schools and temples, and ordered the construction of major networks of canals, dikes, road ways, and bridges to facilitate the production of rice and the movement of people and natural resources. Gradually the Chinese population of the Tonkin Delta grew, and the two original prefectures were divided into seven, with Chinese prefects appointed for each area. In addition, soldiers from the Han Dynasty were granted land by the Chinese government and began to take up farming in Vietnamese villages.

Rebellion of 39 AD

Over time, Chinese authority consolidated and played more and more of a role in daily life. The Vietnamese maintained their identity and felt they were occupied by the Chinese.

In 39 AD, the execution of a fairly minor Vietnamese feudal official triggered an uprising. The uprising was led by his widow, Trung Tac, and her sister, Trung Nhi. The two women have becoome epic characters in Vietnamese culture, known as the Two Trung Ladies or the [Two] Trung Sisters. The 1,968th anniversary of their exploits was recently celebrated in Hanoi

The women raised an army that quickly besieged and overpowered Chinese garrisons, and was in control within a year. "In 40 A.D., the Vietnamese, much to their surprise, found themselves free from foreign domination for the first time in 150 years and the Trung sisters were proclaimed queens of the country." During this time, Trung Trac proclaimed herself queen, re-established the original tax system and took steps to alleviate the poverty of the peasants.

Given the communications and transportation of the time, the Chinese could not respond quickly, but they did in the year 43, led by General Ma Yuan. "the Vietnamese troops of the two queens made a fatal error: They chose to make a stand in the open field against the experienced Chinese regulars, with their backs against the limestone cliffs at the edge of the river Day – not far from the place where General Vo Nguyen Giap was to pit his green regulars against French Marshal de Lattre’s elite troops 1,908 years later.

The result was the same in both cases: The more experienced regulars destroyed the raw Vietnamese levies. Accounts differ, but the Vietnamese tradition is that the Trung systems drowned themselves rather than surrender, while the Chinese claim they were killed. They are still venerated in Vietnam; the 1968th anniversary of their act was recently celebrated.

The Chinese returned with much stronger control, and attempted to make Vietnam a place of Chinese, not Vietnamese culture. They remained in strong control for approximately two centuries.

Rebellion of 248 AD

Another rebellion against the Chinese, in 248 A.D., also led by a woman, Trieu Au, collapsed almost immediately, and like the Trung sisters, Trieu Au committed suicide. Trieu Au, enlisted the help of the Chams from central Vietnam. The Cham are matriarchal and have an Indian-influenced culture. Aided by elephants trained in warfare, led a short rebellion. Chinese Confucianism put women in a subordinate position, which would have clashed with the Cham culture.

She is reported to have said:

I want to ride the stormy sea, subdue its treacherous waves, kill the sharks of the ocean, drive out the aggressors and repossess our land, undo the ties of tyranny and never bend my back to be the concubine of any man — Trieu Au

Southern and Northern Dynasties 420–589

544-547

In the early 6th century AD, Chinese supervision over Vietnam relaxed somewhat due to the peaceful nature of the Chinese Emperor Wu who was a devout Buddhist and a patron of the arts. Freed from tight oversight, His lenience led to high levels of political infighting in China while in Vietnam local Chinese leaders, who no longer worried about supervision from China, were able to accumulate power. The misuse of this power led to a revolt against the tyrannical Chinese governor by Ly Bon, of Sino-Vietnamese ancestry.

In 542, Ly Bon defeated the Chinese and established his own kingdom, and ruled from 544 to 547 when the Chinese retook the areas. His followers continued to oppose Chinese rule with sporadic guerilla tactics until 603 when the Sui Dynasty (589-618) gained control in China and Vietnam. At that time, a new Vietnamese capital was established in present-day Hanoi, then known as Tong-binh.

Annam

With the rise of the strong Tang dynasty in China after 618 resistance became hopeless: Viet-Nam became the Chinese Protectorate General of the "Pacified South" or "Annam" a symbol of humiliation and defeat, that the region was to become best known to the outside world.

Tang domination

In 618 the Tang Dynasty gained control of China and of Northern Vietnam, changing the name of the country to Annam (Pacified South) in 679 to reflect its status as a part of Southern China. During the T'ang period, a number of individuals tried to revolt against this new and more intrusive government.

In 687, Ly Tu Tien and Dinh Kien led an insurrection. In 722, Mai Thuc Loan, also known as the Black Emperor, attempted to become emperor of Vietnam. With the help of Vietnamese neighbors, the Khmers and Chams, he was able to capture the capital for a short time.

Further rebellions were started by Phung Hung during the period from 767 to 791 and Duong Thanh in 819 to 820. These rebellions preceded a period of anarchy which occurred both in China and Vietnam in the 10th century with the weakening of the Tang dynasty in the latter part of the eighth century

In the later half of the eighth century, the rule of the Tang dynasty in Vietnam began to weaken. Taking advantage of this opportunity, Phung Hung, the head of Duong Lam, now part of Ha Tay province, captured the Tong Binh citadel (Hanoi) and regained sovereignty for the country. After Phung Hung’s death, his son honoured him as Father - the Great Emperor, and temples to worship him were built in a number of places such as Quang Ba (Hanoi), Trieu Khuc (Ha Tay), and others.

Medieval History (939-1427)

With the decline of the Tangs, Viet-Nam’s chances for freedom rose again. A rash of rebellions in 938 led to the defeat of the Chinese the following year. By 940, the Vietnamese were in full control of their country from the foothills of Yunnan to the 17th parallel

The most successful of these many rebellions was that of Ngo Quyen, who defeated the Chinese army in 939, proclaimed himself king, and established the capital of Vietnam at Co Loa. After his death in 944, anarchy and civil war broke out in Vietnam, but the Chinese army was neither strong enough nor quick enough to retake the country. During the following 900 years Vietnam enjoyed a measure of political independence although Chinese thought and culture continued to play an important role in Vietnamese lifestyle and politics. This produced a unique blend of Chinese and Vietnamese cultures which shaped both traditional and modern Vietnam

Ming domination (1407-1427)=

brief period from 1407 to 1427. Having secured their rear areas, the Vietnamese now could address themselves to their major historical mission - securing Lebensraum for their teeming agricultural population in the relatively empty deltas to the south of their boundary. ===Kingdom of Champa (192-1471) But to the south lay the Indianized kingdom of Champa."

This led to much discontent on the part of the Vietnamese villagers who made up the majority of the population. This discontent periodically grew and shrunk over the next 700 years, frequently erupting into major rebellions as peasants found their land allotments shrinking and their taxes increasing Eager Chinese immigrants were happy to buy up land on which the Vietnamese peasants could no longer pay taxes. Poor government and natural disasters added to the peasant suffering.

In the later half of the eighth century, the rule of the Tang dynasty in Vietnam began to weaken. 

(Brit) The first and shorter division of the country occurred soon after the elimination of Champa. The Mac family, led by Mac Dang Dung, the governor of Thang Long (Hanoi), made themselves masters of Dai Viet in 1527. The deposed Le rulers and the generals loyal to them regained control of the lands south of the Red River delta in 1545, but only after nearly 50 years of civil war were they able to reconquer Thang Long and the north.

Furing this period, Vietnam as a nation had to ceaselessly fought against the vicious conquering conspiracies of Chinese and Mongolian feudal empires. Vietnam became stronger, all its ethnic groups became more united and the country moved into a new prosperous period after each struggle.

Dong Son culture which was enriched by the influence of Chinese culture developed from centuries to centuries in a framework of an independent state. Buddhism and Confucianism entered Dai Viet and brought with them many popular cultural features and distinct forms. Nonetheless, Vietnam still preserved its own language and a highly developed agricultural civilization.

Dai Viet "Great Vietnam") 10th Century

In the 10th century AD, the Vietnamese had won their freedom and built up an independent state named Dai Viet. The country was under the ruling of many national feudal dynasties, among which the most important ones are the

Ly Dynasty (11th and 12th century)

Resisted invasion by the Song

Tran Dynasty (13th and 14th century

Yuan or the Mongols (13th century)

Le Dynasty (15th, 16th and 17th century)

ith their centralized administration, strong army forces and a highly developed economy and culture.

Tay Son (1771-1802)

In the 17th and 18th century, feudalism in Vietnam was considerably weakened. Peasants ceaselessly rose up in revolts that led to the Tay Son movement (1771-1802). Tay Son overthrew all regional feudal lordship that divided the country into two parts, united the country and chased away the Qing (Manchus) invaders from China, simultaneously implemented many social and cultural reforms. However, with foreign aid, Nguyen Anh soon took over the ruling power and the Nguyen Dynasty was established, which was the last royal dynasty in Vietnam.

Colonization by France

By 1857 Louis-Napoleon had been persuaded that invasion was the best course of action, and French warships were instructed to take Tourane without any further efforts to negotiate with the Vietnamese. In 1858, France invaded Vietnam, and the ruling Nguyen dynasty accepted protectorate status.

Tourane was captured in late 1858 and Gia Dinh (Saigon and later Ho Chi Minh City) in early 1859. In both cases Vietnamese Christian support for the French, predicted by the missionaries, failed to materialize. Vietnamese resistance and outbreaks of cholera and typhoid forced the French to abandon Tourane in early 1860.

Still, France believed control of Indochina was necessary, if only to prevent the British from conquering it; Vietnamese autonomy was not a consideration.

On early 1861, a French fleet of 70 ships and 3,500 men reinforced Gia Dinh and, in a series of bloody battles, gained control of the surrounding provinces. In June 1862, Emperor Tu Duc, signed the Treaty of Saigon agreeing to French demands for the cession of three provinces around Gia Dinh (which the French had renamed Saigon), as well as for the opening of three ports to trade, free passage of French warships up the Mekong to Cambodia, freedom of action for the missionaries, and payment of a large indemnity to France for its losses in attacking Vietnam.

The French navy was in the forefront of the conquest of Indochina. In 1863 Admiral de la Grandiere, the governor of Cochinchina (as the French renamed Nam Bo), forced the Cambodian king to accept a French protectorate over that country, claiming that the Treaty of Saigon had made France heir to Vietnamese claims in Cambodia. In June 1867, the admiral completed the annexation of Cochinchina by seizing the remaining three western provinces. The following month, the Siamese government agreed to recognize a French protectorate over Cambodia in return for the cession of two Cambodian provinces, Angkor and Battambang, to Siam. With Cochinchina secured, French naval and mercantile interests turned to Tonkin (as the French referred to Bac Bo).

The 1873 storming of the citadel of Hanoi, led by French naval officer Francis Garnier, had the desired effect of forcing Tu Duc to sign a treaty with France in March 1874 that recognized France's "full and entire sovereignty" over Cochinchina, and opened the Red River to commerce. In an attempt to secure Tonkin, Garnier was killed and his forces defeated in a battle with Vietnamese regulars and Black Flag forces. The latter were Chinese soldiers, who had fled south following the Taiping Rebellion in that country and had been hired by the Hue court to keep order in Tonkin.

, giving France control by 1884.

Rise of Nationalism (Brit)

A new national movement arose in the early 20th century. Its most prominent spokesman was Phan Boi Chau, with whose rise the old traditionalist opposition gave way to a modern nationalist leadership that rejected French rule but not Western ideas, science, and technology. In 1905 Chau went to Japan. His plan, mildly encouraged by some Japanese statesmen, was to free Vietnam with Japanese help. Chau smuggled hundreds of young Vietnamese into Japan, where they studied the sciences and underwent training for clandestine organization, political propaganda, and terrorist action.

The anticolonial movement in Vietnam can be said to have started with the establishment of French rule. Many local officials of Cochinchina refused to collaborate with the French. Some led guerrilla groups, composed of the remnants of the defeated armies, in attacks on French outposts. A much broader resistance movement developed in Annam in 1885, led by the great scholar Phan Dinh Phung, whose rebellion collapsed only after his death in 1895.

The main characteristic of the national movement during this first phase of resistance, however, was its political orientation toward the past. Filled with ideas of precolonial Vietnam, its leaders wanted to be rid of the French in order to reestablish the old imperial order. Because this aspiration had little meaning for the generation that came to maturity after 1900, this first stage of anticolonial resistance did not survive the death of its leader.

Inspired by Chau’s writings, nationalist intellectuals in Hanoi opened the Free School of Tonkin in 1907, which soon became a centre of anti-French agitation and consequently was suppressed after a few months. Also, under the inspiration and guidance of Chau’s followers, mass demonstrations demanding a reduction of high taxes took place in many cities in 1908. Hundreds of demonstrators and suspected organizers were arrested—some were condemned to death, while others were sent to Con Son Island in the South China Sea, which the French turned into a penal camp for Vietnamese nationalists.

Phan Boi Chau went to China in 1910, where a revolution had broken out against the Qing (Manchu) dynasty. There he set up a republican government-in-exile to attract the support of nationalist groups. After the French arranged his arrest and imprisonment in China (1914–17), however, his movement began to decline. In 1925 Chau was seized by French agents in Shanghai and brought back to Vietnam for trial; he died under house arrest in 1940.

After World War I the movement for national liberation intensified. A number of prominent intellectuals sought to achieve reforms by obtaining political concessions from the colonial regime through collaboration with the French. The failure of such reformist efforts led to a revival of clandestine and revolutionary groups, especially in Annam and Tonkin; among these was the Vietnamese Nationalist Party (Viet Nam Quoc Dan Dang, founded in 1927 and usually referred to as the VNQDD). The VNQDD preached terrorist action and penetrated the garrisons of indigenous troops with a plan to oust the French in a military uprising. On the night of Feb. 9–10, 1930, the troops of one garrison in Tonkin killed their French officers, but they were overwhelmed a day later and summarily executed. A wave of repression followed that took hundreds of lives and sent thousands to prison camps. The VNQDD was virtually destroyed, and for the next 15 years it existed mainly as a group of exiles in China supported by the Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang).

Britannica

MLA Style:

"Vietnam." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2008. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 11 Jul. 2008 <http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/628349/Vietnam>.

Of much longer duration and greater historical significance was the second division of Dai Viet, which occurred about 1620, when the noble Nguyen family, who had governed the country’s growing southern provinces from Hue since 1558, rejected Thang Long’s suzerainty. After the country was reunited following its first division, the Le monarchs in Thang Long were rulers in name only; all real power was in the hands of the Trinh family, who had made themselves hereditary princes in charge of the government. For 50 years the Trinh rulers tried in vain to regain control of the southern half of the kingdom by military means. The failure of their last campaign in 1673 was followed by a 100-year truce, during which both the Nguyen and the Trinh paid lip service to Vietnamese unity under the Le dynasty but maintained separate governments in the two halves of the country.

Unity was reestablished only after a 30-year period of revolution, political chaos, and civil war (1772–1802). Although the revolution started in the south, it was directed against the ruling houses of both south and north. It was led by three brothers, whose name in history—Tay Son—was that of their native village. The Tay Sons overthrew the southern regime in 1777 and killed the ruling family. While the Tay Sons waged war against the north, one member of the southern royal family—Nguyen Anh, who had escaped the massacre—regained control of Saigon and the deep south in 1778, but he was driven out again by the Tay Sons in 1783. When the Tay Sons also defeated the Trinh in 1786 and occupied Thang Long, Dai Viet was briefly reunited under Tay Son rule. In 1788 the Chinese tried to exploit the Vietnamese crisis, but the Tay Son rulers—who had abolished the Later Le dynasty—were able to defeat the Chinese invaders. During that same year, however, Nguyen Anh succeeded, with French military assistance, in occupying Saigon and the Mekong delta. In a series of campaigns that lasted 14 years, Nguyen Anh defeated the Tay Sons and gained control of the entire kingdom. When Hue and Thang Long fell to his armies in 1802, he proclaimed himself emperor, under the name Gia Long, of a reunited Da Viet, which he renamed Vietnam. History » State and society in precolonial Vietnam

The rule of Gia Long and his successors until the conquest of Vietnam by France in the late 19th century brought no innovations in the organization of the state, the basic character of which had already been firmly established by the Ly emperors during the 11th century. The Ly rulers had successfully fought the revival of local feudalism, which was rooted in the powers exercised by tribal chiefs before the coming of the Chinese. From the 11th century, Dai Viet remained a centralized kingdom headed by a monarch whose absolute powers were said to derive from a mandate from heaven—one aspect of the thoroughly Confucian character of the Vietnamese state. The Ly rulers, following the Chinese model, established a fixed hierarchy with a ranking system of nine grades for all public officials. Mandarins assigned to civil and military positions were appointed by the emperor and were responsible only to him. All mandarins—those at the very top at the imperial court as well as those in the lowest ranks of the provincial and local administration—were recruited and assigned to one of the nine grades in the official hierarchy in only one way: through civil service examinations taken after years of study. As a rule, only the wealthy could spend the time required for these studies. Nevertheless, except in periods of dynastic decline when offices were sometimes for sale, the road to positions of power was through scholarship, not wealth.

The concept of a division of powers was alien to the precolonial rulers. The emperor, with the help of high court mandarins, was not only the supreme lawmaker and head of all civil and military institutions but also the dispenser of justice in both criminal and civil cases, and he delegated his powers to the hierarchy of mandarins in the provinces and villages. Even public functions of a religious character were the sole prerogative of the emperor and his representatives at the lower levels of the administration. No military caste ever exercised control over the state, no religious hierarchy existed outside the mandarins, and no aristocracy with political influence was allowed to arise. Titles of nobility, bestowed as honours, were not hereditary.

The economic policies of the great Vietnamese dynasties also favoured the maintenance of imperial and mandarin power. Through the 900 years of independence, from the end of Chinese domination until the beginning of French colonial rule, the Vietnamese economy remained almost exclusively agricultural. Artisan and fishing villages existed, and there was some mining; but the mass of people were engaged in the cultivation of rice, and neither domestic nor international trade was systematically promoted. No property-owning middle class of merchants ever threatened the authority of the scholar mandarins, and the rising power of great landowners was periodically diminished through the redistribution of land. Gia Long and his successor, Minh Mang, actually abolished all huge landholdings during the first half of the 19th century. Theoretically, the emperor owned all the land, and it was by imperial decree that the settlers on newly conquered territories received their plots in the villages that sprang up from the Red River delta south to the Mekong delta.

Vietnam’s rigid absolutism was limited to a certain extent by the importance given to the family in accordance with the Confucian concept that the family is the basic unit of civilized society; submission to the authority of the family head thus was the foremost moral obligation of every citizen, even more important than obedience to the ruler. The autocratic character of society was also eased slightly by the limited authority granted to the village administration; local affairs were handled by a council of notables elected, as a rule, from the more prosperous or otherwise prominent citizens. Among the duties of these notables were the enforcement of law, the conscription of army and forced-labour recruits, and the assessment of taxes. Next to devotion to family, loyalty to the village was the duty of every Vietnamese. History » Colonial Vietnam » French administration

The French now moved to impose a Western-style administration on their colonial territories and to open them to economic exploitation. Under Gov.-Gen. Paul Doumer, who arrived in 1897, French rule was imposed directly at all levels of administration, leaving the Vietnamese bureaucracy without any real power. Even Vietnamese emperors were deposed at will and replaced by others willing to serve the French. All important positions within the bureaucracy were staffed with officials imported from France; even in the 1930s, after several periods of reforms and concessions to local nationalist sentiment, Vietnamese officials were employed only in minor positions and at very low salaries, and the country was still administered along the lines laid down by Doumer.

Doumer’s economic and social policies also determined, for the entire period of French rule, the development of French Indochina, as the colony became known in the 20th century. The railroads, highways, harbours, bridges, canals, and other public works built by the French were almost all started under Doumer, whose aim was a rapid and systematic exploitation of Indochina’s potential wealth for the benefit of France; Vietnam was to become a source of raw materials and a market for tariff-protected goods produced by French industries. The exploitation of natural resources for direct export was the chief purpose of all French investments, with rice, coal, rare minerals, and later also rubber as the main products. Doumer and his successors up to the eve of World War II were not interested in promoting industry there, the development of which was limited to the production of goods for immediate local consumption. Among these enterprises—located chiefly in Saigon, Hanoi, and Haiphong (the outport for Hanoi)—were breweries, distilleries, small sugar refineries, rice and paper mills, and glass and cement factories. The greatest industrial establishment was a textile factory at Nam Dinh, which employed more than 5,000 workers. The total number of workers employed by all industries and mines in Vietnam was some 100,000 in 1930. Because the aim of all investments was not the systematic economic development of the colony but the attainment of immediate high returns for investors, only a small fraction of the profits was reinvested. History » Colonial Vietnam » Effects of French colonial rule

Whatever economic progress Vietnam made under the French after 1900 benefited only the French and the small class of wealthy Vietnamese created by the colonial regime. The masses of the Vietnamese people were deprived of such benefits by the social policies inaugurated by Doumer and maintained even by his more liberal successors, such as Paul Beau (1902–07), Albert Sarraut (1911–14 and 1917–19), and Alexandre Varenne (1925–28). Through the construction of irrigation works, chiefly in the Mekong delta, the area of land devoted to rice cultivation quadrupled between 1880 and 1930. During the same period, however, the individual peasant’s rice consumption decreased without the substitution of other foods. The new lands were not distributed among the landless and the peasants but were sold to the highest bidder or given away at nominal prices to Vietnamese collaborators and French speculators. These policies created a new class of Vietnamese landlords and a class of landless tenants who worked the fields of the landlords for rents of up to 60 percent of the crop, which was sold by the landlords at the Saigon export market. The mounting export figures for rice resulted not only from the increase in cultivable land but also from the growing exploitation of the peasantry.

The peasants who owned their land were rarely better off than the landless tenants. The peasants’ share of the price of rice sold at the Saigon export market was less than 25 percent. Peasants continually lost their land to the large owners because they were unable to repay loans given them by the landlords and other moneylenders at exorbitant interest rates. As a result, the large landowners of Cochinchina (less than 3 percent of the total number of landowners) owned 45 percent of the land, while the small peasants (who accounted for about 70 percent of the owners) owned only about 15 percent of the land. The number of landless families in Vietnam before World War II was estimated at half of the population.

The peasants’ share of the crop—after the landlords, the moneylenders, and the middlemen (mostly Chinese) between producer and exporter had taken their share—was still more drastically reduced by the direct and indirect taxes the French had imposed to finance their ambitious program of public works. Other ways of making the Vietnamese pay for the projects undertaken for the benefit of the French were the recruitment of forced labour for public works and the absence of any protection against exploitation in the mines and rubber plantations, although the scandalous working conditions, the low salaries, and the lack of medical care were frequently attacked in the French Chamber of Deputies in Paris. The mild social legislation decreed in the late 1920s was never adequately enforced.

Apologists for the colonial regime claimed that French rule led to vast improvements in medical care, education, transport, and communications. The statistics kept by the French, however, appear to cast doubt on such assertions. In 1939, for example, no more than 15 percent of all school-age children received any kind of schooling, and about 80 percent of the population was illiterate, in contrast to precolonial times when the majority of the people possessed some degree of literacy. With its more than 20 million inhabitants in 1939, Vietnam had but one university, with fewer than 700 students. Only a small number of Vietnamese children were admitted to the lycées (secondary schools) for the children of the French. Medical care was well organized for the French in the cities, but in 1939 there were only 2 physicians for every 100,000 Vietnamese, compared with 76 per 100,000 in Japan and 25 per 100,000 in the Philippines.

Two other aspects of French colonial policy are significant when considering the attitude of the Vietnamese people, especially their educated minority, toward the colonial regime: one was the absence of any kind of civil liberties for the native population, and the other was the exclusion of the Vietnamese from the modern sector of the economy, especially industry and trade. Not only were rubber plantations, mines, and industrial enterprises in foreign hands—French, where the business was substantial, and Chinese at the lower levels—but all other business was as well, from local trade to the great export-import houses. The social consequence of this policy was that, apart from the landlords, no property-owning indigenous middle class developed in colonial Vietnam. Thus, capitalism appeared to the Vietnamese to be a part of foreign rule; this view, together with the lack of any Vietnamese participation in government, profoundly influenced the nature and orientation of the national resistance movements.