Tự Đức (Hanoi: [tɯ̂ ɗɯ́k], chữ Hán: 嗣德, lit. 'inheritance of virtues', 22 September 1829 – 19 July 1883) (personal name: Nguyễn Phúc Hồng Nhậm, also Nguyễn Phúc Thì) was the fourth emperor of the Nguyễn dynasty of Vietnam, and the country's last pre-colonial monarch. Ruling for about 36 years from 1847 to 1883, this made him the longest reigning Nguyễn emperor.
Prince Nguyễn Phúc Hồng Nhậm was born on 22 September 1829. He was a son of the emperor Thiệu Trị and succeeded his father as emperor of Vietnam in 1847 as Tự Đức. Family troubles, however, plagued the beginning of his reign. Thiệu Trị had passed over his more moderate eldest son Hồng Bảo, in favour of Tự Đức, known for his staunch Confucianism and opposition to foreigners and innovation. As a result and due to the repressive policies of the previous emperor, there was now a great deal of dissatisfaction with Nguyễn rule and a legitimate royal figure for opposition to rally around.
In summer 1849, one year after Tu Duc's coronation, a cholera epidemic struck Vietnam and Cambodia. Around 600,000 lost their lives according to the royal archives. Military physician O'neill Barrett (1982) and the Vietnamese Ministry of Health (2007) estimated that a total of two million people had been affected during the pandemic. Historian Christopher Goscha suggests the overall death toll of 800,000.
Unusual heavy rainy seasons were recorded during 1847–1861, followed by a period of extremely dry and severe droughts between 1864 and 1889. Typhoons ravaged Tonkin in 1880–1881. A plague of locusts devastated Sơn Tây and Bắc Ninh provinces in 1854.
Conflict with Hồng Bảo and his descendants
As the eldest son of Thiệu Trị, Prince Hồng Bảo was resentful of his brother. He plotted rebellion against Tự Đức with a wide range of supporters: Confucians who were angered that Hồng Bảo as the eldest son had been passed over in favour of Tự Đức, Lê dynasty supporters, corrupt mandarins, Catholic missionaries and Christian converts who had been persecuted by Minh Mạng and Thiệu Trị, and peasants disgruntled with Nguyễn taxation. He never had the chance to rebel however, as he was arrested in 1854 and scheduled to be executed. The dowager empress Từ Dụ advised him against it, and Hồng Bảo killed himself in prison. He was buried simply without a funeral.
In 1866, Hồng Bảo's son Đinh Đạo rebelled against Tự Đức. The rebellion was crushed and Tự Đức ordered Đinh Đạo, his brothers and his mother to be put to death.
Emperor Tự Đức continued the policies of his predecessors, shutting Vietnam off from the outside world and refusing all efforts to modernize the country. Accounts of his personal life show a gentle and educated man, but his policies brought on conflict with Europe that Vietnam could not win. He oppressed all foreigners in Vietnam, especially the Christian community, who had tried to overthrow his grandfather, such as in the Lê Văn Khôi revolt, calling their religion a "perverse doctrine". The Christian mandarin Nguyễn Trường Tộ tried to convince Tự Đức that this was a suicidal policy, but he did not listen, confident that France was too involved with the chaos in Europe in 1848 to respond, but he was mistaken.
It was quite ironic that even during the height of Tu Duc's persecution against Catholic Christians, there were always devout Catholic officials serving in his court, occupied among the high-ranking positions. Among them, Nguyễn Hữu Thơ, an accomplished priest, was sent by Tu Duc to France with another French priest, to plan the creation of a school of "Sciences, and Arts and Crafts" in Hue, but later that project was defied by Tu Duc himself who quickly lost interest in reforms. Another Catholic official, Nguyễn Trường Tộ, had attempted forty-three times to persuade the court of Tu Duc to renovate the kingdom and adopt the changing global order. In 1866 he was sent to Europe on the Vietnamese third mission to recruit technicians and teachers for a Western-style school foundation in Vietnam, but that project was also cancelled in 1867 when France annexed the rest of Cochinchina.
Nguyễn Trường Tộ launched a campaign against the established-Confucian education and thinking in Vietnam. He denounced Confucianism "the evil that has been brought on China and on our country by the Confucian way of life." Concluding "No other country in the world has so irrational a system of education," Nguyễn Trường Tộ advocated for a new, modernized education system followed the European model. Indeed, neither of his proposals was applied.
In 2018 Lê Minh Khải claimed that he found two instances where the Tự Đức Emperor had ordered the Chinese edition of several classic books on science and industry from the West to be read by the mandarins and soldiers of the country. As an example he mentioned the book "Vạn Quốc Công Pháp" (萬國公法), a Chinese translation of The Elements of International Law, first published in 1836 by American lawyer Henry Wheaton, a book noted by many researchers to have made a profound contribution to the ideological transformation of the ruling elites in Qing China and Japan. It is noted that the very slow adoption of the ideas from this work in the Nguyễn dynasty showed how slowly its elites adopted Western ideas and despite learning about Western ideas they proved to be unable or unwilling adopt them or adapt to them.
Invasions by foreign rebels and mercenaries
Northern Vietnam (known as Tonkin by Europeans), had been ravaged by constant cholera epidemic, natural disasters, and famines in the 1840s–1850s, was left barely administrated by the court. The mountainous parts of Tonkin were territories of mainly indigenous Tai-speaking communities, and later Hmong, who were autonomous and lightly submissive in relations with the court of Hue. Rebellion and pirate activities increased. In 1857, Chinese Muslim rebels from Yunnan attacked and occupied areas near Tụ Long mines, Tuyên Quang. Tụ Long was an important mining zone for the Vietnamese economy which depended on copper coins in every transaction.
In 1860, the Chinese Muslim rebels were driven back, but the new White Flag army invaded Tonkin and laid Tụ Long abandoned by 1863, disrupting Vietnamese finance and the opium trade. Threats from the White Flags mounted as violence and anarchy escalated. In 1862, Tu Duc appointed Nguyễn Bá Nghi to fought off the White Flag rebels. The White Flags made a series of devastating raids in Hưng Hóa, Cao Bằng, Thái Nguyên, and lowland Red River Delta, made local governments there dysfunctional. In summer 1865, the White Flags ambushed Vietnamese troops at Tuyên Quang, killing three hundred soldiers. In February 1868, the White Flags seized Lục Yên and chased the Vietnamese away. Unable to defeat the White Flags in conventional warfare, the Vietnamese began to hire Chinese and Tai-Zhuang mercenaries. In 1860, He Junchang, a Chinese opium merchant, had recruited his own personal militia to protect the opium trade from the White Flags. His private army effectively drove the White Flags away from Lào Cai, the main station along Kunming-Hanoi opium trade route.
Liu Yongfu proclaimed the Kingdom of Yanling in Guangxi in 1861. In 1865, after the fall of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, Liu Yongfu fled to China-Vietnam borders and founded the Black Flag Army, consisting of Chinese and Tai-Zhuang militia. The Vietnamese immediately made an alliance with the Black Flags to fight against the White Flags. In 1868, war in Tonkin broke out between the White Flags and the Black Flags, resulting in White Flags defeat and their forces diminished. The Vietnamese now were harboring the Black Flags and benefiting from their good fighting and reputations.
New waves of Chinese rebels invaded Vietnam in form of the Yellow Flag Army, led by Wu Yazhong and later his lieutenant Pan Lunsi. In March 1868, thousands of Yellow Flags crossed the borders and attacking local Vietnamese authorities and raiding grain warehouses in Cao Bằng. The Yellow Flags occupied large territories in Tonkin, and continued their operations until 1885.