Unification
The Nguyen lords had ruled southern Vietnam from Hue since the sixteenth century. The Tay Son rebellion destroyed their power in the 1770s, and a surviving prince, Nguyen Anh, fought for decades to recover it, with help from French volunteers recruited by the missionary bishop Pigneau de Behaine. He took Hue in 1801 and Hanoi in 1802, and proclaimed himself emperor as Gia Long, ruling for the first time a Vietnam stretching from the Chinese border to the Gulf of Siam. The country took the name Viet Nam in 1804.
The Hue court
Gia Long and his son Minh Mang built a centralised state on Chinese models, with a Confucian bureaucracy recruited by examination, a legal code based on that of Qing China, and a great walled capital at Hue, with an imperial city modelled on the Forbidden City in Beijing. Minh Mang extended Vietnamese control over Cambodia in the 1830s, until a revolt forced withdrawal, and treated the Christian missionaries and converts as a threat, executing several priests. His successors continued the restrictions.
The French conquest
In 1858 a French and Spanish force attacked Da Nang, citing the persecution of Christians. The French took Saigon in 1859, and by the treaty of 1862 Emperor Tu Duc ceded three southern provinces; France took the rest of the south, Cochinchina, in 1867 and made it a colony. In the 1880s France turned north. After fighting in Tonkin and a war with China, which claimed overlordship, the treaties of 1883 and 1884 made Annam, central Vietnam, and Tonkin, the north, French protectorates. In 1885 the young emperor Ham Nghi fled the capital and called for resistance, the Can Vuong movement, which continued for some years.
The protected monarchy
The Nguyen emperors continued to reign at Hue under French control, as part of French Indochina, with little power. Some were deposed for opposing the French. The last emperor, Bao Dai, abdicated in August 1945 in favour of the Viet Minh government of Ho Chi Minh; he later returned as head of a French-backed state from 1949 to 1955. The citadel and monuments of Hue, including the tombs of the emperors set in landscaped grounds along the Perfume River, were inscribed by UNESCO in 1993.
Further reading
- Coedes, George. The Indianized States of Southeast Asia. University of Hawaii Press, 1968
- Kulke, Hermann. A History of India. Routledge, 2004
- Metcalf, Barbara D. A Concise History of Modern India. Cambridge University Press, 2012
See also
- Dai Viet — Dai Viet, "Great Viet", was the name of the Vietnamese state from the eleventh century until the early nineteenth, used under the Ly, Tran and Le dynasties, which expanded south at the expense of Champa and the Khmer.
- French Indochina — French Indochina was the federation of French colonial territories in mainland Southeast Asia, formed in 1887 from Cochinchina, Annam, Tonkin and Cambodia, with Laos added in 1893, which lasted until the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu and the Geneva accords of 1954.
- Khmer Empire — The Khmer Empire was a Southeast Asian state centered on Angkor in present-day Cambodia that flourished from 802 to 1431 CE, building its political and religious order on Indian Hindu and, later, Buddhist models.
This entry was last revised on 12 November 2026.