The southward advance, the Tây Sơn and the Nguyễn dynasty
After two centuries of division and the Tây Sơn rebellion, Gia Long unifies a newly long country, names it Việt Nam and rules from Huế.
- A History of the Vietnamese — K. W. Taylor, Cambridge University Press (2013)
- Vietnam and the Chinese Model: A Comparative Study of Vietnamese and Chinese Government in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century — Alexander Woodside, Harvard University Press (1971)
- Vietnam: A New History — Christopher Goscha, Basic Books (2016)
From the sixteenth century, nominal Lê emperors were puppets while two rival families held real power: the Trịnh lords in the north and the Nguyễn lords in the south. They fought for decades in the seventeenth century, and the Nguyễn pushed steadily south, settling the lands of the Cham and, by the end of the 1600s, the Khmer territory around Prey Nokor, which became Saigon. This Nam tiến (“southward advance”) made the country long and regionally diverse.
- A History of the Vietnamese — K. W. Taylor, Cambridge University Press (2013)
- Vietnam: A New History — Christopher Goscha, Basic Books (2016)
In 1771 three brothers from Tây Sơn in central Vietnam launched a rebellion that toppled both the Nguyễn and the Trịnh. One brother, Nguyễn Huệ, crowned himself Emperor Quang Trung and in 1789 routed an invading Qing Chinese army near Hanoi during the Tết holiday, a victory still celebrated. But a surviving Nguyễn prince, Nguyễn Ánh, helped by a French bishop and a few French volunteers, defeated the Tây Sơn and in 1802 proclaimed himself Emperor Gia Long. In 1804 the country took the name Việt Nam.
- A History of the Vietnamese — K. W. Taylor, Cambridge University Press (2013)
- Việt Nam: A History from Earliest Times to the Present — Ben Kiernan, Oxford University Press (2017)
The Nguyễn built a Confucian bureaucratic state modelled on Qing China, with its capital at Huế. Emperor Minh Mạng (r. 1820–41) persecuted Catholic missionaries and converts, which later gave France a pretext to intervene.
- Vietnam and the Chinese Model: A Comparative Study of Vietnamese and Chinese Government in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century — Alexander Woodside, Harvard University Press (1971)
- Vietnam: A New History — Christopher Goscha, Basic Books (2016)
Why it matters today
The Nguyễn created the shape of modern Vietnam, from the Chinese border to the Mekong Delta, and its name. Their legacy is mixed: Huế's citadel and tombs are treasured, but the dynasty is also blamed in official history for inviting French help and then losing the country to France. The Tây Sơn hero Quang Trung is far more celebrated.