Nguyễn Công Trứ (1778–1858) was among the more distinctive Vietnamese figures in the first half of the nineteenth century. He is most widely known as the author of poems that, in the words of one of his translators, Huỳnh Sanh Thông, reflect ‘two opposite facets of a rich personality: a heroic sense of duty and achievement and a hedonistic zest for life’.Footnote 2 Trứ is also known for the songs he wrote to be sung in the ca trù mode, a distinctive form of Vietnamese music that was fashionable in northern Vietnam during his lifetime. This tells us that he fully participated in the cultural life of his time, of his place, and of his social position as an educated northern Vietnamese. At the same time, despite coming from a family of educated people, he grew up in poverty, so there is an interesting feature of his oeuvre that reflects the confidence of a marginal man who has pushed his way into the centre of literary and artistic attention by the force of his own will.
In addition to his literary and musical achievements, he is also known for his administrative and military accomplishments during the 28 years (1820–1848) of his career in Nguyễn dynasty officialdom. Of these achievements, he is most famed for reclaiming land and organising villages with erstwhile landless peasants in the region where the Hồng (Red) River meets the sea. Inhabitants of this region made him a tutelary deity. He also excelled in leading soldiers to suppress rebellions and to fight Siamese armies in Cambodia; most of his career was taken up with this kind of work. But another feature of his public life that is well known is that several times he was demoted for ostensible infractions of the mandarin code of conduct; and this is generally presumed to be a result of his headstrong personality — yet the fact that he always bounced back up to higher office is taken as an indication of his intelligence and ability to surmount the discontents of officialdom.
Most studies of Trứ focus upon his poetry, including songs written for ca trù; some also describe or comment upon his career in officialdom.Footnote 3 In this essay, I aim to provide an indication of the rich materials available for the study of government in early nineteenth-century Vietnam by way of discussing Trứ's early career up through his first demotion in 1831. What I aim to demonstrate is that the Nguyễn court of Minh Mạng (r. 1820–1840) was an arena of personalities competing for advancement, of efforts to push down those whose talent thwarted conformity, and of a king who, like his father but unlike his successors, was an expert at reading his subordinates and knowing how to use them.
This study is primarily based upon the Đại Nam Thực Lục (True records of the Great South), the Nguyễn dynastic chronicle that was compiled over a period of decades beginning in the 1840s, and that achieved its final form in 1909.Footnote 4 It contains summaries of matters that came before the court, dialogues between the king and his advisers, and information about public events. Another important documentary source is the Đại Nam Liệt Truyện (Biographies of the Great South), compiled beginning in the 1840s and completed in 1905; it contains biographies of royalty, officials, rebels, and other personalities.Footnote 5 There are also anthologies and genealogical records that will be referred to in context.
Trứ lived under the first dynastic regime to govern both the northern and the southern realms of modern Vietnam. This introduced a regional dimension to Vietnamese government, a dimension that produced both creative engagement and resentful animosity; during his lifetime, Trứ experienced both of these tensions.
Northerners during the Tây Sơn wars
Trứ came of age during the thirty years of war commonly referred to as the Tây Sơn era, a time of prolonged fighting between armies based in various territories inhabited by speakers of the Vietnamese language. Most of the fighting was between the Nguyễn lords whose ancestors had ruled from Huế on the central coast since the beginning of the seventeenth century, and a rebel movement called Tây Sơn that was initially based in the region of the port city of Qui Nhơn on the south-central coast. By the late 1780s the Nguyễn base of operations was at Sài Gòn in the Mekong delta, while the Tây Sơn had gained control of all the Vietnamese lands to the north. In 1802, the Nguyễn finally defeated the Tây Sơn, united for the first time all the Vietnamese regions, and made Huế their royal city.
Vietnamese in the northern region participated in this war very little aside from the three years from 1786 to 1789 when they vainly resisted the arrival of Tây Sơn armies. Northerners fought on behalf of the Lê dynasty, which had governed the country in the fifteenth century, had collapsed in the early sixteenth century, and was restored to Hà Nội at the end of the sixteenth century after several decades of civil war. In 1789, the Tây Sơn put an end to the Lê dynasty, and thereafter northerners watched from the sidelines as the outcome was decided between the two southern powers. In 1792 the charismatic Tây Sơn leader Nguyễn Huệ died. After ten additional years of fighting, Tây Sơn forces succumbed to the southern armies of Nguyễn Phúc Ánh who in 1802 was proclaimed Emperor Gia Long (r.1802–1820).
Loyalty to the Lê dynasty remained strong among educated northerners well into the nineteenth century. While some northerners purposely avoided serving the southern dynasty at Huế, others chose to serve. Trứ was a northerner; he lived through these events and was among those who chose to serve. However, his family had been impoverished by the destruction of war, and it was not easy for him to find a path of entry into the new royal court dominated by southerners.
Trứ's youth
Trứ's father Nguyễn Công Tấn (1716–1800) and Nguyễn Nghiễm (1708–1775), the father of Nguyễn Du (1765–1820), famed as the author of the well-known literary work Kim Vân Kiều, were from neighbouring villages in Nghi Xuân district in what is now Hà Tĩnh province. In the eighteenth century this place was part of Nghệ An province, on the south bank of the Lam River directly opposite the provincial capital Vinh. Nguyễn Du was born in Hà Nội, where his father was prominent at the Lê dynasty court. Trứ was born in Quỳnh Côi, an administrative centre in what is now Thái Bình province, downriver from Hà Nội near the sea, where his father was a prominent local official. Both families maintained their property in Nghi Xuân while serving in or near the capital.
Orphaned at the age of twelve, Nguyễn Du was cared for by his elder half-brother Nguyễn Khản who had risen to a high position in Hà Nội serving the Trịnh lords who ruled in the name of the Lê kings. At some time in the early 1780s, Nguyễn Du married a sister of Đoàn Nguyễn Tuấn (1750–?), the head of a prominent literati clan in Quỳnh Côi. It is surely not a coincidence that this was exactly where Nguyễn Công Tấn was serving in the local administration. We can easily surmise that the two families from Nghi Xuân were acquainted, and that Nguyễn Công Tấn took responsibility to find a suitable bride for the orphaned son of Nguyễn Nghiễm.
A scholar and poet of distinction, Đoàn Nguyễn Tuấn had chosen to eschew public service and lived quietly at Quỳnh Côi until an army of southern rebels, the Tây Sơn, broke into the Red River plain in 1786, sweeping aside Trịnh soldiers and taking control of Hà Nội. In 1787 the king fled Hà Nội and many officials organised resistance against the southerners; among those who rallied to the king were Nguyễn Công Tấn, Đoàn Nguyễn Tuấn, and Nguyễn Du. Nguyễn Khản returned to Nghi Xuân, raised an army and returned to support the king, was defeated, found refuge in the mountains, caught a fever, and died, leaving Nguyễn Du as the head of the family.
As the Lê king's prospects faded, Đoàn Nguyễn Tuấn, having nowhere to go, made peace with the rebel leader Nguyễn Huệ (1753–1792). In 1789, after a Qing army had been defeated in Hà Nội, he used his erudition to assist Nguyễn Huệ by meeting with Qing envoys. In 1790, he joined an embassy to the Qing court. Meanwhile, Nguyễn Công Tấn returned to Nghi Xuân with his son Trứ, who was then around ten years old. Nguyễn Du, in his early twenties, also returned to Nghi Xuân at this time. There, these people watched as the southern prince Nguyễn Phúc Ánh (1762–1820) gradually overcame the rebels and in 1802 brought peace to the Vietnamese after thirty years of war, founding the Nguyễn dynasty and taking the throne name of Gia Long. Having survived the tumultuous times of their youth, both Nguyễn Du and Trứ eventually entered public service under the Nguyễn kings.
When Nguyễn Công Tấn returned to Nghi Xuân he found his property ravaged by the rebels and reportedly was reduced to living in a bamboo hut where he opened a school. Trứ spent his teenage years in poverty. He worked with peasants to support his family, but, educated by his father, he became a learned man. However, his poverty was an impediment to opening the way into officialdom, and he did not pass the civil service exam until 1819, when he was 41 years old.
Trứ during the reign of Gia Long
During the first two decades of the nineteenth century, after the death of his father and before the start of his public career, very little information survives about Trứ. But there is one episode in the summer of 1803 in which he played a part that dynastic historians considered worth recording. King Gia Long journeyed from Huế to the north and at that time there was a famine in Nghệ An. The king distributed rice and, moved by the suffering he witnessed, called upon village people in Nghệ An and in provinces to the north to submit petitions with proposals to improve government. He ordered a civil official named Nguyễn Viên to receive the petitions and to sort them out, setting aside those submitted by criminals, artful and unscrupulous people, bullies, those with illicit private interests, and those known to have influence in local affairs.
One submission received public notice, and it was from 25-year-old Trứ. It was recorded that his submission contained ten clauses and that the king ordered the Ministry of Personnel (Lại Bộ) to study it carefully and to publicise it; in this way, Trứ was given public recognition for what he had written.Footnote 6 This tells us that Trứ had a clean and loyal reputation in the eyes of the dynastic leadership, that he had no discernible influence in local government, that he took a serious interest in public affairs, and that he was erudite and articulate enough to earn a measure of respect from the royal court for what he had submitted. How he managed to do this may have had something to do with Nguyễn Viên, the man designated by the king to be the gatekeeper for the petitions.
Nguyễn Viên was from Thanh Hoa, the province just north of Nghệ An. Like the fathers of Nguyễn Du and of Trứ, he had served the Lê dynasty and returned to his home village when the rebels gained ascendancy. In 1802, he offered his services to Gia Long; it is recorded that Gia Long liked his erudition. Coming from a background similar to Trứ and likely to have known Trứ's father from his years in service to the Lê dynasty, perhaps he was inclined to push the young man forward. Gia Long did not long enjoy the service of Nguyễn Viên; this man, a potential patron for Trứ, died a little over a year later, suggesting that he was around the same age as Trứ's father, who had died four years earlier.Footnote 7 Lack of money and lack of a patron inhibited Trứ's advancement in public service.
In 1807, the southern dynasty held exams for northerners to gain access to officialdom. Education was a much larger part of culture in the north than it was in the south, and there was a relatively large population of well-educated but idle northerners after the fall of the Lê dynasty and the dynastic shift into the hands of southerners. The Nguyễn court coveted the erudition of these northerners and endeavoured to bring them into government service. The exams organised for northerners followed criteria suitable for the level of learning in the north; most southerners in those years were not competitive in that environment. The Nguyễn court had no dearth of southerners who had ascended into the ranks of the royal entourage during the decades of war, but northerners tended to be more adept at diplomatic work with Qing China, and using them was important for reconciling the northern population with the new regime.
Trứ participated in the 1807 exam, but failed to be selected. Five years later, in 1813, a second exam was held for northerners; he earned recognition as a promising student at what would be the equivalent of a modern secondary education (sinh đồ-tú tài).Footnote 8 At the third exam in 1819 he obtained first-place honours (giải nguyên) for Nghệ An province, which qualified him for a government appointment.Footnote 9
The 16 years between his encounter with the king in 1803 and his success in the exam of 1819 were surely filled with days of study. We have no information about teachers and curriculum, or whether he was an autodidact. However, an essay that he wrote for the 1819 exam survives in a collection of exam essays from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.Footnote 10 This essay is likely to reveal indications of Nguyễn Công Trứ's frame of mind at that time, but it is written with cursive calligraphy that I have not yet deciphered.
The other aspect of Nguyễn Công Trứ's life that plausibly reveals something about his activities during Gia Long's reign is his love of ca trù (‘tally music’), a style of music that migrated from the royal court into city streets when kings no longer resided in Hà Nội. Ca Trừ was sung in Hà Nội establishments patronised by educated men. It featured a female singer with castanets, a musician with a long-necked lute, and a drummer who was typically a customer of the establishment as well as being the author of the lyrics given for the singer to improvise a song. The manner of beating the drum indicated the degree of the drummer's enjoyment of the performance, and based on this the drummer accumulated tallies that he was required to redeem before departing.Footnote 11 Trứ wrote many songs for ca trù.Footnote 12 It is reasonable to assume that during these years, from age 25 to 40 when his youthful energy was at a peak and his poetic sensibility was in full flower, he developed confidence in his literary voice and in his existential focus on the pleasure of being alive, which came to characterise both his poetry and his career.
Trứ's early career at court
Trứ entered officialdom in 1820 at the beginning of Minh Mạng's reign and encountered a world with which he was surely familiar as an observer, but that he was directly experiencing for the first time on the inside. It was a realm of intense competition for advancement in a system of complex gradations of status. There were bureaucratic protocols available for raising one's own status and for lowering the status of others; the king could choose to intervene or not and was the final arbiter of every decision affecting promotions and demotions.
Trứ's first assignment upon arriving at Huế in 1820 was in the newly established Bureau of State History (Quốc Sử Quán); in the following year he assisted in administering examinations in Huế and in Sơn Nam, located downriver from Hà Nội.Footnote 13 By 1824 he was a senior secretary (lang trung) in the Ministry of Personnel (Lại Bộ) when two members of the State Academy (Quốc Tử Giám) were demoted for dereliction while administering examinations; Trứ was promoted to replace one of them.Footnote 14 A few months later he was appointed as a senior assistant (thiêm sự) in the Ministry of Justice (Hình Bộ).Footnote 15 In 1825, the governor (phủ doãn) and vice governor (phủ thừa) of the province in which the capital Huế was located were demoted when the king was angered by their lackadaisical response to brigands in the Huế region and referred their cases to the Ministry of Justice; Trứ was promoted to replace the vice governor.Footnote 16 Apparently, Trứ's response to the problem of brigandage was satisfactory, because only three months later he was appointed to be chief of staff (tham hiệp) in Thanh Hoá province, which suffered from endemic unrest and rebellion.Footnote 17 Trứ's career during his first five years in officialdom is impressive. His early years were spent with paperwork resulting in a mid-level position in the Ministry of Personnel, which supervised appointments, and then, when a position opened up due to a demotion, he was chosen to enter the State Academy. The State Academy was stocked with people considered to be erudite, competent, and loyal; when he received this appointment a court official advised the king that ‘his career path is above average’.Footnote 18
His promotions to the State Academy and as vice governor of the province in which the court was located filled positions vacated by the men who had been demoted. He moved up when positions opened due to people being demoted; this was a very common way of advancing in one's career. His move from the Ministry of Personnel to the State Academy is a plausible example of this because the Ministry of Personnel was a strategic place for policing the pecking order among officials; he apparently learned to navigate in this environment and knew how to position himself for advancement. The State Academy was a desired place to be because it provided more personal contact with the king; hence the king being advised about Trứ's career path at that time.
Similarly, he was promoted to vice governor when he was working in the Ministry of Justice where the case leading to the demotion of the previous vice governor was adjudicated. What went on behind the scenes here can only be conjectured, but it is plausible to imagine that Trứ was alert to possibilities and knew how to push himself forward.
Trứ's career entered a new phase once he escaped from the cloisters of the court with an appointment that gave him scope for initiative and action. He was appointed to replace an official who was demoted for failing to deal successfully with brigands,Footnote 19 which gave him an opportunity to demonstrate an ability to pacify security threats. Much of the rest of Trứ's career would be taken up with campaigning against brigands, rebels, and the Siamese and Cambodian armies. He became something of an expert in organising and conducting military operations in remote and difficult places. Within three months of his appointment as chief of staff in Thanh Hoá, he reported an outbreak of banditry and rebellion and requested permission to organise a military campaign.Footnote 20 This was the beginning phase of what came to be known as the rebellion of Phan Bá Vành, which would continue through 1826 and into the first half of 1827.
Initially, Trứ was concerned with a related uprising in southern Thanh Hoá and northern Nghệ An led by people claiming loyalty to Lê dynasty pretenders. He joined with officials from Nghệ An in military operations that by the middle of 1826 had dispersed the rebel armies, captured over one thousand prisoners, and restored peace to the two provinces. The royal court distributed rewards to those who participated in this campaign, from the commanding officers to the lowest-ranking soldiers. A policy was published to expeditiously examine the prisoners to identify honest people who had been tricked or coerced by rebel leaders and to grant their immediate release.Footnote 21 At the conclusion of this campaign, Trứ requested and was granted leave to mourn the death of his mother.Footnote 22
Four months later, Trứ was ordered back to his position as chief of staff in Thanh Hoá.Footnote 23 Soon after, he was given authority to adopt exceptional measures under the pressure of circumstances and to organise and train military forces.Footnote 24 What lay behind this was the burgeoning rebellion of Phan Bá Vành that was ravaging the provinces just north of Thanh Hoá in Nam Định, Thái Bình, and Hải Dương.
The king was very upset that this uprising continued month after month. In early 1827, he sent a message to the commanding officer tasked with putting down the rebellion, Phạm Văn Lý, urging him on to greater effort, saying:
Although the rebels have been defeated many times, they are not yet eradicated … winter has passed to spring, so get busy. You and the others must put your soldiers on the road. What's so hard about hitting the rebels one hard blow and capturing the lot of them? It's your responsibility. Try harder! Try harder! If you dilly-dally and wait around, be afraid that your former merit will not be enough to compensate for such a serious error.
At the same time, the king sent a message to Trứ, directing him to bring his Thanh Hoá soldiers into the campaign, saying:
I know you have experience both at court and in the field. Last winter, because of many problems in the north, I urgently sent you to help with military affairs. You then reported that you killed many rebels and I sent rewards. But although the rebels have been defeated many times, yet the military officers have not yet been able to exterminate them, which makes it impossible for me not to be very angry. The circumstances being what they are, you must honestly report what is happening … quickly lead out your troops.Footnote 25
When the rebellion was finally quelled by early summer of 1827, Trứ and the other commanders were called back to the capital to receive promotions, rewards, and to participate in the royal birthday festival.Footnote 26 Shortly after this, Trứ and his colleagues were sent back north with the mandate to mobilise soldiers to finish tracking down and capturing remnants of the rebel armies.Footnote 27 The king had apparently come to view Trứ as an expert on security matters, for he consulted him about how to deal with the Lao leader Chao Anou when he arrived on the border fleeing from Siamese troops, although the substance of this consultation was not recorded.Footnote 28
In autumn 1827, Trứ was called back to Huế to be vice minister (thị lang) in the Ministry of Ritual (Lễ Bộ). During a royal audience, the king asked him: ‘Recently the bandits have been rather quiet; will the people be able to live in peace for a long time or not?’ Trứ reportedly replied: ‘After the army attacked and swept them, the crowd of bandits were dispersed, but the ring-leaders are not yet all captured. According to what I have seen, it is only a temporary peace.’Footnote 29 His reply to the king reveals a realistic perception of what was happening in the countryside. Shortly after this, the king appointed him to sit on a committee formed to compile ‘regulations for supervising all the officials’.Footnote 30 In early 1828, while still assigned to this committee, he was shifted to a vice ministerial position in the Ministry of Justice.Footnote 31
Up to this point, Trứ had enjoyed an exceptional career. With a few years of court appointments, he had mastered the bureaucratic routine and repeatedly found ways to position himself for advancement. Once he had graduated to receiving major appointments outside of the court, he quickly demonstrated his ability to deal with rural problems of banditry and insurgency. We can surmise that his mature age, being around ten years older than others in his cohort, may have helped him to understand how to make friends and to leverage collegial relationships. What happened next had no apparent precedent. We can only imagine that his background in rural poverty and his experience dealing with rebellious, disaffected, and distressed peasants led him to come up with an initiative that would confer upon him not only fame but the status of a local tutelary deity.
Trứ's land reclamation initiative
In the third month of 1828, Trứ submitted a three-point petition to the throneFootnote 32 based upon his experiences fighting bandits and hunting down rebels in rural areas during 1826 and 1827. He proposed a policy for dealing with the three main groups of people he had encountered: insurgents, local officials, and impoverished landless peasants.
His first point was titled ‘Establish Severe Laws to Put an End to Thieves and Robbers’ and addressed the endemic lawlessness in the northern part of the country. He described the distressing social and political conditions in the northern provinces and attributed this baleful situation to the region having experienced a decade of rule by the ‘western bandits’, his term for the Tây Sơn rebels from the south, and their ‘treacherous followers’ among northerners:
People became arrogant and cunning, taking advantage of injustice, kidnapping for ransom, digging up graves, assembling accomplices to intimidate villages; escaped prisoners found refuge in the households of village tyrants, which became their lairs; rural dignitaries took brutal bullies as their arms and legs to compete for ascendancy. This is already rebellion — it is not just attacking towns and occupying land that is rebellion; if people are not able to live in peace, it is also rebellion.
He then proposed a stern policy based upon the adage ‘if there are rebels, then off with their heads’; he favoured the appointment of two additional officials for each village to watch over the people and to behead not only members of bandit gangs, but also local leaders who connived with and sheltered local bullies.
What is remarkable is that he was describing a situation a quarter-century after the end of the Tây Sơn regime and the founding of the Nguyễn dynasty. Although he blamed these conditions upon the decade of rule by the ‘western bandits’ in the 1790s, in fact the situation of northern rural lawlessness had been a serious problem from as early as the seventeenth century and would continue through the nineteenth century until the pacification operations of the French in the 1890s.
This situation was related to a lack of administrative control caused by the malaise of an unbalanced two-headed government, with a Lê royal court that presided but did not rule, and Trịnh lords who ruled but did not preside. Despite periodic experiments, a successful agrarian policy was never developed during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Instead, rural society proliferated with competing tax collectors, and local affairs fell into the hands of strongmen and their platoons of thugs who knew how to bribe officials and intimidate peasants while accumulating wealth and land. Local strongmen were generally upstarts or members of large households who learned how to manipulate local authorities for their private benefit.Footnote 33
Trứ's second point was titled ‘Make Clear Rewards and Punishments to Encourage Officials’. Here he addressed corruption among officials and proposed that the number of officials be reduced by half and that salaries be increased to encourage integrity. He also wanted a system of tri-annual inspections with promotions for honest and diligent officials and punishments for those found greedy and corrupt.
Before going to the third and most important point in Trứ's missive, I want to pause to consider the critical reaction of high court officials to these first two points.Footnote 34 The officials were concerned about Trứ's draconian emphasis on beheading and the indiscriminate treatment of local officials. They believed it was important to stress rewards and incentives for good behaviour as well as punishments for bad behaviour. They also wanted to distinguish between officials at village, canton, and hamlet levels. They opposed reducing officialdom or increasing salaries:
As for the request to reduce the number of those in public service and to increase salaries, those in public service already have a wage scale — how can half of them be dismissed? Salaries have regulations, so if we increase the salaries only of some officials, then what about all the other officials?’
They were concerned about how Trứ's proposal would roil the existing pattern of appointments and emoluments. They also did not like the idea of appointing two officials to each locality, and favoured having just one official ‘to avoid confusion’. Behind this we may surmise their discomfort with the prospect of two officials sharing a function and of the litigation between them that would inevitably arise. On the other hand, they endorsed the idea of tri-annual inspections, an activity that could be easily accommodated within existing administrative protocols.
What we see here is the difference between the perspective of a man with experience in dynamic and difficult situations and the perspective of court-bound officials invested in maintaining the existing system and worried about making exceptional moves that would create new administrative problems. This became a pattern repeated throughout Trứ's career, with his proposals and activities being perceived as tending toward excess and needing to be closely monitored by the king's advisers.
Trứ's third point, ‘Reclaim Abandoned Fields for Poor People’ became a policy with which he would subsequently be personally associated. He began his argument by postulating an idealised vision of former village life to contrast it with the contemporary situation:
In earlier times, fields were divided and property was assigned for the people to have a means of livelihood, and they were accordingly able to live peacefully in their hamlets and villages without treachery. Nowadays, the people are poor and lack food; they are idle and in poor health; they join together to rob and steal, and evil cannot be stopped. When I went to Nam Định province, I saw an immense expanse of abandoned fields in Giao Thủy and Chân Định districts. In addition, there are hundreds of thousands of hectares that local people want to open up for agriculture but the expense is too great and they lack sufficient manpower. If we allocate public funds then we can gather poor people to open up the land for cultivation. It will not cost the government very much but the benefit will be forever. Moreover, the abandoned and unopened land is brushy and deserted, so thieves and robbers habitually gather there to make their lairs, so turning this wasteland into cultivated fields will not only let poor people earn their livelihood but will also put an end to cruel gangs. I request that officials be sent to inspect and ascertain the situation for opening up uncultivated land and to assign local wealthy people to oversee the recruitment of poor people to open up the land. Fifty people will form a village with a village head; thirty people will form a hamlet with a hamlet chief, and land will be calculated and allocated. Public funds will be issued to build houses, to buy water buffalo and agricultural implements; wages and rice will be provided for six months after which the people can earn their own livelihood. In three years, there will be rice fields — ownership can be transferred, and taxes can be collected. District and provincial officials will establish and fill a storehouse with rice to provide against harvest failures from which the people can borrow if necessary. The new hamlets and villages will be designated as ‘The Army Devoted to Fundamentals’ (lực bản quân) [referring to the cliché of agriculture being the foundation of the state].
The king's advisers approved of this initiative except for one thing: ‘As for newly established villages and hamlets, let them belong to jurisdictions according to the normal regulations; there is no need to establish a new category of “The Army Devoted to Fundamentals” — what for?’ The court officials did not like to see anything being created outside of the system already in place over which they presided. Aside from their reservations, they recommended that Trứ's proposals be implemented and after three years be evaluated for results. The king agreed except for one thing: ‘In this matter half a year is enough time, there is no need to wait three years.’ Trứ was appointed to be Commissioner of Fields for the Landless (dinh điền sứ) and instructed to report in six months.Footnote 35
Perceptions of village perversity
Before he departed on his new assignment, Trứ had an interview with the king. The king reviewed the situation in the north and endorsed the importance of what Trứ was being sent to do.Footnote 36 In reply, Trứ proposed that since many landless people had followed rebels out of desperation and were now remorseful of what they had done, they should be allowed to confess their crimes, be exonerated, and allotted land. He also proposed that in ‘places where cultivatable land is scattered about’ there be organised smaller jurisdictions called ‘outpost villages’ (làng trại) comprised of 15–18 people: ‘So then there will be no abandoned places.’Footnote 37 The king agreed with this and then went on to discuss his concern about taxation:
In the north when there is a harvest failure, immediately there is rebellion, military operations, the breakdown of dykes — we know all about these miserable situations. Unpaid back taxes up to the fourth year of my reign were graciously forgiven, and unpaid back taxes from the fourth to the eighth years were postponed until the tenth year to be paid at a reduced rate. The court does not collect taxes without taking into account the misery of the people. Now the bandits have been pacified and rice harvests can be increased; there are no longer the difficult conditions that we had before. Our people must be diligent to work and to pay their taxes. As for rural dignitaries and local bullies who habitually collect taxes from the people and use them for their private benefit with the idea that unpaid taxes will someday be pardoned, I know all about that trick. The tax scale this year must be paid in full. Do not let these false and deceitful people continue to be disrespectful.Footnote 38
This royal comment indicates the gravity of the agrarian problem in the north and the king's concern about how he had yet to collect the regulation amount of taxes due from there.
This perception of agrarian life as a sad affair with rural dignitaries and local bullies feeding off the livelihood of impoverished peasants with no benefit to the royal court is congruent with information recorded about northern Vietnam for centuries. The abuses took many forms and were constantly sprouting up in unexpected places, as shown by Trứ's half-year report in the ninth month of 1828, in which he requested authority ‘to eradicate the evil of local bullies’:
People who discuss popular unrest habitually attribute the blame to officials appointed by the court and do not know that most of the problem is due to local bullies. The harm done by officials is one or two parts of ten; the harm done by local bullies is eight or nine parts of ten. Officials do not go beyond looking for small advantages with paperwork, demanding money outside of the rules in dues and fees — the harm is small and temporary, it is readily perceived, the culprits are immediately demoted, and there is repentance. But the harm of local bullies — they make orphans and widows; they squeeze the life out of the people and destroy the people's traditions. And they do it all in secret so that in broad daylight they are not restrained by any fear. Everywhere they gather as comrades specialising in how to get rich, how to deceive and to tease the officials sent by the court, and how to satisfy their appetites. They commonly contrive to hire labor to work public lands to fatten themselves while the poor people have nowhere they can go for help. … Local bullies hire hundreds of workers who are not registered for the poll tax but serve only the private interests of the bullies. These illicit laborers work thousands of hectares on which no tax is paid. I request to bring the law to bear on this situation and to cancel the regulations for hiring workers to cultivate public land.Footnote 39
Here Trứ refers to the abuse of regulations that had been published by the court that allowed public land to be cultivated by hired workers; the intent was to produce rice to support activities for the common good. But now public land was being used for the private profit of powerful local people and also private land was being declared to be public land to remove it from taxation.
The king's advisers understood that the regulations were being subverted (‘local bullies learned to use it for their benefit to the harm of the people’) but asserted that the intent of the regulations was good and that Trứ's request was too extreme. They recommended that the regulations be maintained and that instead more emphasis be put on ‘the prohibition against the chronic evil of deceit’.Footnote 40 The king agreed with them and ordered that Trứ remain at his job and come to court to report at the end of the year.Footnote 41
Here we again notice Trứ's inclination to take action with extraordinary measures while the court-bound worthies kept their eye on maintaining the status quo; they understood his work with the landless as nothing more than incorporating a wandering population into the existing system of administration. They wanted to maintain the structures and policies already in place and saw no need for establishing new policies or abolishing existing ones.
Policy discussions about establishing new jurisdictions
During the winter and spring of 1828–1829, two new districts were formed with landless peasants on previously uncultivated land: Tiền Hải district in what is now Thái Bình province and Kim Sơn district in Ninh Bình province. The court annals contain records of consultations between Trứ and the king and his court about the details of setting up these new administrative jurisdictions, allotting subsidies to help people begin their new lives, and dealing with problems.Footnote 42 Throughout, there is an undercurrent of having to deal with local clerks and bullies who connived to thwart field surveys and to intimidate the poor. The king advised that violations should be treated with forgiveness to encourage people to reform themselves.Footnote 43
In the third month of 1829, Trứ submitted a recommendation about how to bring civilisation to the disparate horde of strangers that had been assembled in the two new districts: ‘groups of wandering people who do not yet have connections with each other’. He wanted ‘to make village rules to instruct them to know how to be attentive to their conduct’, and he organised his recommendation under five headings.Footnote 44
First, he proposed that every hamlet and village should have a school with a teacher. Tax-exempt public land would provide upkeep, teacher salaries, and student scholarships. He proposed a curriculum for students between the ages of 8 and 16, after which students could be sent to district schools or ‘if one cannot study then change to another kind of work’. Second, he proposed that every village should establish a granary to store rice in times of plenty that could be distributed in times of flood, drought, or failed harvests. Third, he requested that for every 25 households an assistant headman (tư trưởng) be appointed with responsibility for instructing the people in proper behaviour; incorrigibles should be reported to higher authorities and local leaders would be punished if they tried to conceal bad behaviour in their jurisdictions. Fourth, local authorities must be prepared to mobilise local men to resist and capture bandits. Fifth, local authorities must exhort those who ‘are lazy, leave fields uncultivated, indulge in fornication and adultery, spend time unnecessarily suing each other in courts of law’ and must encourage them to reform their behaviour; if inspectors find people leading dissolute lives and fields left uncultivated during a term of three years with nothing being done about it, then the local authorities should be tried and punished and replaced by ‘serious, trustworthy, prompt, and virtuous’ men.
The king's advisers were critical of these recommendations. They believed that establishing schools was important, but that it was too soon to do so in these newly organised jurisdictions: ‘It is best to open schools when the people are more numerous and prosperous; it is not urgent when wandering people have just been gathered together.’ Similarly with the matter of granaries, they believed that it was too soon to think about this; it would be better to wait a few years when local agriculture was more developed. The idea of appointing assistant headmen to educate local people made no sense to them. They felt it was an overlap with other local authorities and asked: ‘Why implement something that is not done everywhere?’ As for Trứ's recommendation for local initiative in dealing with bandits, the court officials observed that there already were authorities at the cantonal level with responsibility for this and there was no need to complicate matters by getting people at lower jurisdictions involved. Here we see these men at court pushing back against what they chose to regard as Trứ's outlandish and rash ideas. The king agreed with them.Footnote 45
Resistance to Trứ's recommendations
When the Nguyễn dynasty was founded in 1802, Gia Long established a viceregal administration in Hà Nội with responsibility for the northern provinces. He wanted a regional government that could respond to the distinctive conditions of the old Lê-Trịnh domain and where officials from the north could be used to best effect. In the 1820s, Minh Mạng saw the administration of the viceroy in Hà Nội as a lair of northern officials with doubtful loyalty to his dynasty and as an impediment to his aim of gaining more direct access for his court to provincial administrations. Eventually, in 1831, he abolished the viceregal administration and replaced it with a structure of jurisdictions typically comprised of two neighbouring provinces, which provided a more direct link between the royal court and local government. Meanwhile, viceregal officials were increasingly sensitive to royal initiatives in their territory that came directly from Huế rather than through them. Trứ's assignment was just such an initiative. Although Trứ reported directly to the king, the king could not ignore the opinion of viceregal officials so long as they still existed.
In the fourth month of 1829, Trứ reported that two people had attempted to bribe officials working with him. He imprisoned them and asked the court about what the next step should be. The king sent the case to the viceregal administration in Hà Nội, which had authority over the districts where Trứ was working, and asked for an opinion from the officials there. The viceregal authorities reported that if Trứ had been known to be honest, no one would have dared to offer bribes; therefore, he was ipso facto guilty and his show of reporting the matter was simply a trick to gain a reputation for honesty. They recommended that he be demoted three grades and reassigned elsewhere.Footnote 46 The king saw no logic in this. After summarising the details of the case, he concluded that the authorities in Hà Nội were ‘wrong’ and had ‘discussed beyond what is worthy to be discussed’. He issued a decree sternly admonishing the Hà Nội authorities and proclaiming Trứ free of any suspicion.Footnote 47
This episode reveals the Hà Nội officials’ desire to be rid of Trứ from their jurisdiction. They were apparently ready to countenance any kind of charge against him, however implausible. He was very likely an irritant to their routine of governance. It is telling that Trứ did not send his report of making arrests for corruption to Hà Nội, where it should have gone according to normal protocol. Rather, he alerted the king and involved the royal court in the case to blunt the hostility toward him in Hà Nội. This episode is also evidence for the declining importance of the Hà Nội viceregal administration and an indication that its days were numbered. The king would abolish the viceroyal government at Hà Nội within two years and was already stocking it with men whose career prospects were unpromising.
In the summer of 1829, Trứ came to Huế to report that there had been collusion between clerks and local bullies to exclude lands from the survey made to ascertain the extent of fields available for cultivation by new settlers; he requested authority to prosecute the culprits and to conduct a new survey.Footnote 48 He apparently suspected that there were more errors in the survey than what had already been uncovered. When consulted by the king, the court advisers saw no logic in responding to criminal activity by the extraordinary measure of redoing the survey. They took the position that if collusion was uncovered then it must be punished and the survey rectified. There was no need to redo the entire survey. They recommended that local officials gather the people and warn them about trying to avoid taxes by thwarting the survey. They believed that this would cause culprits to be afraid and to confess their crime, in which case they could be forgiven and the survey of their land would be re-examined. The king agreed with this and it was recorded that 630 hectares of fields and 400 hectares of abandoned fields newly opened for cultivation were found to have been hidden from the survey and from the tax rolls; these fields were added to the tax rolls and the culprits were pardoned.Footnote 49 We don't know if more unreported hectares would have been uncovered by a new survey as Trứ had proposed.
In this episode we can sense from the court a certain irritation with Trứ's inclination to seek special measures rather than simply to follow established procedures. This irritation seemingly came to the surface two months later when it came to light that the local administration in Huế had illegally rented a boat to a Chinese rice merchant but the Ministry of Justice had failed to prosecute those who were guilty. After this case of malfeasance had been investigated, five high officials in the Ministry of Justice suffered reductions in their grades of service and Trứ was included among these five, although his demotion was the least severe.Footnote 50 In addition to his work as Commissioner of Fields for the Landless, Trứ continued to hold his appointment as a vice minister in the Ministry of Justice. This demotion affected his level of pay and privilege, but not his appointments and responsibilities. It was a slap on the wrist from the highest echelon of the court and a warning to watch his step. Another opportunity to rein in what these people apparently perceived as Trứ's exuberance came a few weeks later when another of his initiatives became a target for criticism.
In the eighth month of 1829, Trứ submitted a report about the security situation on the coast where shipping from the south entered the river system en route to Hà Nội. Piracy was rampant and the naval outposts were inadequate. He suggested to establish a new naval base at a strategic location on the coast and to abolish a base that was too far upriver to be of assistance against the pirates.Footnote 51 The king referred the matter to the Hà Nội authorities. Four months before, their eagerness to strike at Trứ had been disciplined by the king's rejection of their ill-considered judgment against him in the bribery case. This time they conducted a detailed investigation that provided a seemingly thorough survey of the downriver security situation. They did not contest Trứ's description of the situation nor his assertion that a new naval station needed to be established at a strategic coastal location. But they rejected the particular location that Trứ proposed for it. They proposed a different location and provided a comparative analysis to argue that it was superior to the site favoured by Trứ. They also rejected Trứ's idea to abolish the upriver installation by forwarding a strong argument for incorporating it into a more highly developed system of riverine security. The king endorsed the Hà Nội report.Footnote 52 In this case, Trứ identified a problem, but his solution to it was rejected in favour of a recommendation produced by bureaucratic procedures.
These episodes reveal that Minh Mạng tended to follow consensus among his officials unless it offended his sense of logic or threatened to derail an official or a policy that he supported. Minh Mạng was keen to find and use talent from the northern provinces. Most southerners were almost by definition loyal to his dynasty, but the northerners remained susceptible to lawlessness and rebellion. Trứ was an asset that he did not want to lose, but he did not on that account accept every new idea that Trứ proposed. He could not afford to strike a partisan pose among his closest officials; he gave them space to define and decide issues for him and rejected their advice only when something critical to his priorities was at stake. Perhaps one exception to this was the case of Hoàng Quýnh with whom Trứ was fated to have an unpleasant encounter.
The case of Hoàng Quýnh
In early summer of 1830, Trứ's assignment as Commissioner of Fields for the Landless ended; he was back in Huế working in the Ministry of Justice. He had been assigned along with seven other officials to serve on a committee to ‘rectify the laws’. One of the other members of the committee was a vice minister in the Ministry of Finance named Hoàng Quýnh. For committee work, Trứ was responsible for using the official seal of the Ministry of Justice and Quýnh was responsible for using the official seal of the Ministry of Finance.Footnote 53 Trứ and Quýnh had very different personalities; while Trứ was proactive and full of ideas for reform, Quýnh was a quintessential bureaucratic infighter with a reputation for finding fault in others. Also, Trứ was much older than Quýnh. Within a few months, the relationship between these two seal keepers became adversarial.
Quýnh was from Hương Trà district on the north side of Huế. His grandfather Hoàng Quang had served the Nguyễn Phúc royal family until it was driven from Huế in 1774. Thereafter, as Huế was occupied first by the Lê-Trịnh regime in Hà Nội and then by the southern rebels led by Nguyễn Huệ, he dropped out of public life and became, in the words of the annals, a ‘scholar in retirement’, remaining loyal to the Nguyễn Phúc who by the late 1780s were established in the far south at Sài Gòn. In 1791, as Nguyễn Phúc armies and navies began their campaigns that after a decade would result in gaining ascendancy over all the Vietnamese regions, Hoàng Quang wrote a song that became known as ‘Song of Longing for the South’, which spread throughout the south and became a favourite of the Nguyễn Phúc soldiers, who reportedly could not sing it without tears.Footnote 54
Hoàng Quang died before the Nguyễn Phúc returned to Huế in 1801, and his eldest son, Quýnh's father, died when Quýnh was still young, leaving him in the care of his paternal uncle Hoàng Kim Hoán. Hoàng Kim Hoán had a good but undistinguished career during the reigns of Gia Long and Minh Mạng; he died in 1830 as he was about to take up a new assignment in the important northern border province of Lạng Sơn. Minh Mạng honoured him posthumously with gifts of silk and cash to his family.Footnote 55 In 1817, Gia Long is recorded as speaking of Hoàng Kim Hoán as follows: ‘He has the honour of being among those who helped to raise up our dynasty and we are not ungrateful for this.’Footnote 56 Quýnh's family reputation for remaining loyal during the nearly thirty years that the ruling house was in exile from its capital marked him for special favour.
Quýnh was reputed to have been an unusually hard-working student. Although we do not know his date of birth, he was apparently still quite young when he passed a regional exam in Huế and entered officialdom in 1820 at the beginning of Minh Mạng's reign, at the same time as Trứ stepped up into officialdom.Footnote 57 Compared with Trứ, he enjoyed a fast track to the top.
In the first month of 1820, Quýnh was one of six men appointed to set up the secretariat office (văn thư phòng) to handle royal correspondence. Bronze seals were given to these men to authenticate court documents.Footnote 58 One month later, while retaining his appointment in the secretariat, he was promoted to the Hàn Lâm Academy, where the most erudite officials tended to go.Footnote 59 In the tenth month of 1820, the king scolded him and two others because they knew but failed to report that one of their colleagues had taken his seal out of the capital instead of turning it in when given a provincial appointment.Footnote 60
Perhaps this experience alerted Quýnh to the possibilities for gaining favour by submitting accusations against people who violated rules, for just four months later he lodged an accusation in the Ministry of Justice against a man of Sơn Tây, near Hà Nội, who tried to take a provincial examination in Quảng Nam, south of Huế. This seems to have been the case of a northerner seeking entry into officialdom by posing as a southerner. When the Ministry of Justice recommended dismissing the case, the king asked how it was possible to have a case at law without one person being right and the other person being wrong. The ministry officials replied that the accused should be blacklisted from future employment. As for Quýnh, he had been greedy to make an accusation, but since he was in the right he could be pardoned for speaking out beyond his rank. The king agreed with this.Footnote 61
The king treated Quýnh with discernible solicitude. In the fourth month of 1821, the king queried him about the attitudes of common people and of officials toward the king. Quýnh answered the king's questions with a youthful honesty that Minh Mạng appreciated; Minh Mạng concluded the interview with some words of advice:
Your family was loyal to our dynasty in former times and I know its erudition, but having been promoted in youth you must all the more attend to your duties with care and diligence; I am pleased to advance people who are far from me — how much more then is this true of people like you?Footnote 62
This indicates that Minh Mạng considered this young man as someone with a particular attachment to the throne, but needing guidance to navigate his career.
However, Quýnh, and his uncle Hoàng Kim Hoán, did not always show good judgement. Quýnh became involved in the education of little princes and children of prominent officials. In 1823, he requested promotions for three students with whom he had personal acquaintance; when the matter was investigated, the three students refused to be associated with the request, thereby earning the king's praise, implying disapproval of Quýnh's request. At the same time, Quýnh's uncle, Hoàng Kim Hoán, was a supervisor in the State Academy while his own son, Quýnh's cousin, was a student there; when it came to the attention of the king, Hoàng Kim Hoán was transferred to another position.Footnote 63 A year later, court officials recommended Quýnh for a position in the provincial administration of Quảng Nam. The king refused, saying:
Quýnh is from a local family that remained loyal when our house was exiled from the capital. He is basically a man of great learning who can be consulted about public affairs, but he has been an official but a short time and to so quickly promote him to such a high position would not be equitable.Footnote 64
In 1825, when Hoàng Kim Hoán requested promotions for some of his students, the king ordered Quýnh to lead an investigation. Quýnh asked to be excused from doing this because Hoàng Kim Hoán was his uncle. The king did not allow him to be excused from the task, saying: ‘One's veneration for an uncle cannot be equal to one's veneration for the throne.’Footnote 65 Minh Mạng's view of Quýnh appears to have been a mixture of fondness and exasperation.
In 1826, Quýnh and another official named Nguyễn Hưự Nghi were assigned to supervise the regional examination in Nghệ An province. They got involved in a series of events that included disappearing examinations, a student riot, a banquet with singing and drinking, officials shouting at one another, and charges of corruption. Amidst this uproar, although junior to Nguyễn Hựư Nghi, Quýnh took the lead in attempting to enforce a modicum of order by allowing the students to retake the exam and summoning out of retirement Phan Bảo Đĩnh, a prominent official who had been allowed to retire to his native Nghệ An because of advanced age and illness. Apparently, Quýnh believed that Phan Bảo Đĩnh's reputation would reinforce his authority; Phan Bảo Đĩnh died less than half a year later. Minh Mạng commented:
According to Quýnh's report, although he acted while dealing with an emergency, still what he did was for the most part inappropriate, such as his summons [to Phan Bảo Đĩnh] and letting the students retake the exam without authorisation — how could he act so rashly as that!
The Ministry of Personnel investigated and decided that Quýnh had shown excessive egotism in the way he had humiliated provincial officials, and that he had been the instigator of unwarranted responses to the local situation; he was demoted two grades while Nguyễn Hưự Nghi was demoted one grade.Footnote 66
But this wasn't the end of the affair. Two months later, apparently emboldened by Quýnh's demotion, provincial officials in Nghệ An accused Quýnh and Nguyễn Hựư Nghi of taking bribes from students, reporting that after the exam they had gathered with the graduates to gamble and have fun. When Minh Mạng asked his court officials to discuss the matter, there was a difference of opinion between military and civilian officials. Military officials accepted the accusation from the Nghệ An officials and demanded the severest punishment of beheading for improperly advancing unworthy students; civilian officials argued that, although it may look as if the accused took bribes, in fact they could not have, because if they had taken bribes the unsuccessful students would have protested, which they did not do. Minh Mạng agreed with the civilians, but was still troubled by the rash behaviour of the two officials. One official explained that they
do work by using their authority to bully others; they violated regulations, and to punish them for this is correct; but we should also consider that they wanted to obtain the best talent from the examinations, and they did not think about how their actions would look to others.
Minh Mạng did not agree with this, saying:
There is a way to conduct the examinations … it is not our intention to select students like this! … Nguyễn Hựư Nghi and Quýnh tend to have rash dispositions and to act wrongfully and are guilty of that, but there is absolutely not a single indication of their taking bribes … And as for Quýnh, he attends at my side from early in the morning to late at night; I have watched him with my own eyes and listened to his advice with my own ears, and I have affectionately and clearly admonished him. Now, considering his reckless behaviour, he and Nguyễn Hựu Nghi are dismissed from their positions [at court] and exiled to Quảng Bình province where they must endeavour to redeem their faults.Footnote 67
Five months later when a petition arrived from Quảng Bình requesting to reduce taxes in the province, Minh Mạng praised it for the way it was written. He asked one of his officials: ‘Do you know who wrote this petition?’ When the official confessed that he did not know, the king said:
Certainly it is Nguyễn Hựư Nghi and Hoàng Quýnh, not at all the local provincial officials. I know that those two have talent, but when driven to extremes under the compulsion of circumstances then they suffer from making excessively enthusiastic efforts. If after having satisfied their ambitions they continue to act rashly and make mistakes, then it will be too bad for them.Footnote 68
Quýnh apparently showed a reforming spirit, for he was soon sent to help supervise work on the dykes in the Red River plain. Unfortunately, he walked into a situation with unsatisfactory work being done on the dykes and sustained a minor demotion in the summer of 1829.Footnote 69 But three months later he was cleared of charges and exonerated.Footnote 70 However, a few weeks after that he suffered a rebuke from Minh Mạng because he was not paying attention to the harvest in Quảng Bình when the people there were suffering from famine.Footnote 71 Nevertheless, he continued to have the king's ear and was often consulted about conditions in various parts of the country while gaining new promotions.Footnote 72 Despite the vicissitudes of his career, he was a Huế-born dynastic insider compared with Trứ, who was a northern outsider. In the summer of 1830, Quýnh and Trứ became colleagues on the committee to rectify laws.
Quýnh’s accusation and Trứ's demotion
According to the annals, when Trứ was working as Commissioner of Fields for the Landless in Nam Định province, he made the acquaintance of a local man named Phí Qúy Trại. Phí Qúy Trại was wealthy and influential; it is recorded that he followed Trứ around to be sent on errands. This brings to mind that in his initial proposal to settle landless people on abandoned land, cited above, Trứ had proposed to ‘assign local wealthy people to oversee the recruitment of poor people to open up the land’. It now happened that a provincial official from Nam Định named Nguyễn Nhược Sơn came to court and Phí Qúy Trại came with him. Trứ and Nguyễn Nhược Sơn then recommended that Phí Qúy Trại be appointed as a magistrate in Tiền Hải, one of the new districts that had been created by Trứ from abandoned land.
Quýnh knew of Phí Qúy Trại from the time that he had been assigned to supervise work on dykes in the north, and his opinion of Phí Qúy Trại was very negative. According to Quýnh, Phí Qúy Trại had no ability aside from being concerned with his own personal advantage and entreating for favours. Quýnh petitioned the king accusing Trứ and Nguyễn Nhược Sơn of recommending an unworthy person, which was a serious charge according to the protocol of appointments. According to Quýnh's peititon:
Phí Qúy Trại is nothing but a rich and influential person in Nam Định. He has appropriated public and private fields, and poor people without a means of livelihood have suffered by being ordered around by him. If he is appointed, not only will examination graduates assigned to Tiền Hải feel ashamed having to stand in the same rank with him but also Tiền Hải will become a den for shirkers. … Those two chaps [Trứ and Nguyễn Nhược Sơn], whatever they were thinking, have dared to take an appointment from the royal court and make of it a personal gift to reciprocate a personal matter. I request that the guilty be judged, that begging for favours be stopped, and that all subjects be admonished about deceiving the king for personal benefit.
Minh Mạng instructed Trứ to report his answer to this accusation and assigned officials to try the case. These officials recommended that the two accused men be dismissed, but the king, ‘as a special favour’, changed the verdict to demotion. Both Trứ and Nguyễn Nhược Sơn were assigned to be district magistrates. As for Phí Qúy Trại, he was sentenced to one hundred strokes of the rod and blacklisted for any future government employment.Footnote 73
We do not know what might have happened between Trứ and Quýnh after they had been assigned as seal keepers on the committee to rectify laws only a few months before the eruption of this episode. However, we know that Trứ was in his 50s while Quýnh was probably in his 30s. Trứ was a man of action who sought results, was willing to take extraordinary measures, and constantly generated new ideas; Quýnh was an inside man who, when sent out into a situation, would get excited and end up blundering about; he generated nothing new and was a stickler for rules and regulations. Both men were loyal, learned, and had useable talent for the throne. But, from what we can surmise about their personalities, it is easy to imagine that it would be difficult for them to work together harmoniously. Minh Mạng could not ignore Quýnh's accusation, but he was not about to lose Trứ's abilities by dismissing him from office as recommended by the court.
The later careers of Trứ and Quýnh
Being assigned as a district magistrate was a relatively minor form of demotion that positioned one for future advancement. And so it turned out for both Trứ and Nguyễn Nhơực Sơn. But while Nguyễn Nhược Sơn's subsequent career was pedestrian, Trứ's was distinguished and, in the clairvoyant words recorded about him when he had received his first major appointment in 1825, ‘above average’. In 1832 he was given a high appointment in the bi-provincial system that replaced the Hà Nội viceroy; he was responsible for security in the northeastern provinces of Hải Dương and Quảng Yên. From there he mobilised troops and from 1833 to 1835 was involved in putting down the Nông Văn Văn rebellion that roiled the northern mountains.
One episode at this time reveals that Trứ marched to his own drum. In one of his reports to the throne in 1833 he used a classical expression to the effect that he was requesting authorisation ‘to grasp the flag of righteousness and to stand on guard’. Some people in the Ministry of Ritual thought that this was suspicious and that he harboured some secret scheme. Minh Mạng rebuked them, saying: ‘Just because he uses old-fashioned language does not mean that he has some sneaky trick.’Footnote 74 This reveals the extent of suspicion and eager fault-finding that existed at the court.
In 1840, Trứ was reassigned to the war in Cambodia and commanded soldiers in the fighting there until 1844. The Siamese and Vietnamese had already been contending for supremacy in Cambodia for more than two centuries. In the second decade of the nineteenth century, Gia Long had gained the dominant position, but in 1833 Siam took advantage of an anti-Huế uprising among officials in Sài Gòn to advance into Cambodia. Years of warfare ensued. In 1840 the war took a bad turn for the Vietnamese. Trứ arrived on the battlefront with reinforcements that helped to re-establish the Vietnamese position in Cambodia. The war continued until 1847 when Thiêu Trị (r. 1841–1847), Minh Mạng's successor, being distracted by aggressive actions of the French navy, negotiated a peace with the Siamese and withdrew from Cambodia.
In 1844, Trứ was implicated by association with others accused of corruption, and briefly demoted to be a common soldier in Quảng Ngãi province, where he almost immediately began to rise again up officialdom's ladder. By 1846 he was the vice governor of Thừa Thiên province, where the capital Huế was located; in 1847 he was promoted to be governor. In 1848 he retired at the age of 70 with great honour. Ten years later when Franco–Philippine forces attacked, he emerged from retirement with the intention of fighting the invaders but suddenly died.
As for Quýnh, his career in officialdom coincided almost perfectly with the reign of Minh Mạng, which was probably a mercy for him, for Minh Mạng held a soft spot in his heart for this cranky man who went through the 1830s bumping up and down with promotions and demotions. Through it all, he clearly remained close to the king and maintained his reputation for erudition. A poem of his is included in a surviving anthology of poetry.Footnote 75 Some items attributed to him appear in a collection of petitions and reports to the throne from the reign of Minh Mạng.Footnote 76 He also appears as a co-compiler of three texts dated in 1835 that contain poems written by Minh Mạng on occasions of sending officials off to fight rebels.Footnote 77
He died from an unknown cause in the third month of 1840, only a few months before Minh Mạng died after falling off a horse. After Quýnh's death, Minh Mạng is reported to have told officials in the grand secretariat (nội các):
Quýnh comes from a family that has been loyal to my dynasty for generations. He was simple and rude but also upright and just. In his speech he was easily provoked and impetuous, which resulted in demotions and reassignments. Yet he was incorruptible and resolute, which is why he could continue to serve with honour. Now he has weakened and died, which is a great pity.Footnote 78
Here we see the solicitude of Minh Mạng for people whose loyalty to his dynasty he did not doubt. We can only conjecture about whether Minh Mạng would have had the same solicitude for Quýnh if Quýnh had not had such a famous grandfather, whose song had inspired the soldiers that carried Minh Mạng̣'s father to victory.
Conclusion
Philippe Langlet, A.B. Woodside, Choi Byung Wook and Nola Cooke have published important studies covering various aspects of the reign of Minh Mạng and of Nguyễn government more generally during the nineteenth century.Footnote 79 Here, I have simply taken a brief excursion into the sources to illuminate how the bureaucratic paths of Trứ and Quýnh crossed in 1830 and 1831. These two men illustrate two types of talent at the Huế court: Trứ could be trusted to go out into the countryside to deal with rebels and foreign enemies. Quýnh could be trusted to maintain the central machinery that kept the bureaucracy functioning. From this essay, we can see two aspects of Nguyễn officialdom during Minh Mạng's reign.
First, much is often made of the ups and downs of Trứ's career, as if this were an indication of the unusual force of his personality. But what we find is that demotions and promotions were normal and were simply how the system worked. The friction of competing ambitions within officialdom needed an outlet and the protocols for being promoted and demoted were the arena for sorting out relationships among officials and adjusting career trajectories appropriate for the available talent. Maximising the effectiveness, fairness, and ideological correctness of government policies and their implementations were the ideals toward which these protocols ostensibly aspired. But the push and shove of clashing personalities, regional loyalties, ideas, and ambitions that were inevitably produced among inhabitants of this bureaucracy produced the dynamic human energy that made things happen.
In general, what distinguished one official from another was not whether or not, or to what extent, one suffered demotions, but how high one could rise within the ranks and more or less stay there over a relatively long period of time. When Quýnh died after 20 years in officialdom, he was a mid-level official in the Ministry of Public Work. When Trứ retired after 28 years in officialdom, he held the prestigious post of governor of the province where the capital was located. On the other hand, judging solely from the frequency of their demotions and promotions, their careers were not much different. The routine of being promoted and demoted was a regular aspect of an organisation that was complex and unstable — it operated something like a gyroscope with a perpetual re-matching of talent and function within a context of human behaviour explained from a moral point of view.
This system of government needed the tightfistedness of Quýnh and others at court to preserve the coherence and royal grip necessary to maintain command. It also needed the openhandedness of Trứ and others who protected the court by knowing how to slap down threats and manage affairs in the countryside. But to make this system work, there needed to be a king who understood it and was sufficiently engaged to command it. After Minh Mạng, there was no such kind of king. His successors were incapable of surmounting the factional intrigue that paralysed officialdom in the looming shadow of French aggression.
So my second concluding point has to do with the role of Minh Mạng in this system of promoting and demoting. Minh Mạng was very engaged in the details of government operations and he was a good judge of human talent and character. He never tried to protect the people that he valued from accusations, investigations, and punishments, but he regularly intervened as the final arbiter to clear someone from charges that he considered to be without merit or to reduce the severity of a judgment and punishment. Without his steadying hand on the process we can imagine that this bureaucracy would easily have become the destructive arena of factionalism and intrigue that it later became with kings less able than he.
Neither Thiêu Trị (r. 1840–1847) nor Tự Đức (r. 1847–1883), the last kings before the French conquest, were capable of mastering the bureaucratic structure that Minh Mạng and his father had created. They were unable to assert their authority over headstrong subordinates and a rising tide of factionalism. Minh Mạng had the strength of character, the understanding of human personality, and the ability to take decisive action that kept his governing system leashed to his own guiding hand. During his reign, no ambitious subordinates rose up to grasp and to exercise royal authority as happened under Thiêu Trị and Tự Đức.
Epilogue
As for Trứ, we know from his poetry that the experience of poverty left a lifelong mark on his thought; his knowledge of peasant life surely inspired his achievements in suppressing rebels and bandits and in settling impoverished people on abandoned land. In one of his poems he cites a classical aphorism to express his outlook on life as a sequence of progressively related experiences: ‘poverty, advancement, adversity, understanding’ (cùng đạt biến thông).Footnote 80 The discipline of hardship gave him qualities that enabled advancement, which inevitably shifts to adversity out of which is gained understanding. He did not have the benefit of belonging to a family that was established at the royal court with influential connections and a secure source of private wealth, as for example Quýnh did. His family had been impoverished by the wars and depredations of the 1780s and 1790s; all that his father could bequeath to him was education. Without money to open doors and without an influential patron, it took him more than a decade of trying before he gained advancement. His ability to handle the bustle of life outside the court, however, made him useful to Minh Mạng.
In the following poem, Trứ begins by expressing an acceptance of humiliation as a mark of honour upon the road to fame:
In the first couplet, the poet sets his theme. In the second couplet, he meditates upon those who live in humiliation, being glad to have the bare essentials of nutrition and fashioning makeshift weapons to protect themselves in times of unrest. The third couplet turns to those in high positions of authority and how even they benefit from abasing themselves to listen to their inferiors and to experience adversity. Then, in the final couplet, the poet appears to give a sardonic twist to the entire topic by mocking the very idea of gaining fame, implying that this is possible only in the improbable case of the world being governed in peace, and that when that happens anyone can gain fame as easily as a bird flaps its wings. Yet, behind this surface humour lies a deeper critique of officialdom: that achieving good government is as likely as being able to gain fame by flapping one's wings; the metaphor plays with the cliché of officials at court standing lined up at attention like a row of storks or herons.
There is an anecdote from the time of his demotion from being a general in the army on the Cambodian battlefront to being a common soldier assigned to Quảng Ngãi province. This occurred in 1844 when he was 66 years old. According to the story, no transportation was allowed to him in reporting at his new assignment, so he reportedly walked around 800 kilometres from the far south to Quảng Ngãi in the garb of a common soldier and carrying his weapons. When he arrived, the Quảng Ngãi officials, many of whom were his friends or acquaintances, gave him an enthusiastic welcome. One embarrassed senior official urged him to divest himself of his soldier's accoutrements, but he reportedly replied:
I request to remain as I am. I did not take being commander of an army as cause for glory and now I do not take being a soldier as cause for shame. People in whatever position have the duties assigned to that position. If I am a soldier but do not carry my weapons then how can I be called a soldier?Footnote 82
Regardless of what may have actually happened, this anecdote reflects how Trứ has been remembered, and it resonates with the poem we just read. Trứ was not as simple as the anecdote suggests. The range of his poetry reveals that he was not unaffected by what happened to him:
But he seems to have known himself and to have been contented with himself:
