tuduc

       Born on September 22, 1829 Emperor Tu Duc was crowned in 1848 as the Son of Heaven. His father, Emperor Thieu Tri had changed the law of succession so that he could choose his successor rather than the crown passing from oldest son to oldest son. It is for this reason that the youngest son, Tu Duc, became emperor and not Crown Prince Hong Bao. The boy's mother was the soon to be famous Empress-Dowager Tu Du and the new emperor was reported to be the most intelligent and well-educated of the Nguyen monarchs. This would prove to be a neccessary quality since the French were becoming more and more aggressive in their desire to control all of Indochina. The new monarch would have to face challenges past royals did not have to deal with and ultimately, Emperor Tu Duc would be called by some the last independent Vietnamese emperor.
        To most people, Emperor Tu Duc is remembered as an upstanding Confucian monarch, a great scholar and generally just what a good Asian emperor was supposed to be. However, his reign was facing nothing like typical Vietnamese problems but rather the encroaching western power of France who viewed Vietnam as their's for the taking, saw Confucianism as a backward ideology and generally held the Vietnamese to be inferior people. Emperor Tu Duc had to deal first with rebellions against his own authority by his brother who had been passed over for the throne, remnants of the Le dynasty loyalists and later difficult French missionaries whose persecution gave France a reason for open hostilities against Vietnam.
        Again, Emperor Tu Duc was tolerant of the Christian faith but this ended when it was discovered that a French priest had been involved in the effort to overthrow him. This was only the latest in a series of missionary involvement, possibly backed by the French government in several palace coups. In 1848 Tu Duc decreed that all Vietnamese converts were to renounce Christianity and return to their traditional beliefs or be branded a heretic and lose all privelages. His crackdown on French and Spanish missionaries brought western opinion down against Vietnam, most never hearing of the previous intrigues against the government by spiritual men trespassing into temporal affairs. The French began attacking north from Cochinchina and Emperor Tu Duc had to order a military draft and establish a system for formal military training.
        However, the bravery of the primitive Vietnamese army was no match for the armed might of modern French weapons and soon most of Vietnam was under French control which they referred to as "protection". It was a protection that the Emperor did not want and soon his actual authority reached no farther than the walls of the Forbidden City. This began the period that U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt referred to as the "milking of the Vietnamese". Emperor Tu Duc died on July 17, 1883 leaving the throne to his adopted nephew Emperor Duc Duc. The author Oscar Chapius wrote that, like King Louis XV, Emperor Tu Duc could have truthfully said, "Apres moi le deluge". The era of French colonial rule had begun.