Tay Son Rebellion

In 1771 three brothers, Nguyen Nhac, Nguyen Lu and Nguyen Hue, started a revolt in Tay Son, a village in Binh Dinh in central Vietnam. They were from a family of merchants and farmers, and their revolt drew on peasant anger over taxes and corruption. Within a few years they had overthrown the Nguyen lords who ruled the south, and in the 1780s they struck north and ended the Trinh lords, who had held real power over the Le emperors.¹⁴

Vietnam was split in two by then. The Trinh lords ruled the north in the name of the Le emperors, and the Nguyen lords ruled the south, which had expanded as far as the Mekong delta. Famine, heavy taxes and a corrupt regent in the south left both regimes unpopular. The Tay Son brothers promised land and tax relief and recruited soldiers, and Nguyen Hue proved a brilliant general. In 1785 he destroyed a Siamese army that had come to back the Nguyen at Rach Gam and Xoai Mut. In 1788 he proclaimed himself Emperor Quang Trung and in early 1789 he crushed a Qing army, sent to restore the Le, near Hanoi during the Tet holiday.¹²

Quang Trung died in 1792, and his young son could not hold the realm together. The surviving Nguyen prince, Nguyen Anh, with French help and Siamese refuge, rebuilt his forces in the south and overcame the Tay Son by 1802, when he became Emperor Gia Long. The Tay Son era left a record of a bold effort at reform, including writing in the Vietnamese demotic script, though most of what is known comes from the writings of its enemies.¹³