Artillery of the Nguyen Lords

The artillery of the Nguyen Lords, the family that ruled southern Vietnam from the late 1500s to the late 1700s, and the precursor of the Nguyen Dynasty, was an important component of their military success in repelling attacks from the rival Trinh Lords, their northern contemporaries. Between 1627 and 1672, seven campaigns were waged by the Trinh in an attempt to break the Nguyen, without success, along a frontline in the vicinity of what later became the 17th parallel that divided Vietnam some three centuries later. The Nguyen were much weaker than the Trinh in terms of having an established state and administration, with a vastly smaller army and population from which to draw resources, but their fortification system and their superior artillery allowed them to repel attacks from a stronger enemy while at the same time pushing southwards in the "Nam Tien" ("southward march") which established Vietnam's modern-day territory.

Background

Artillery had been known in Vietnam since at least the 14th century. In the late 14th century, as the Tran dynasty was at its weakest point prior to the Chinese invasion by the Ming Dynasty in 1407, Vietnam had been frequently troubled by incursions by the kingdom of Champa, which was located in modern-day central Vietnam. The latest incursion led by Che Bong Nga, widely regarded as Champa's greatest king, was killed by cannonfire in 1390. The "Ming Shi" (History of Ming) went as far as to claim that the Chinese learned how to construct cannons from the Vietnamese after they invaded Dai Viet (the then name of Vietnam) in 1407,Li, p. 43.] although the historian Li Tana interpreted this as referring to a particular model of weapon, since Kublai Khan had used cannons in his invasion of Japan, and because cannons built in the 1370s were unearthed in northern China.Li, p. 44.]

A later instance of cannon use came in 1593 after the split between the Nguyen and Trinh Lords. The families had been leading forces in the imperial service of the Le Dynasty that was established after Le Loi expelled the Chinese and ended the Ming occupation in 1428. By the start of the 16th century, the power of the Le family had evaporated and a series of Le kings were enthroned and dethroned by the Trinh family, who held "de facto" power. Furthermore, the Mac of Mac Dang Dung usurped the throne and Trinh and the Nguyen fell out, leading to a three way power struggle. In 1558, the leader of the Nguyen clan, Nguyen Hoang, whose sister was the wife of Trinh Kiem, the leader of the Trinh, decided that it was no longer safe for him to stay in Hanoi. He feigned madness and told his sister to convince Kiem to send him to Thuan Hoa, which is the location of modern-day Hue. At the time, Thuan Hoa was at the periphery of Vietnamese territory. Although the 1471 Vietnamese invasion of Champa of Emperor Le Thanh Ton had taken the Vietnamese army further south and broken the back of the Champa kingdom, the area was still to be consolidated under Vietnamese administration, and was largely lawless and insecure. Kiem agreed to send Hoang and the Nguyen family to Thuan Hoa, thinking that his brother-in-law was genuinely mad, in the hope and expectation that he would not last long in the insecure territory.

During this time, Hoang still proclaimed his loyalty to the Le Dynasty and the Trinh Lords, and sent the annual taxes back to Hanoi. During this time, he had already made an impact with his artillery, when in 1593 he took his army to the north of the country to help the Le and the Trinh end the decades long campaign. The court records that the Mac were quickly crushed after Hoang brought "large cannons of all types" into battle. The scholar of Asian history, Keith Taylor, wrote of the Le Dynasty annals and its portrayal of Hoang's cannon:"There is an air of the exotic and the marvelous in the northern annal's perception of Nguyen Hoang's arrival. He bursts with amazing wealth and a wonderful engine of war into a scene straitened by poverty and powerful enemies."

In 1620, the Nguyen lords formally broke with the Trinh, after Hoang's son and successor Nguyen Phuc Nguyen refused to continue the annual paying of taxes to the capital, leading to a period of tension culminating in the Trịnh-Nguyễn War.

Origins

The origin of the first Nguyen cannons were unclear. At the time, the Japanese government had banned Japanese naval merchants from exporting firearms, although there had been instances of Japanese licensed vessels who had flouted the ban, including one ship that had been arrested by the Dutch Governor General of Taiwan in 1628 for illegally shipping 200 muskets and a small number of cannons. At the time, the Netherlands controlled Taiwan and was engaged in selling weaponry, but the relations between the Nguyen and the Dutch were poor, including instances of naval skirmishes, so historians considered it unlikely that the Nguyen procured their cannons from the Dutch. At the time, Chinese traders had difficulty obtaining artillery, so scholars pinpointed Macau as the most likely source of the cannon.

In his diary, the Vietnamese speaking Jesuit priest Christoforo Borri, who worked as a Catholic missionary in Vietnam in the 1620s, asserted an unconventional hypothesis to explain the Nguyen cannons. He claimed that the Nguyen Lords acquired their first artillery through luck, after a wrecked ship had run aground. He claimed that Nguyen Phuc Nguyen's decision to flout the authority of the Trinh was prompted by the fortuitous acquisition of the cannon, writing ths his defiance was caused by being "suddenly furnished with divers pieces of artillery recovered and gotten out of the ship-wreck of sundry ships of the Portugals and Hollanders." Borri went on to remark that he felt that the Nguyen Lords' army had honed their cannon operating skills to the extent that "they surpass our Europeans."

Production and usage

The artillery was the centrepiece of the Nguyen defense against the Trinh onslaught from the very start. According to "Tien Bien", the court annals of the Nguyen, the first of the Nguyen's two famous large defensive walls in modern Quang Binh Province, known as the "Luy Nhat Le", was heavily lined with artillery. According to the annals, cannons were placed at four metre intervals along the 12 km wall, with a large battery at every twelve to twenty metres. The annals went on to note that "ammunition was so abundant that the depots were like mountains." This would have meant that there were 3,000 cannons along the wall.

However, the Dutch traveller Johan van Linga placed doubt on this claim by the Nguyen annals, after he estimated in his 1642 writings that the Nguyen possessed approximately 200 cannons. Nevertheless, despite the uncertain number of cannons in the Nguyen arsenal, historians have long credited the Nguyen artillery as one of the key reasons that they were able to defeat an army many times larger.

The Nguyen were also able to able to cast their own cannons on their own territory, which was seen as a further factor in their ability to gain such a superiority in their artillery. The time at which the Nguyen developed their own production facilities has remained a point of academic dispute. Early 20th century French language scholars such as Le Thanh Khoi, Charles Maybon and Leopold Cadiere thought that a Portuguese man by the name of Joaoa da Cruz has started a foundry in 1615. However, in 1972, Pierre-Yve Manguin cast doubt on this by noting that the Nguyen sent 3,000 kg of copper to Macau in 1651 so that it could be cast into cannon, reasoning that it would be illogical to do so if they had access to a foundry on their own territory. Manguin instead dated da Cruz' arrival in Vietnam to be in 1658. In another account, the "Tien Bien" recorded that in 1631, a cannon foundry existed in a quarter of Hue known as Phuong Duc, where da Cruz was later reported to have worked.

By the time da Cruz had died in 1682, the Nguyen were producing most of their artillery needs, using Portuguese models.

In 1750, the French merchant Pierre Poivre reported that the Nguyen were in possession of 1,200 cannons, long after the Trinh had given up on conquering the Nguyen. Despite their non-use, the artillery was well known and synonymous with the Nguyen, with the cannons being universally noted in written accounts by European travellers of the time.Li, p. 45.]

However, by this time, the Nguyen artillery had become rather obsolete. Poivre was scathing in his assessment of the relevance of the weapons, writing that the Nguyen "take no notice, or are unaware, of what could make this artillery useful. None of the cannons has got six shots to fire and most of the cannonballs are not of the right caliber."Li, p. 46.]

In the 1770s, the rule of the Nguyen Lords came to an end with the uprising of the Tay Son Dynasty. As the Nguyen were toppled, it was reported that none of their cannons were used in an attempt to quell the uprising. This led the historian Anthony Reid to opine that the Nguyen had begun to view their artillery only for decorative purposes, as was the case in other Southeast Asian countries, as "more a means of boosting morale and expressing the supernatural power of the state than of destroying the enemy".

Notes

References

*cite book |title=Nguyen Cochinchina| author=Li Tana |year=1998 |publisher=Cornell Southeast Asia Program |isbn=0-87727-722-2