LA CAGE AUX FOLLES AND THE FALL OF THE NGUYEN DYNASTY
Many western historians view pre-colonial Vietnam as a place of horrors: constant wars, famine and disease, coupled with a largely illiterate and unwashed population. Look at Vietnam in the years immediately preceding the arrival of the French: all three regions of the country, led by three different brothers, were warring on each other!
Yet amongst all these horrors sublime beauty could be found in temples, road side shrines and common eateries. The Zen of everyday life is very powerful here! So how could such beauty coexist with armies ravaging back and forth and and rulers of differing ilk declaring themselves emperor?
In The Flower Sermon the Buddha silently held up a white flower to his disciples. But in confusion no one answered. Only one of them, Mahakasyapa, understood the meaning, the silent transmission of prajna, or wisdom. In recognition a secret smile graced his lips. In the original Zen Chinese it is said, “pick up flower, subtle smile.” The secret of Zen has nothing to do with wealth or power or material status. Instead, one recognizes things as the are: ‘Suchness’ or ‘Thathata’ . Of course, to the invading French, this was the worst sort of nonsense.
In this respect it’s worthwhile to examine the Nguyen Dynasty. They took over their country in 1802 and shortly afterwards moved the capitol from Hanoi to Hue. Needless to say, the rewards for dynastic rule were the usual: cruelty, madness, death, and in the case of the final Emperor, a luxurious life style in Monaco!
Yet it was through the Nguyen’s rule that beauty and literacy abounded. The Nguyen’s helped create the Nom, a hybrid Chinese/Vietnamese language that became prevalent among the upper echelons of society.
It persisted until the arrival of the French, who turned written Vietnamese into a more western oriented language. Today Nom is forgotten.
Unfortunately, the Nguyen’s rise to power coincided with French penetration into Indochine. First came the missionaries, then came the marines.
When the French seized Saigon in 1859 Emperor Tu Dun wept. Sadly, this was only one of many heartbreaks. He had suffered from smallpox as a boy: rendering him weak and impotent.
Despite the fantastic harem he maintained in the Imperial Palace he was unable to produce an heir. He was forced to adopt. In the end sadness begot sadness. With his dying breath he cursed the French, and as things turned out it wasn’t long before his wish came true.
The mausoleum of Emperor Tu Dun lays in the rolling hills outside the lovely city of Hue. We rode our sturdy one speeds along the Perfume River, passing the Thien Mu Pagoda. We didn’t stay long. We needed to get to the tomb of Tu Duc before the day became much too hot.
Then we were laboriously riding over hill and dale, ignominiously pushing our bikes up the steepest hills. We stopped to watch a puja with orange-robed monks in a local house. By then it was already very hot and I was drenched in sweat. We flew down a final hill and we were there!
Despite spending three years of constant effort that virtually bankrupted Vietnam, Emperor Tu Duc isn’t actually buried there!
After his death his body was spirited away to an undisclosed burial location.
Sadly, the two hundred attendants who accompanied his body were slaughtered to preserve the anonymity of the site. So much for the emperor who regarded the Confucian value of ‘modesty’ to be his highest virtue!
As the French attacks on Vietnam continued the sickly Nguyen Dynasty was incapable of devising a response. In general, the Emperors were more concerned with poetry and cultivating Confucian values than in the defense of their country. Except, of course, for the Mad Emperor Thanh Thai.
It’s really hard to gain any traction on the life of Thanh Thai. As a beautiful boy ruler he frequently looked like a deer in the headlights. Perhaps that was simply due to the requirement of 19th century photography for the subject to remain motionless for the extended shutter speed. But from the earliest days of his rule he was dogged by accusations of sensuousness and debauchery. Not from his countrymen, of course, for currently there are no Vietnamese/English translations of his rule. All the criticism came from the French, who by the 1880’s effectively ruled the country.
First Thanh Thai was accused of slipping out of the palace incognito to observe the life of common Vietnamese. Then he was accused of slipping out of the palace for secret assignations with common women.
Finally, and more seriously, he was accused of throwing concubines to their death in the tiger enclosure, of shooting concubines, of shooting the prince president of the Council of the Royal Family, and finally, of whipping the queen mother herself in her reading room!
That was the final straw. He was packed off for a thirty year exile to Reunion Island. His son, who assumed Thanh Thai’s rule, followed his father into exile a few years later. It would seem that the main objection that the French had with Thanh Thai was that he opposed the French!
By now it was late afternoon. We decided to get back on our bikes and ride the short distance over the hill to the tomb of Emperor Dong Khan. Although the short rule of Dong Khan immediately preceded that of Thanh Thai, it took another thirty five years for the mausoleum to be completed. In that time four separate monarchies rose and fell and Thanh Thai was still in exile in Reunion!
Outside of the ticket taker we were the only ones at the tomb. We walked up the hill with the wind sighing through the pine trees like the troubled whispers of ghostly attendents. It’s a nice site. The Stele Pavilion and Obelisks are much smaller than those at Tu Duc’s tomb, yet they are well proportioned and pleasing to the eye.
We wandered father up the trail. Behind the twisting pines we could see construction equipment and then a glorious phantasmagoria of folk art! Our curiosity was wetted.
Across the varied surfaces of the pavilions fantastic figures made of porcelain…some broken fragments and others purposefully made… disport in happiness or rage. Farmers farm, soldiers make war, and above it all, sages look down from wispy porcelain clouds.
Since we visited this site I have I’ve come across old photographs of this same location and it was a rather dowdy affair. But as you can see, this most recent restoration really pops with colors and textures and different ideas. And then there’s the porcelain!
Eventually tiredness overcame us. The sky had never been great all day but now it simply turned into a hot overcast haze. It was time to go. But it was hard to get excited with four miles of hills ahead of us. So in the end, the only thing that got us back to Hue was the fever dream of a Saigon beer, cold and glistening, rising out of the cooler…
I would like to thank Wikipedia for the use of their historical images