One major “blind spot” that exists in our understanding of modern Vietnamese history concerns what happened at the Nguyễn Dynasty court in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
For most of the nineteenth century, historians can consult compilations based on Nguyễn Dynasty court records that are known as “veritable records” (thực lục 實錄), but no such collections were made for the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Court documents from that period, however, do still exist.
I’ve recently been reading a work entitled the Essential Policies of the Đồng Khánh and Khải Định [Eras] (Đồng Khánh Khải Định chính yếu 啓定政要). Compiled in 1922, this text contains edicts and other documents that were written by the emperor at that time, Emperor Khải Định (r., 1916-1925), as well as documents that were written by his father, Emperor Đồng Khánh (r. 1885-1889).
Between the reigns of these two emperors were the reigns of two other emperors, Thành Thái and Duy Tân. However, their writings are not included in this compilation, and it is clear from some of the comments that Emperor Khải Định makes in this work that he did not have a positive view of these two emperors.
What this points to is a division in the royal family. When Emperor Đồng Khánh died in 1889, he will still in his 20s, and his son, Khải Định, was too young to succeed to the throne.
After coming to power in 1916, Khải Định clearly had a desire to “resurrect” and glorify his branch of the family. The Essential Policies of the Đồng Khánh and Khải Định [Eras] thus contained documents from his father’s and his own reign, and the collection as a whole was created in part to serve as a “textbook” for the man destined to be the next Nguyên Dynasty ruler – Bảo Đại.
1922, the year that this text was compiled, was also the year that the young Bảo Đại was sent to France to study. His father, Khải Định, accompanied him on this journey, thus becoming the first Vietnamese ruler to visit Europe.
A tutor in “Hán learning” (Hán học 漢學), a new twentieth-century concept that had emerged to refer to the traditional learning of Vietnam that was different from “Western learning” (Tây học 西學), also traveled to Europe where he was to teach Bạo Đại about the “essential policies” of his father and grandfather, as well as the moral teachings contained in the Confucian classics and other texts that had long served as the core sources for educating the young in Vietnam.
Bạo Đại is often referred to as the last Nguyễn Dynasty emperor, as he succeeded his father in 1925 and ruled the dynasty until its demise in 1945.
In reading the Essential Policies of the Đồng Khánh and Khải Định [Eras], however, I would label Khải Định as “the last emperor.” Khải Định was the last Nguyên Dynasty ruler to be fully trained in traditional learning, and to still be intellectually part of the traditional Vietnamese world.
Bảo Đại’s tutor may have taught him enough to perform rituals, but intellectually he was part of a new world, a Western world.
Bảo Đại was the last Vietnamese monarch, but his father was the last Vietnamese emperor.
In the days and weeks ahead, I’ll try to share some of what I have found in this work. If one searches for “Khải Định” on the Internet, it’s easy to find information about him, but none of it is based on any historical documents that he himself produced. Indeed, I’ve never seen any historian ever cite this work or even mention it.
In reading what Khải Định wrote, however, it is obvious that there is a lot more that we can learn about him and the times he lived in. And that can help us reduce the size of that blind spot in our understanding of modern Vietnamese history.
