Subject: quý ông nobleman as mandarin
Culture: Vietnamese
Setting: French occupation, Nguyen dynasty Vietnam mid 19thc - early 20thc
Evolution:
Context (Event Photos, Primary Sources, Secondary Sources, Field Notes)
* Woodside 1971 p61-62
"In both Peking and Huế the emperor or Son of Heaven stood at the top of three basic hierarchies, civil, military, and censorial or censorial-judicial. The hierarchy of civil bureaucrats in both China and Vietnam was divided into eighteen grades, 1A to 9B. The grades were marked off from each other by different styles of clothing, different perquisites, different salaries, and different degrees of access to the imperial court. The links between bureaucratic posts and hierarchical grades were largely but not completely similar in Ch'ing China and Nguyễn Vietnam. Nguyễn board presidents, for example, were called 'great ministers' (đại thân), a unique usage of Ch'ing China. But they held more the lowly hierarchical grade of 2A, as did their earlier counterparts in Ming China. In Ch'ing China the governor-general at the summit of the formal provincial administration occupied the grade of 1B and the district magistrate at the bottom of the same administration found himself in the seventh grade. But in Vietnam the equivalent posts were 2A and 6A-6B respectively, an arrangement which may have reflected the less extensive gradation of difficulty and scope of jurisdiction between the two commissions in a smaller country. In fact the major divergences of the Nguyễn bureaucratic rank system came at the sub-provincial level of the territorial administration. Here hierarchical positions descended as intricately as they did in China, on paper, but differentiations of function lost their sharpness, comparatively speaking, and faded out.
"Neither in China nor in Vietnam did these ranks or grades guarantee power. Power was derived from commissions in the bureaucracy, not from statuses -- and commissions were personally conferred by the emperor. In this way Chinese and Vietnamese governments, as wholes, represent peculiar mixtures of bureaucratic and non-bureaucratic elements. If the obedience the official offered to the emperor was an obligation of his status rather than of personal individual life-long loyalty, the emperor's control of the official was distinctly personal. Success as a ruler in the Sino-Vietnamese political scheme depended upon this direct control of the bureaucracy through personal manipulation, rather than upon direct proprietary custody of resources, which in fact was decentralized in China and Vietnam. Some of the more obvious techniques of imperial control which Chinese courts invented and Vietnamese courts inherited included the periodic circulation of bureaucrats in office (to prevent them from developing local power bases), the manipulation of social mobility channels (by setting regional quotas in the examination systems), the adroit balancing of one group of bureaucrats against another (by means of an internal intelligence network of censors, and periodic ratings of inferiors by superiors) as well as the personal authorization of all appointments."
* Woodside 1971 p65
"It is evident that the famous 'generalism' of Chinese and Vietnamese scholar-officials was the historical outcome of more than just classical Confucianism, which defined officials as being moral and cultural paragons, 'gentlemen' rather than 'tools.' It was, like so many other of the group characteristics and patterns of behavior within the bureaucratic hierarchy, the product of a centuries-old balancing process in power-dependence relations between the court and the bureaucracy. If it cannot be wholly ascribed to the expositions of Confucius and his disciples, whose paternity of historical forces and ideas was really not as impossibly fertile as is sometimes thought, the admission must nonetheless be made that narrowly specializing administrators would have become aloof and inaccessible as a social elite. That is, they would have become less imitable by other people. Thus they would have been less able to communicate the generally relevant values of their culture to the rest of their society by personally enacting them. The resulting social-cultural disintegration and reorganization would have undermined them as much as the ruler. Their very imitability came from the time-tested generalness of their superiority, which allowed them to make their own standards all-pervasive. 'Generalism' served both the official inside the bureaucracy and the emperor outside it."
* SarDesai 1997 p188
"Opposition to French rule began almost as soon as they had occupied Cochin China in 1862. It was led by all types of people, including peasants and fishermen, who were not prepared to abandon their time-honored culture for that of people separated from them 'by thousands of mountains and seas.' The resistance movement grew to revolutionary proportions after the French conquest of Annam in 1885. The so-called pacification program, like its British counterpart in Myanmar, was most intense until 1895, but it extended in Vietnam to 1913. In a particularly vicious campaign from 1909 to 1913, the French hounded the resistance leaders and murdered them one by one. The peasantry harbored and supported the leaders of the resistance movement, known as Can Vuong (aid the king), which included the scholar-gentry, the Vietnamese mandarin class. In the decades before 1900, the mandarins appeared to believe that the French occupation of their lands might spell loss of political control but not a cultural or spiritual loss. By 1900, however, a new generation of maturing mandarins grew apprehensive that the educational and cultural impact of French culture had become pervasive. They were haunted by the image of mat nuoc (losing one's country), not merely in political terms but more seriously in the sense of their future survival as Vietnamese. Mandarins thus fell into three groups: those who withdrew to the villages in a sort of passive noncooperation, and those who struggled desperately through participation in the resistance movement to bring new meaning and ethnic salvation (cuu nuoc) to the populace."
Saber
"In the early nineteenth century another foreign influence affected Vietnamese dao - France. After the French bankrolled the establishment of the Nguyen dynasty in 1802, lion-head pommels began appearing. These sabers are essentially European in design, with 'D' shaded [SIC] knucklebows. This French pattern is overlaid and decorated in the local Vietnamese fashion, usually with embossed silver fittings on the scabbard and hilt and mother of pearl inlay in lacquer or rose wood scabbards. Other examples have plain tortoise shell covered scabbards. This style of saber has a scabbard chape with an usually sharp upward accelerating curve terminating in a sharp end. This is quite different from sabers of European design which tend to have chapes with rounded ends. This pointed chape is most likely a hold-over from Ming Chinese influences."
"Returning to the specific features of the Vietnamese term “kiem” and “guom”, it has to be added that it is also utilized to refer to almost all varieties of European sabers and even Kossack shashkas, as well as local (often ceremonial) sabers showing a French style guard in the form of the Latin letter “D”. The latter are fairly well presented in museum and private collections both in Vietnam and abroad. In Paris Army Museum an illustrative example under number 5206 I is kept, quite a number of them are displayed in Vietnamese museums, the earliest ones dated to the late 19th century when the European intervention was already under way. These sabers grew widespread with the establishment of the Nguyen dynasty in 1802, which rising to power was to a great extent made possible thanks to the French economical support (in particular, with weapons). Their stylized handles quite often capture the flair of Napoleon`s era and Empire style which was in vogue at that time and reflected in a peculiar way in weapon manufacture. In his article, the Russian scholar S. Barchewsky writes in detail about the ceremonial versions of these weapons and their decorative design. Scott Rodell also mentions sabers of French design insistently calling them dao following the Chinese tradition. The French authors call it guom."
Costume
* Vietnam teaching jobs 2025-02-17 online
"By the Nguyen dynasty (19th century), the male áo dài emerged, representing a blend of practicality and elegance. The Nguyễn court formalized specific dress codes for different social classes, solidifying traditional styles."
* Traditional Vietnamese dress online
"Ao gam and ao dai with long sleeves represent nobility and elegance, historically worn by aristocrats and mandarins. These versions feature wide sleeves, thick brocade fabric, and intricate embroidery, denoting wealth and status."
* Vietnamese traditional costumes online
"One of the most iconic traditional costumes for men in Vietnam is the Ao Dai. This is the male version of the Ao Dai, which is the national costume of Vietnam and is also a well-known costume for women. The Ao Dai is a long tunic that fits tightly around the torso and flows loosely to the ground. It is often worn with loose-fitting pants and a headpiece. The Ao Dai is commonly worn for special occasions such as weddings, Tet (Vietnamese Lunar New Year), or other formal events."
Baton
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