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Vietnam – Nguyen Dynasty (1802-1945)
Duy Tan – Emperor: 1907-1916
Bronze Duy Tan Thong Bao Cash Token 24mm, Struck 1907-1916
Reference: B 108.5, H 25.41, No=14
Chinese Symbols.
Olive patina, Van.
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 Emperor Duy Tân (維新, lit. “renovation”; 19 September 1900 – 26 December 1945), born Nguyễn Phúc Vĩnh San, was an emperor of the Nguyễn Dynasty who reigned for 9 years between 1907 and 1916.
Duy Tân (at the time, known by his birth name, Prince Nguyễn Phúc Vĩnh San) was son of the Thành Thái emperor. Because of his opposition to French rule and his erratic, depraved actions (which some speculate were feigned to shield his opposition from the French) Thành Thái was declared insane and exiled to Vũng Tàu in 1907. The French decided to pass the throne to his son Nguyễn Phúc Vĩnh San, despite the fact that he was only seven years old. The French hoped that someone so young would be easily influenced and controlled, and thus raised to be pro-French.
The efforts on the part of the French to raise the prince to support them largely failed. Nguyễn Phúc Vĩnh San was enthroned with the reign name of Duy Tân, meaning “friend of reform”, but in time he proved incapable of living up to this name. As he became older he noticed that, even though he was treated as the emperor, it was the colonial authorities who were actually obeyed. As he became a teenager, Emperor Duy Tân came under the influence of the mandarin Trần Cao Vân, who was very much opposed to the colonial administration. Emperor Duy Tân began to plan a secret rebellion with Trần Cao Vân and others to overthrow the French.
In 1916, while France was preoccupied with fighting World War I, Emperor Duy Tân was smuggled out of the Forbidden City with Trần Cao Vân to call upon the people to rise up against the French. However, the secret was revealed and France immediately sent troops there, and after only a few days, they were betrayed and captured by the French authorities. Because of his age and to avoid a worse situation, Emperor Duy Tân was deposed and exiled instead of being killed. Trần Cao Vân and the rest of the revolutionaries were all beheaded.
The former emperor was exiled with his father (Thành Thái) to Réunion Island in the Indian Ocean. Prince Vĩnh San continued to favor national liberation for Vietnam in exile.
During World War II he resisted the Vichy Regime until the Liberation of La Réunion, after which he joined the Free French Forces and became a low-ranking naval officer on the French destroyer Léopard, serving as radio officer. He then joined the Free French army as a second lieutenant in December 1942, receiving successive promotions to lieutenant (1943), captain (1944), major (July 1945) and lieutenant-colonel (September 1945).
When France was facing defeat by the Viet Minh, and the regime of Emperor Bảo Đại proved incapable of gaining any public support, French leader Charles de Gaulle talked to Prince Vĩnh San, who was still very popular in the Vietnamese public memory for his patriotism, about returning to Vietnam as emperor. However, he died in a plane crash in Central Africa on his way home to Vietnam in 1945 and the great hopes of many died with him – as a patriotic challenge to Hồ Chí Minh. For his wartime service, the French posthumously awarded him the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour and the Officer’s Médaille de la Résistance, also appointing him a Companion of the Ordre de la Libération.
In 1987, his son, Prince Bảo Vàng, and the royal family of Vietnam accompanied his father’s remains, which were removed from Africa and brought home to Vietnam in a traditional ceremony to rest in the tomb of his grandfather, Emperor Dục Đức. In 2001, Prince Bảo Vang wrote a book titled Duy Tân, Empereur d’Annam 1900–1945 about his father’s life. Most cities in Vietnam have named major streets after him.
 The Nguyễn dynasty (Chữ Nôm: 茹阮, Vietnamese: Nhà Nguyễn; Hán tự: 阮朝, Vietnamese: Nguyễn triều) was the last Vietnamese dynasty, which ruled the unified Vietnamese state largely independently from 1802 to 1884. During its existence, the empire expanded into modern-day southern Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos through a continuation of the centuries-long Nam tiến and Siamese–Vietnamese wars. After 1883, the Nguyễn emperors ruled nominally as heads of state of the French protectorates of Annam and Tonkin until the final months of WWII; they later nominally ruled over the Empire of Vietnam until the Japanese surrender.
The Nguyễn Phúc family established feudal rule over large amounts of territory as the Nguyễn Lords by the 16th century before defeating the Tây Sơn dynasty and establishing their own imperial rule in the 19th century. The dynastic rule began with Gia Long ascending the throne in 1802, after ending the previous Tây Sơn dynasty. The Nguyễn dynasty was gradually absorbed by France over the course of several decades in the latter half of the 19th century, beginning with the Cochinchina Campaign in 1858 which led to the occupation of the southern area of Vietnam. A series of unequal treaties followed; the occupied territory became the French colony of Cochinchina in the 1862 Treaty of Saigon, and the 1863 Treaty of Huế gave France access to Vietnamese ports and increased control of its foreign affairs. Finally, the 1883 and 1884 Treaties of Huế divided the remaining Vietnamese territory into the protectorates of Annam and Tonkin under nominal Nguyễn Phúc rule. In 1887, Cochinchina, Annam, Tonkin, and the French Protectorate of Cambodia were grouped together to form French Indochina.
The Nguyễn dynasty remained the formal emperors of Annam and Tonkin within Indochina until World War II. Japan had occupied Indochina with French collaboration in 1940, but as the war seemed increasingly lost, overthrew the French administration in March 1945 and proclaimed independence for its constituent countries. The Empire of Vietnam under Emperor Bảo Đại was a nominally independent Japanese puppet state during the last months of the war. It ended with Bảo Đại’s abdication following the surrender of Japan and August Revolution by the anti-colonial Việt Minh in the August 1945. This ended the 143-year rule of the Nguyễn dynasty. Many Vietnamese historians have a harsh and poor assessment of the Nguyễn dynasty.
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