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Vietnam – Nguyen Dynasty (1802-1945)
Hoang Tong – Emperor: 1916-1925
Bronze Thai Dinh Thong Bao Cash Token 42mm, Struck 1916-1925
Chinese Symbols.
Presentation Coin, Quoc, Thuan, Wu, Dien, Phonq, An, Dan Thai (Country
Prosperous, Citizens Peaceful, Winds, Harmony, Rain, Favorable).
You are bidding on the exact item pictured, provided with a Certificate of Authenticity and Lifetime Guarantee of Authenticity.
 Khải Định (啓定; born Nguyễn Phúc Bửu Đảo; 8 October 1885 – 6 November 1925) was the 12th Emperor of the Nguyễn Dynasty in Vietnam, reigning from 1916 to 1925. His name at birth was Prince Nguyễn Phúc Bửu Đảo. He was the son of Emperor Đồng Khánh, but he did not succeed him immediately.
Before Emperor Đồng Khánh’s era came the eras of Emperor Thành Thái and Emperor Duy Tân, both of whom were exiled by the French for their resistance to the colonial regime. After this trouble, the French decided to enthrone Bửu Đảo as he was the son of the monarch who was the most submissive Nguyễn collaborator with the colonial regime, standing with the French colonizers and opposing any independence movements, Emperor Đồng Khánh.
Nguyễn Phúc Bửu Đảo became the nominal ruler of Annam on 18 May 1916, after the exile of Duy Tân (Nguyễn Phúc Vĩnh San) and took the name Khải Định for his reign, meaning “auger of peace and stability.” He said he wanted to restore the prestige of the empire, but this was not possible with his close collaboration with the French occupiers. Although not satisfied with his position, Khải Định enacted a policy of close collaboration with the French government and was effectively a puppet political figurehead for the French colonial rulers, following all of their instructions to give “legitimacy” to French policies.
Because of this, Khải Định was very unpopular with the Vietnamese people. The nationalist leader Phan Châu Trinh accused him of selling out his country to the French and living in imperial luxury while the people were exploited by France. Nguyễn Ái Quốc (later known as Hồ Chí Minh) wrote a play about Khải Định called “The Bamboo Dragon” that ridiculed him as being all grand appearance and ceremony but a powerless puppet of the French government.
From 1919 onward, the Emperor made a decree that Vietnam cease to use Chinese as official written language and was replaced by Romanized Vietnamese.
In 1922, the Emperor’s visit to France to see the Marseilles Colonial Exhibition was also ridiculed by nationalist leaders, who hated Vietnam’s status as a colonial subject of France and saw nothing in the exhibition worth celebrating.
Emperor Khải Định’s unpopularity reached its peak in 1923 when he authorized the French to raise taxes on the Vietnamese peasants, part of which was to pay for the building of his palatial tomb, and which caused a great deal of hardship. He also signed the orders of arrest against many nationalist leaders, such as Phan Bội Châu, forcing them into exile and having their followers who were captured beheaded.
When he was still Duke of Phụng Hóa, Emperor Khải Định married his first wife Trương Như Thị Tịnh in 1907. She left him in 1915 and became a nun, before he was enthroned. Upon ascending the throne, he married his second wife, Ân phi, Noble consort of the first rank Hồ Thị Chỉ (1902–1982) of An Truyền Hồ Đắc clan. She is a daughter of Hồ Đắc Trung, who became Annam’s Minister for Public Instruction. Emperor Khải Định had his first and only son with one of his concubines, Hoàng Thị Cúc (1890–1980). She gave birth to Nguyễn Phúc Vĩnh Thụy (later Emperor Bảo Đại) in 1913. After Khải Định’s ascension, she was given the title of Huệ tần, noble consort of the third rank, later elevated to the title Huệ phi, noble consort of the second rank.
Historical records and studies state that Emperor Khải Định only had homosexual desires. He rarely slept with his wives during his reign. He was close to his male guard, Nguyễn Đắc Vọng, and always slept with him.
Khải Định suffered poor health like his father and became a drug addict. He died of tuberculosis in the Imperial City of Huế, according to his concubine Ba Phi, who described him as “not interested in sex” and “physically weak“.
 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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