Mainland Southeast Asia, 1600–1660

Nanda Bayin, king since 1581, had watched his vassals break away one by one. In December 1599 he surrendered Pegu to the kings of Toungoo and Arakan and was carried to Toungoo as a captive. In 1600 Naresuan of Siam besieged Toungoo to get him, and Minye Thihathu refused to give him up.

Natshinnaung, Minye Thihathu's son and a poet, had loved the widowed princess Yaza Datu Kalaya for years, and Nanda had refused the match. Convinced the captive still stood behind his father's refusal, he killed Nanda at Toungoo on 30 November 1600. His displeased father gave the fallen king a respectful cremation.

Yaza Datu Kalaya, Bayinnaung's daughter and widow of Nanda's crown prince, was a poet herself and nineteen years older than Natshinnaung. His poems to her are counted among the finest in Burmese. Minye Thihathu at last relented: they married when Natshinnaung was made crown prince in March 1603, and she died that November.

Min Razagyi of Arakan had besieged Pegu with Toungoo, burned it and kept its port, Syriam. In June 1600 he left the captain of his Portuguese mercenaries, Filipe de Brito, as governor there. When de Brito revolted in 1603, the Arakanese crown prince sent to retake Syriam was ambushed and captured, and Min Razagyi paid a ransom and let Syriam go.

Filipe de Brito, Nga Zinga to the Burmese, built forts at Syriam, drew Portuguese settlers there, and in March 1603, backed by the viceroy at Goa, declared it for Portugal. He went on to bind himself to Siam's lord of Martaban, Binnya Dala, whose daughter married de Brito's son.

Nyaungyan, Nanda's half-brother, had made himself king at Ava in 1600 and was rebuilding Upper Burma from its rice lands. He took the Shan hill states one by one and by 1604 held Mone, on Lan Na's border. That advance into lands Siam counted as its own brought Naresuan north.

Naresuan, who had freed Siam from Burmese overlordship, now acted as overlord of his neighbours. He fell back from Toungoo in May 1600 when Arakanese raids cut his supplies, but kept the coast as far north as Martaban. In 1602 the ruler of Lan Na became his vassal, and he sent a Cambodian prince home to rule.

Early in 1605 Naresuan marched north to stop Nyaungyan. At Mueang Haeng, on the frontier, he fell ill, and he died on 25 April. His brother Ekathotsarot became king and called off the invasion; the threat to Ava was gone.

Members of Cambodia's royal family had been held in Ayutthaya since the Siamese took Longvek in 1594. In 1602 Naresuan let one of them, Srei Soriyopear, go home to rule Cambodia by his leave. His son Chey Chettha stayed in Ayutthaya and came home only later.

Vorapita, a commoner married to a princess of the royal line, governed Lan Xang for his son, made king in 1596 at about eleven. When an army he had sent against Lan Na came home beaten and short of food, he barred it from Vientiane and threatened its commanders, who turned to the young king and besieged the capital.

For months father and son fought over Vientiane, until the Buddhist clergy made peace between them. Vorapita gave up the regency and withdrew to Nakhon Phanom, and in 1603 Voravongsa was crowned as Thammikarath, the righteous king, and threw off the overlordship Burma had held since 1575. The chronicles disagree on the dates, some putting his seizure of power in 1599.

Nguyễn Hoàng governed Thuận Hóa and Quảng Nam for the Lê, but from 1593 he had been kept for eight years at the Trịnh court. In summer 1600 he took command against a revolt that the northern chronicle says he had stirred up, and slipped away south. To keep the peace he married a daughter to Trịnh Tùng's son Trịnh Tráng and left a son and a grandson in the north as hostages.

Trịnh Tùng had won Thăng Long back from the Mạc for the Lê in 1592. In 1599 he made the emperor name him Bình An Vương and set up his own palace beside the throne; appointments, taxes and the army now ran through the lord's palace. When the emperor died that year he passed over the crown prince for a younger son.

Lê Kính Tông, Lê Duy Tân, became emperor in October 1599 at twelve, chosen by Trịnh Tùng, and married Tùng's daughter. When the revolt of 1600 broke out, lord and emperor had to flee Thăng Long, and the Mạc held it until Tùng's armies drove them back to the hills.

Phùng Khắc Khoan, a scholar and poet who had served the Lê cause since the 1550s, led the embassy to the Ming court in 1597, where he exchanged verses in writing with the Korean envoy Yi Su-gwang. Kính Tông made him minister of works in 1599 and of revenue in 1602; he then retired to his village and died in 1613.

Nyaungyan died on campaign in the Shan hills, and his son Anaukpetlun took up the work of putting Burma back together. He took Prome in July 1608, Toungoo in 1610, and Syriam in March 1613 after a siege by land and river; in May Martaban submitted to him. Kingship was rebuilt by taking the ports and the men who held them.

Thalun, Anaukpetlun's younger brother, was given Prome to govern after its capture in 1608. For the next twenty years he commanded in his brother's wars, from the coast to the Shan states on the Chinese frontier, and gathered the standing that would let him claim the throne when his brother was murdered.

Natshinnaung succeeded his father at Toungoo in 1609, but in 1610 Anaukpetlun took the city and left him only a vassal. Unwilling to accept it, he called in de Brito and Binnya Dala; their men sacked Toungoo and took him to Syriam. When Syriam fell he was put to death with de Brito, in April 1613.

De Brito's Syriam was the strongest port on the coast. Anaukpetlun besieged it with an army and a river fleet, and it fell on 29 March 1613 after thirty-six days. De Brito was impaled, and the Portuguese prisoners were marched north to serve the Burmese king as gunners.

Binnya Dala held Martaban for Siam, bound to de Brito by his daughter's marriage and partner in the raid on Toungoo. With Syriam gone he surrendered Martaban to Anaukpetlun on 14 May 1613, and Siam's hold on the coast north of Tavoy ended.

Ekathotsarot kept the peace Naresuan had won. In 1608 his embassy reached The Hague and met Maurice of Nassau. He raised regiments of foreign volunteers, Japanese among them, and traded with Tokugawa Japan. He died in 1610 or 1611, grieving, it was said, for his son Suthat, who took poison after the king accused him of rebellion.

Ekathotsarot's younger son Si Saowaphak reigned less than a year: Japanese traders stormed the palace and held him hostage, and he was killed. Another son, Songtham, a former monk remembered for his piety, took the throne in 1611. His court came to rest on foreign trade and foreign soldiers.

Voravongsa ruled a Lan Xang at peace. In 1612, Siamese sources say, hearing that Ayutthaya had fallen into foreign hands during the Japanese troubles, he marched down as far as Lopburi. The Lao accounts say he found it untrue and went home; an Italian telling has Songtham beat him in April 1612, the king escaping on horseback.

After Syriam, Anaukpetlun tried Siam's own coast: his army beat the Siamese at Tavoy in December 1613 but was driven back by the Portuguese guns of Tenasserim. On 30 April 1614 two of his armies, from Martaban and from Mone, invaded Lan Na, a vassal Siam held only in name.

Thado Kyaw, ruler of Lan Na at Chiang Mai, sent for help. None came from Ayutthaya; Lao troops from Lan Xang joined the defence. By August both armies were penned in around Chiang Mai, and on 22 December 1614 the city surrendered. Lan Na would answer to Burma for more than a century.

Nguyễn Phúc Nguyên, Nguyễn Hoàng's sixth son, succeeded his father in 1613. He still held his titles from the Lê, but he ruled the south as his own: from 1615 he cast cannon with Portuguese help, and he made his eldest son governor of Quảng Nam, the province of the port of Hội An.

Nguyễn Phúc Kỳ was made governor of Quảng Nam in 1615, the post that marked him as heir, and governed there for sixteen years. He was friendly to the Western missionaries, who under his protection could live and work at Hội An and at the provincial seat, Thanh Chiêm. He died in 1631, before his father.

Trần Đức Hòa, from Bồng Sơn, was the Nguyễn inspector at Quy Nhơn, so close to Nguyễn Phúc Nguyên that the lord called him his sworn brother. He stored grain for the war with the north and protected the Jesuits who settled at Nước Mặn in his province.

Francesco Buzomi, a Neapolitan Jesuit sent from Macau, landed at Đà Nẵng on 18 January 1615 with the first Jesuit mission to the south. He served the Japanese Christians of Hội An, moved to Thanh Chiêm, and in 1618 founded the mission at Nước Mặn, in Trần Đức Hòa's province.

Francisco de Pina, a Portuguese Jesuit, came to the south in 1617. He became the first European to speak Vietnamese fluently and to preach in it without an interpreter, compiled a first vocabulary in 1619, and worked out how to write the language in Latin letters, the beginning of the modern Vietnamese alphabet.

Cristoforo Borri, a Milanese Jesuit, mathematician and astronomer, sailed with Pedro Marques and reached the south in 1618. He worked from Nước Mặn with Buzomi and Pina until 1622. His account of the mission, printed in Rome in 1631, became Europe's chief description of the Nguyễn south.

Chey Chettha, home from Ayutthaya, received the throne from his father about 1619. He stopped the tribute to Siam, made Oudong his capital and married a daughter of Nguyễn Phúc Nguyên. Songtham led an army into Cambodia himself in 1621 and was thrown back; a second, in 1622 under his brother Si Sin, failed as well.

Ngọc Vạn, Ang Cuv in the Khmer chronicles, kept her own household and Vietnamese guard at Oudong. In 1623 an embassy from her father asked for the customs posts at Prey Nokor, citing the war with the north; at his request she pressed her husband, and Chey Chettha lent them. The Nguyễn had a foothold for trade in the delta, not yet rule.

Songtham's reign was a time of trade: a treaty with the Dutch in 1617, embassies to the shoguns from 1621. His wars went badly. Cambodia stopped its tribute and beat off his invasions of 1621 and 1622, and in 1622 Burma took Tavoy. He leaned on foreign soldiers, above all the Japanese.

Yamada Nagamasa commanded the Japanese volunteers of the royal guard and held the Siamese title Okya Senaphimuk. The Japanese of Ayutthaya were traders as well as soldiers, and through him Songtham's court reached into the trade with Tokugawa Japan.

In 1620 two of Nguyễn Phúc Nguyên's brothers, Hiệp and Trạch, secretly asked Trịnh Tùng to help them seize the south, promising to submit to him. Tùng sent 5,000 men to the Nhật Lệ, but the plot was discovered and the brothers arrested. From then on the south sent no taxes north.

Lê Kính Tông chafed under Trịnh Tùng. In 1619 he plotted with Tùng's son Trịnh Xuân, who wanted the succession, to kill the lord; a hidden gun fired at Tùng's party only broke his parasol. The plotters confessed, and on 23 June 1619 the emperor hanged himself. He was buried as an emperor but kept out of the dynastic temple.

Trịnh Xuân lost his posts and was confined after the plot, but his father freed him in 1620. In July 1623, with Tùng dying, the lord made his son Tráng commander and Xuân only deputy. Xuân rebelled, sacked the lord's palace and set Thăng Long burning; his uncle Trịnh Đỗ lured him in and had him killed.

Lê Thần Tông, Lê Duy Kỳ, Kính Tông's eldest son by Trịnh Tùng's daughter, was put on the throne in 1619 at the empress's plea, though another Lê prince wanted it. As the lord's grandson he tied the two houses together. In the rising of 1623 Trịnh Tráng had him escorted out of the capital to safety.

Trịnh Tráng, named commander as his father lay dying in July 1623, became lord when Tùng died on the road out of the burning capital. He beat off a Mạc army that tried its luck, brought the emperor home, took the title Thanh Đô Vương, and demanded that the Nguyễn send their taxes and submit.

In 1621 Voravongsa went to Luang Prabang, leaving his heir in charge at Vientiane. Hearing that the prince meant to take the throne, he ordered his arrest; the prince fled with troops, and part of the army and court went over to him. Voravongsa was hunted down and killed on his son's orders, in 1621 or 1622.

The prince, known only by his title Upayuvarat, heir, was crowned in Vientiane. Thai accounts give the rising to a lord named Vieng, who seized the capital in his name and pursued and killed the old king. The new king died within months, traditionally after nine, of causes the chronicles do not give.

Phaya Vieng, the lord who had made the prince king, wanted another son of Voravongsa, Mom Kaeo, to follow him. The court chose otherwise, and Vieng rose against the new king too.

The court passed over Voravongsa's sons and chose a senior lord of the old royal line, the governor of Sikhottabong on the middle Mekong, who reigned from about 1623 as Phothisarat II. Vieng's revolt showed how little the choice had settled. Phothisarat died in 1627.

Nguyễn Phúc Nguyên refused Trịnh Tráng's demands for taxes and submission. In 1627 Tráng marched south, taking the emperor with him, and attacked the Nguyễn at the mouth of the Nhật Lệ. The Nguyễn guns held, and the northern army went home.

Nguyễn Hữu Dật, son of an officer who had come south with Nguyễn Hoàng, had passed the lord's examination at sixteen. In 1627 he was supervisor of the army south of the Gianh. The Nguyễn chronicle says he spread word that Tráng's kinsmen Trịnh Gia and Trịnh Nhạc were about to rebel in the north, and Tráng withdrew in alarm.

A northern scholar, Đào Duy Từ, fled south in the winter of 1625 and, failing to reach the lord, went to Trần Đức Hòa at Quy Nhơn. Hòa took him in, gave him his daughter in marriage, and presented him to Nguyễn Phúc Nguyên in 1627.

Đào Duy Từ had been barred from the northern examinations as a stage performer's son. Taken into Nguyễn Phúc Nguyên's service in 1627, he became his chief adviser on war and government, and the lord treated him as a teacher.

Trịnh Tráng governed in the emperor's name from the lord's palace. In 1625 his son Trịnh Kiều captured the Mạc claimant at Cao Bằng and had him killed. In 1627 he took the emperor south to make the Nguyễn submit, and came home with nothing.

Alexandre de Rhodes, a Jesuit from Avignon, reached Hội An in December 1624 and learned Vietnamese from Francisco de Pina. On 19 March 1627 he and Pedro Marques landed in Thanh Hóa; in July they reached Thăng Long, where Trịnh Tráng gave them a house and let them preach.

Pedro Marques, a Jesuit who had sailed to the south with Borri, went north with Rhodes in 1627 to open the Tonkin mission. For more than a year the two preached freely in the capital before they were confined.

When Phothisarat II died in 1627, the throne went back to Voravongsa's line: his son Mom Kaeo, brother of the short-lived Upayuvarat. His reign was full of quarrels among claimants. Vieng, who had made and unmade kings, rebelled once more and was put down and executed.

In July 1628 Anaukpetlun was killed on the orders of his son Minyedeippa. The king had found out the prince's affair with a minor queen, the daughter of the Kengtung chief, and told him the crime deserved roasting alive.

Minyedeippa, about twenty, forced the ministers at Pegu to proclaim him king while his uncles were away in the Shan states. He never ruled beyond Pegu. In 1630 his uncle Thalun marched down from Ava; in August the commander of the palace guard seized Minyedeippa and handed him over, and he was executed in November.

Thalun was campaigning around Kengtung with his brother Minye Kyawswa when Anaukpetlun died. The two marched back, held Upper Burma, and made Thalun the rallying point against the parricide. Proclaimed heir, he took Pegu in 1630 and began to rebuild the kingdom.

Songtham wanted his young son Chetthathirat to succeed him rather than Si Sin, the prince of the Front Palace and heir by custom. He asked the favourite he trusted, Okya Siworawong, to see it done, and died in December 1628.

Okya Siworawong, by van Vliet's account Songtham's cousin, had risen from a wild youth and prison to royal favour. With Yamada's help he put Chetthathirat on the throne and executed those who opposed it; made minister of war, the Kalahom, he dominated the young king. In 1629 he had him killed, crowned a boy brother, and soon took the crown himself as Prasat Thong.

Si Sin, Songtham's brother in van Vliet's account and his son in the Siamese chronicles, took refuge in the monkhood. Lured to the palace and arrested, he was sent to Phetchaburi to die; rescued, the chronicles say, by monks, he raised a short revolt, which Yamada crushed. He was captured and executed.

Chetthathirat, about fifteen, reigned some eight months as the Kalahom's creature. When the minister held a royal-style cremation for a parent and most of the court attended it instead of the king's audience, the king threatened punishment. The Kalahom's men stormed the palace, and the king was captured and executed in 1629.

Athittayawong, about ten, was crowned while the Kalahom governed. After about thirty-six days the officials said the realm had two kings; the boy was deposed and later executed, and the Kalahom took the throne as Prasat Thong. Songtham's line was finished.

Yamada had helped make Chetthathirat king and had crushed Si Sin. He objected when the Kalahom took the throne, so Prasat Thong sent him south as governor of Ligor. In 1630 Yamada was poisoned, and the new king drove out the Japanese of Ayutthaya.

Chey Chettha died in 1627. His eldest son was a monk, and the court offered the crown to the king's brother Outey; he refused it and governed as ubhayorach, a title usually held by a king who had abdicated, keeping the throne for his nephew. He married his niece Ang Vathi, the princess betrothed to that nephew.

Ponhea To, Chey Chettha's eldest son, left the monkhood and was crowned about 1628, leaving government to his uncle. He loved Ang Vathi, now his uncle's wife; the quarrel became a war, and he was killed by Outey's European mercenaries, the chronicles say between 1630 and 1632.

In 1629 Trịnh Tráng sent an envoy south with titles for the Nguyễn lord and demands for a son at court, elephants and warships. Đào Duy Từ advised taking the titles for now and refusing the rest. On his advice the Nguyễn built a wall at Trường Dục in 1630, took southern Bố Chính that autumn, and in 1631 raised a stronger line along the Nhật Lệ, the Teacher's Wall.

In 1630 Trịnh Tráng married his daughter Trịnh Thị Ngọc Trúc to his nephew, the emperor Lê Thần Tông, binding the throne still closer to the lord's house.

Trịnh Thị Ngọc Trúc had been married to a Lê prince, Lê Trụ, who died in prison after a grave crime, and had a daughter. She was thirty-five. The ministers objected to the match; the emperor answered, the chronicle says, that it was done and he would take her. A devout Buddhist, she was known for her study of the Diamond Sutra.

The Tonkin mission turned the court's women and eunuchs against it, the Jesuits wrote, by preaching one wife for each man, and they spread word that the priests were sorcerers. In May 1630 Trịnh Tráng expelled Rhodes and Marques, who sailed for Macau.

Đào Duy Từ found the Nguyễn new officers as well as walls. In 1631 a young man from his own home district in Thanh Hóa, Nguyễn Hữu Tiến, came to him; Duy Từ recommended him to the lord and gave him his daughter in marriage. He died in December 1634, after eight years in the lord's service.

Nguyễn Hữu Tiến, born in 1602, began as a captain in the Nguyễn navy and rose to command the lord's armies. In 1633 he and Nguyễn Hữu Dật led the troops that fell on Trịnh Tráng's camp at the Nhật Lệ and routed his second invasion.

Nguyễn Phúc Anh, the lord's third son, took over Quảng Nam when his elder brother Kỳ died in 1631. Wanting the succession, he wrote to Trịnh Tráng in 1633 offering to rise in the south if the Trịnh attacked. He gave no signal, and the Trịnh army he had invited was routed.

Trịnh Tráng, raised to Thanh Vương in 1629, counted on Nguyễn Phúc Anh's offer and took the emperor south again in 1633. He waited at the Nhật Lệ more than ten days for a signal that never came, was routed, and went home leaving his son-in-law Nguyễn Khắc Liệt to hold northern Bố Chính.

Thalun spent three years subduing Lan Na again, finishing in 1632, and was crowned at Pegu in December 1633. In 1634–35 he moved the court back to Ava, in the rice lands of Upper Burma, and made his brother Minye Kyawswa heir.

Minye Kyawswa, Thalun's younger brother and governor of Ava, had fought beside him in the Shan states in the 1620s and against the parricide. When the court moved to Ava he was made Maha Uparaja, heir to the throne. He built a four-storeyed monastery by the river at Sagaing.

Prasat Thong's seizure of the throne let his vassals question his right. Patani's queen stopped sending the golden flowers of tribute; his expeditions against her in 1632 and 1634 both failed, the second when the Dutch ships promised to help came too late.

Raja Ungu, queen of Patani since 1624, had dropped the Siamese title her sisters used. In 1632 she married her daughter to the sultan of Johor, though the girl already had a husband in the Siamese vassal of Phatthalung, who urged Siam to attack. Patani beat off both attacks, but its trade fell away; she died in 1634 or 1635.

After Ponhea To's death, Outey again refused the crown and gave it to another of Chey Chettha's sons, keeping the government in his own hands.

Ponhea Nou, crowned in the mid-1630s as Ang Tong Reachea, reigned while his uncle governed. His reign saw quarrels with the Dutch over seized ships and copper, and from 1638 a Dutch trading post in Cambodia. He died in June 1640.

Mom Kaeo's reign never escaped the quarrels of rival claimants. He died in 1633, and the throne passed to his son Tone Kham, whom he had made heir in 1627.

Tone Kham, heir since 1627 with the title Upayuvarat, reigned by the usual reckoning from 1633 to 1637; the Lao and Thai chronicles disagree over these short reigns. One of his sons was the future king Sourigna Vongsa.

From Ava Thalun turned a conquering army into a state. A revenue inquest of 1635 counted some two million people in the Irrawaddy valley, and a survey of people and land followed. He settled war captives on the irrigated lands of Kyaukse to farm and to serve in war.

Kaingza Manuraza, a minister holding the village of Kaing, answered Thalun's questions on law from the old Manu law texts. His answers, the Maharajasat, also called Manuraza's answers, became a law book of the reign.

Taungpila Sayadaw, a monk born at Salin in 1578, was the teacher Thalun honoured: the king gave him the title Tipiṭakālaṅkāra on his accession, and when he withdrew to the forest in 1638–39 Thalun and Minye Kyawswa vied to endow him. His works include answers to the king's questions and the Manusāra law book. He died about 1650.

Nguyễn Phúc Nguyên died in 1635, and his second son, Nguyễn Phúc Lan, heir since Kỳ's death, succeeded. In 1636 he moved the lord's seat to Kim Long, near present-day Huế, and let the Dutch Company open a trading post at Hội An.

Nguyễn Phúc Anh rose in Quảng Nam as soon as Lan succeeded, fortifying Cu Đê and holding Đà Nẵng harbour with his fleet. His secretary, secretly Lan's man, betrayed his plans. Lan's troops struck by land and sea, caught Anh as he fled, and brought him to Thuận Hóa in chains.

Nguyễn Phúc Khê, Lan's uncle, was the man Lan wept to, offering to give up the throne rather than kill a brother. Khê answered that the law came before kinship and urged the attack; when Anh begged for his life, Khê and the generals pressed for his death, and Anh was executed with the men in his roll of conspirators.

Tống Thị, the widow of Nguyễn Phúc Kỳ, came to court in 1639 to plead her case and became Lan's mistress. Her father had gone over to the Trịnh in 1631. Grown rich on bribes and threatened by Lan's brother Trung, she wrote, the annals say, through her father to Trịnh Tráng, urging him to invade the south.

Raja Kuning succeeded her mother as queen of Patani about 1635. When Siam prepared another attack, the raja of Kedah mediated; she made peace in 1636, sent the tribute again, and in 1641 visited the court of Ayutthaya herself.

Jeremias van Vliet ran the Dutch Company's post at Ayutthaya from 1633 to 1642, dealing with a king who kept trade in royal hands. He wrote the account of the succession war that brought Prasat Thong to power, still the main source for it. In 1642 he left to govern Dutch Malacca.

Osoet Pegua, a Mon merchant, had the court contacts the Company needed and acted as go-between for Prasat Thong's trade with the Dutch. From 1638 to 1642 she was van Vliet's partner, and they had three daughters. When he left he fought her for the girls; they stayed with her until her death in 1658.

Vichai, Tone Kham's brother, took the throne when Tone Kham died in 1637 and died within a year. His sons fled when their cousin was crowned.

Sourigna Vongsa, Tone Kham's son, was chosen by the nobles over his two elder brothers about 1637–38. He secured the throne by sending rivals away, one brother to Vietnam and another into the monkhood, and began a fifty-seven-year reign remembered as Lan Xang's golden age.

Gerrit van Wuysthoff, a Dutch Company merchant, set out up the Mekong from Cambodia on 20 July 1641 with gifts for the king, to see whether trade with Lan Xang would pay and whether the river could carry it. Sourigna Vongsa received him with honour, but the falls of the Mekong made a trading post impractical.

When Ponhea Nou died in 1640, Outey broke his own rule: he made his son Ang Non, about twenty-one, king. The surviving sons of Chey Chettha were shut out.

Ponhea Chan, another son of Chey Chettha, would not be passed over. Backed by Malay and Cham Muslims, and by Japanese, he had Outey and Ang Non killed on 5 January 1642 and took the throne as Ramathipadi. He soon became a Muslim, the only Cambodian king to do so, and Europeans called him Sultan Ibrahim.

Ngọc Vạn, Chey Chettha's widow, still kept her own court at Oudong. With other royals and monks she asked the new king to spare the descendants of Outey, and Outey's young sons were spared.

Pieter van Regemortes came to press the Dutch Company's claims at the new court. On 27 November 1643, on his way to an audience at Oudong, he and his escort were cut down; the Company's men at its post and aboard two of its ships were killed or enslaved.

Captain Harouse led the fleet the Company sent up the Mekong in 1644 to punish the king. The Cambodians fought it on the river near Phnom Penh; 156 of its 432 men died, Harouse among them, and ships were lost. Batavia gave up a second attack; the 29 surviving captives were freed after about three years, and peace was signed in 1656.

Nguyễn Phúc Tần, Lan's son and heir, met the Dutch at sea. In the summer of 1643 three Company warships came to the Gianh to join a Trịnh attack; without waiting for his father's order he went out against them with some fifty war junks.

Pieter Baeck's heavy flagship was overtaken, dismasted and boarded. It blew up, by his own hand the Vietnamese account says, and he died with much of his crew; the other two ships escaped. The Company sent no more warships to the Nguyễn.

Rhodes came back to the south in 1640 and, between expulsions, worked there until 1645. He trained a company of Vietnamese catechists, sworn to serve the Church for life, who carried on when foreign priests were sent away. In 1645 he was expelled for good.

Andrew of Phú Yên, baptized with his mother in 1641 at about fifteen, became one of Rhodes's closest helpers and joined his catechists. In July 1644, when the governor moved against the mission on the lord's orders, soldiers seeking another catechist took Andrew instead. Refusing to renounce his faith, he was killed at Kẻ Chàm on 26 July, the first Vietnamese martyr.

Urged on, the Nguyễn annals say, by a letter from Tống Thị, Trịnh Tráng attacked the south again in 1643, took southern Bố Chính, and withdrew in the summer heat. That November, after a scandal over his advances to a young consort of the emperor, the chronicles say, he made Lê Thần Tông abdicate in favour of his son.

Lê Chân Tông, Lê Duy Hựu, became emperor on 23 November 1643 when his father was made to step down; Lê Thần Tông lived on as retired emperor. The Trịnh governed in the new emperor's name as they had in his father's.

Trịnh Tạc, Tráng's son, became heir when his elder brother died in 1642 and was given command of the armies and the government in 1645. Two passed-over brothers, Trịnh Sầm and Trịnh Lịch, rose that summer while their father was ill; Tạc crushed them, and both were killed.

Phạm Công Trứ, a doctor of the 1628 examinations, had marched south with the army in 1643. As deputy censor-in-chief in 1645 he and Đào Quang Nhiêu urged the lord's palace to strike before the rebel princes gathered their men, and the revolt was put down.

Ngọc Trúc became empress dowager in 1643. She was a pupil of the Chinese monk Chuyết Chuyết, who gave her the Buddhist name Pháp Tánh. After Thần Tông stepped down she and her daughter went to live at the Ninh Phúc temple, Bút Tháp, and paid for its restoration.

Chuyết Chuyết, a Linji Chan monk from Haicheng in Fujian, had preached in the Mekong delta and the Nguyễn south before coming north. He reached Thăng Long in 1633, was honoured by Trịnh Tráng and consulted by the emperor, became abbot of the restored Bút Tháp in 1642, and died there in 1644.

Minh Hành, a Chinese disciple Chuyết Chuyết had taken in the Nguyễn south, came north with him and was sent back to China to fetch scriptures at the lord's request. He succeeded his master as abbot of Bút Tháp and compiled his sayings. He died in 1659.

Giovanni Maria Leria, a Jesuit, reached Vientiane in 1642 with Sourigna Vongsa's leave, the first Catholic missionary in Lan Xang. In five years among its powerful monasteries he made very few converts, and in 1647 he left for Macau by way of Vietnam. His description of the royal palace is one of the few European pictures of Lan Xang at its height.

Minye Kyawswa died in 1647 or 1648; the dates differ. Thalun made his own son Pindale heir. Minye Kyawswa's son, who wanted the title, rose, sacked the palace and drove Thalun to take refuge in a monastery at Sagaing. The revolt failed, and its leaders were burned alive.

Pindale succeeded when Thalun died in 1648. The Chinese wars reached him soon: in 1651 Ming armies fleeing the Qing entered Kengyun on his north-eastern frontier, and the five regiments he sent were driven back that December. He did not contest the frontier again.

In 1648 the Trịnh came south again, broke through at the Nhật Lệ and battered the Trường Dục wall; Tần and Nguyễn Hữu Tiến routed them in a night attack with a hundred elephants. Lan fell ill and died that March on the way home, and Tần became lord.

Nguyễn Phúc Trung, Nguyễn Phúc Nguyên's fourth son, had commanded the fleet in 1627. Once Tống Thị's enemy, he became her lover after Lan's death, and, the annals say, she urged him to take the lordship from his nephew. In 1654 one of his men denounced the plot; Tần spared his uncle's life but jailed him, and he died in prison.

Tống Thị was arrested with Trung in 1654. Tần had her put to death and gave her great fortune away to the soldiers and people. The Nguyễn annals made her the cause of two Trịnh invasions and a plot in the lord's own house.

Lê Chân Tông died in the autumn of 1649 without a son. The Trịnh had his father, Lê Thần Tông, take the throne again; the emperor who had stepped down in 1643 reigned until his death in 1662.

In 1652 Trịnh Tráng had the emperor raise Trịnh Tạc to Tây Định Vương. From then on the heir carried the government for his ageing father.

Gaspar do Amaral, a Portuguese Jesuit, reached Tonkin in November 1629 and worked for years from Thăng Long. He spoke Vietnamese and Japanese and compiled a Vietnamese–Portuguese dictionary, now lost. He died in 1645 or 1646.

António Barbosa, a Portuguese Jesuit, came to Tonkin in April 1636 and stayed until illness sent him back to Macau in 1642; he died at Goa in 1647. He wrote short lessons in the new romanized script for Vietnamese pupils and compiled a Portuguese–Vietnamese dictionary, also lost.

Rhodes reached Rome in 1649, and in 1651 the Propaganda Fide printed his Dictionarium Annamiticum Lusitanum et Latinum, with 8,000 Vietnamese entries, and his catechism in Vietnamese. In the preface he named Pina as his first teacher of the language and acknowledged the dictionaries of Amaral and Barbosa.

In 1655, after a Trịnh raid on southern Bố Chính, Tần sent Nguyễn Hữu Tiến and Nguyễn Hữu Dật across the Gianh. They broke the Trịnh army, the Trịnh governor of Bố Chính surrendered, and they took the seven districts of Nghệ An south of the Lam.

Hữu Dật, the officer of 1627, now shared the command with Tiến. In 1656 the Nguyễn armies beat the Trịnh again and drove their commander back to An Trường.

Sent to Nghệ An as commander in 1655, Trịnh Tạc was called back north by trouble with the Mạc. In 1656 his father sent his youngest son Trịnh Toàn to the front, and Tạc, uneasy at Toàn's popularity, sent his own son Trịnh Căn to watch him. When Tráng died on 28 May 1657, Tạc became lord.

Trịnh Toàn, born in 1631, won a first fight but was driven back to An Trường and courted the loyalty of his soldiers. After his father's death Tạc rebuked him for not coming home to mourn and summoned him; Căn coaxed him back to the capital, where he was charged with treason and jailed.

Trịnh Căn, Tạc's eldest son, was twenty-four when his father sent him to the Nghệ An front in 1656, ostensibly to help Toàn. With Toàn gone, he held the southern command.

Phạm Công Trứ, who had gone south with the armies in 1655, was made minister of rites in 1657, the year Tạc became lord. He would rise to chief minister under Tạc and edit the official history of the dynasty.

Chai, Prasat Thong's eldest son, succeeded his father in 1655 or 1656. Custom favoured a king's brothers over his sons, and his uncle Si Suthammaracha plotted with Chai's half-brother Narai. After about nine months they marched into the palace; Chai was executed and Si Suthammaracha crowned.

Si Suthammaracha, Prasat Thong's younger brother, reigned from August to October 1656 and made Narai heir of the Front Palace. He was weak and ruled by an ambitious minister, and when he tried to force himself on Narai's sister, the princess escaped to her brother hidden in a book chest.

Narai drew on the Persian and Japanese soldiers his father had persecuted, on the Dutch Company and on his brothers. On the day of Ashura they stormed the palace; Narai fought his uncle hand to hand, and Si Suthammaracha was caught and executed on 26 October 1656.

Aqa Muhammad, a Persian merchant from Astarabad, had come to Siam in the 1640s and known Narai before his accession, which Persian soldiers helped to win. Narai made him head of the Persian community, and under him Persian influence at the Siamese court reached its height.

Ang Sur, one of Outey's sons spared in 1642, rose with his brother Ang Tan against Ramathipadi on 25 January 1658, raising the southern provinces and holding Phnom Penh. Siamese troops crossed into the western provinces, but the princes looked east, to the Nguyễn.

Ngọc Vạn, living with the princes, wrote to her nephew Nguyễn Phúc Tần asking for troops on their behalf; some chronicles have her join the rebels only late.

Tôn Thất Yến, deputy commander at Trấn Biên, led two or three thousand Nguyễn troops south in October 1658. They took the post at Mô Xoài, surrounded Ramathipadi's boat on the Tonle Sap and captured him, and sent him north in a cage to Quảng Bình. Tần freed him on a promise of tribute, but he died in 1659 before reaching home.

Ang Tan, who led the revolt with his brother, saw the Nguyễn army turn on the princes who had called it in once it had the king: it sacked Oudong. In 1659 the brothers drove it out, and Ang Sur took the throne.

By 1660 the occupation of Nghệ An had lasted five years, and the two Nguyễn generals had fallen out. In the autumn Trịnh Căn crossed the Lam and broke the Nguyễn lines; Hữu Tiến pulled back without warning Hữu Dật.

Left exposed by Tiến's withdrawal, Hữu Dật fell back too, and by November the Trịnh held the seven districts again; the war returned to the Gianh. Dật went on to defend that frontier, holding off the Trịnh again in 1672.

Trịnh Căn, reinforced by his father, won a great victory at the end of 1660, retaking the seven districts south of the Lam and northern Bố Chính. Tạc rewarded him with the supreme command and marked him as heir.

Wu Sangui, the Ming general whose surrender in 1644 had let the Qing into China, led Qing armies into Yunnan. In March 1659 he and Jobtei beat Li Dingguo near Kunming, and the last Ming emperor fled toward Burma.

Zhu Youlang, the Yongli emperor, last of the Southern Ming, sought refuge with Pindale. The Burmese king let him live at Sagaing, near Ava, on condition that his men gave up their arms; he reached Ava in June 1659, a guest cut off from his armies.

Pindale took the emperor in but could not keep the Ming armies out. From early 1659 Ming troops occupied Nyaungshwe and Mone in the Shan hills and raided Upper Burma, threatening Ava itself. In June 1661 his brother Pye overthrew him.

Li Dingguo, once a rebel general and now the Yongli court's chief defender as Prince of Jin, retreated into northern Burma after his defeat in 1659. He stayed in arms on the frontier, cut off from the emperor, until Wu Sangui drove him off; he died in 1662 near the Lao border.

Bai Wenxuan, made Prince of Gongchang for siding with Li Dingguo against Sun Kewang in 1657, fought on with Li through western Yunnan with some fifty thousand men. After the emperor's flight his forces stayed on the Burmese frontier until he surrendered to the Qing in 1661.

Michał Boym, a Polish Jesuit, had carried letters from the Yongli court's Christian empress dowager to the pope. Received at last in 1655, he sailed back; barred from Macau, he went overland to Ayutthaya and by sea to Tonkin, found no guide to Yunnan, and died in Guangxi on 22 June 1659, never reaching the emperor.