9 - The Rise and Fall of the Eighteenth-Century Water Frontier

Summary

A new Cochinchina was beginning to take shape in the waters of the Mekong Delta and its surrounding coastline. The Chinese shipping network laid the basis for much of the new system of Dang Trong, centred in merchant houses of Canton’s Hong merchants and by the 1760s operating on a grander scale than ever before. The ports and commercial enterprises of the delta and its water frontier depended on a continuous circulation of commodities, primarily rice, cash crop, and a variety of transshipped goods such as tin, gold, and rattan for its prosperity and growth. Tensions grew. The Tay Son rebellion destroyed both the kingdoms of Dang Trong and Dang Ngoai, decimated the kingdom’s population, and obliterated the old Canton trade. The Tay Son’s strength grew out of, and reacted to, 200 years of Nguyen rule. The thirty-year civil war was fought ultimately between the two rival southern powers of Dang Trong (Cochinchina), while the northern power Dang Ngoai (Tongking) had little say about its outcome. Its eventual conquest of Dang Ngoai brought an end to that region’s political economy and commenced the process whereby southern power would come to ascendance on a territory that by 1802 to be known as Viet Nam.