Emperor Gia Long

A small boat slips through a mangrove forest in the river country of the far south. The tide comes in and goes out, the moon rises and sets, and the man in the boat keeps going. He is a young man named Nguyễn Phúc Ánh, and one day the whole country will know him as Emperor Gia Long.

This story does not begin on a throne. It begins in years of wandering along the tangled canals of the south. According to the National Archives Center, Nguyễn Phúc Ánh was born in 1762. He was a descendant of the Nguyễn lords of Đàng Trong. Đàng Trong was the southern realm ruled by the Nguyễn lords in the 17th and 18th centuries. His youth was not a calm one. When his family met a time of upheaval, the young man had to leave home and retreat to the southern lands, where rivers and wild forest were everywhere.

Those were hard days. He had no high walls and no deep moats, no great army and no strong generals, only a few loyal men who followed him. Sometimes he hid on a river islet. Sometimes he ate when there was food and went hungry when there was none, as the tide allowed. Still he did not give up. Each time he failed, he quietly began again from the beginning.

The Dân Việt newspaper puts the whole journey at about 25 years. In that time he came to know every turn of the tide, every stroke of the oars in the night, every call of the birds over the southern creeks at dawn. When a river ran dry, he waited for the water to rise. When one season did not finish the work, he waited for the next. That quiet land slowly raised a patient will in him.

What made Nguyễn Ánh was not that he never stumbled. It was that after every fall, he stood up again. People say perseverance is like flowing water. It is soft, yet nothing can stop it, and it keeps flowing until it reaches the sea.

Then the day came. In 1802, after all those hard years, Nguyễn Phúc Ánh took the throne under the reign name Gia Long and founded the Nguyễn dynasty. It was Vietnam's last royal dynasty, and it reigned from 1802 to 1945. The long road on the rivers had borne fruit. The young man who had rowed through the mangroves became the one who joined together a country divided for generations.

A long land, from the northern frontier to the southernmost cape, now shared one court and one roof. Many scattered families were reunited. Many villages fell quiet of war drums and heard again the laughter of children and the calls of neighbors heading out to the fields.

Once crowned, Emperor Gia Long chose Phú Xuân, that is, today's Hue, as his capital. It was a land long tied to the family of the Nguyễn lords. Beside the Perfume River, in the cool breeze of the evening, a new capital slowly took shape. The sound of cut stone rang out, workers chanted as they hauled timber to raise the walls, and palaces and tree-shaded roads rose one by one along the water.

One act of Emperor Gia Long is still spoken of every day. In 1804, the emperor gave the country the name Vietnam, in place of the earlier name, An Nam. The name Vietnam was used in the affairs of the court and in letters to other lands.

So the name Vietnam was born, more than 200 years ago, beside the Perfume River.

When the emperor died in 1820, he left his descendants a country in one piece, from north to south.

The young man in the small boat among the mangroves had gone a very long way. He had crossed many seasons of high water, fallen and risen again, until at last he gathered the land into one. And that land, joined from end to end, carries a single name: Vietnam.