ABSTRACT
In government, at any rate, Vietnam became more than ever before a miniature China. Communications both within the country itself and with the suzerain power were improved by the construction of the so-called ‘Mandarin Road’, which ran like a spinal column from Saigon, through the capital at Hue, to the Chinese frontier. The history of the Far East contained a striking example which Minh Mang believed worthy of imitation. For two hundred years, since the beginning of the seventeenth century, Japan, once the favourite goal of the European missions, had succeeded in keeping its doors locked against all foreign intrusion. The Vietnamese envoys caused an uproar by revealing that a certain ‘highly-placed mandarin’—generally taken to be Soult himself, though he denied the imputation—had gone so far as to assure them that the decapitation of the missionaries was ‘a good riddance’.
