Nguyễn dynasty

The Nguyễn dynasty was the last ruling dynasty of Vietnam. It was founded by Nguyễn Phúc Ánh, who took the reign name Gia Long, after he defeated the Tây Sơn dynasty and unified the country in 1802. The dynasty made Huế its capital and built a Confucian bureaucracy modelled on the Chinese imperial system. Under Gia Long and his successor Minh Mạng, Vietnam expanded southward into the Mekong Delta and asserted control over Cambodia and Laos, while the court sponsored a distinctive Vietnamese high culture. European pressure grew in the mid-nineteenth century. After the Cochinchina campaign of 1858, France seized the south, and a series of unequal treaties reduced the dynasty to nominal rule. From 1883 the emperors reigned under a French protectorate, and in 1884 the country was divided into the protectorates of Annam and Tonkin and the colony of Cochinchina. The monarchy survived as part of French Indochina until the Second World War. In March 1945 Japan ended French rule and proclaimed the Empire of Vietnam; Emperor Bảo Đại abdicated later that year after the August Revolution, ending the dynasty.