Bao Dai

Emperor of Vietnam (r. 1925-1945, 1954-1955)

• Born: October 22, 1913
• Birthplace: Hue, Vietnam
• Died: July 30, 1997
• Place of death: Paris, France

Vietnam’s last emperor, Bao was a tragic figure who initially sought more freedom and independence for his people but ended up collaborating with their foreign rulers before and during World War II. Furthermore, Bao could not lead Vietnam against Communist aggression and was ultimately deposed through constitutional change in 1955.

Early Life

Bao Dai (bah-oh di) was born in the Vietnamese imperial city of Hue. He was the only child of Emperor Khai Dinh, born by his second wife, Doan-Huy. Bao’s birth name was Nguyen Vinh Thuy, and he had a personal name of Vinh Thuy. At this time, France ruled Vietnam as Indochina, a French colonial possession, and Vietnam’s emperor served at the leisure of French authority. On March 10, 1922, Bao was named heir apparent, given a suitable palace as official residence on May 15, and then, at age nine, sent to Paris for schooling. He first attended Lycée Condorcet, then the Institute of Political Studies.

Bao’s father died on November 6, 1925, requiring that the twelve-year-old Bao return to Vietnam. He was crowned at Hue as Emperor Bao Dai (Keeper of Greatness) on January 8, 1926. He quickly returned to school in Paris, while a regent discharged his imperial duties as directed by the French.

On September 6, 1932, Bao returned to Vietnam. Considered of age, he assumed imperial powers at Hue on September 10.

Life’s Work

Initially, Emperor Bao was full of reformist energy. He immediately abolished the law that his subjects fill his every need. On May 2, 1933, with French approval, he dismissed his old ruling council, seeking to fill imperial positions with young men of promise. Among these men was Ngo Dinh Diem, minister of the interior.

Ardent reformers like Diem quickly clashed with the French who rejected any infringement upon their colonial prerogatives. Bao advised Diem to acquiesce or leave office, and Diem departed. Bao’s new prime minister, Pham Quynh, worked with the French, alienating Bao’s regime from nationalist Vietnamese.

Having probed the narrow limits of French tolerance for Vietnamese freedom, Bao resigned himself to the role of a playboy. On March 20, 1934, he married the beautiful Catholic, French-educated billionaire’s daughter Marie-Thérèse Thi Lan Nguyen Huu-Hao, who took the name of Nam Phuong (Southern Perfume Empress). As was possible in Vietnam, Bao married a second wife, his cousin, Phu Anh, in 1934. Even before the birth on January 4, 1936, of their son, Crown Prince Bao Long, Bao had a daughter, Princess Phuong Mai, with a Chinese lover, Hoang, whom he would marry in Hong Kong in 1946. Empress Nam Phuong had three girls and one more boy with her husband. Their new Bauhaus-style villa in Dalat was the place of frequent matrimonial strife, and at one time Nam Phuong tried to shoot Bao because of the strife.

After the outbreak of World War II on September 13, 1939, Bao suggested a four-point reform program to the French. Cynically, the French rejected the request, giving Bao a private plane as consolation for his acquiescence.

With the fall of France to Germany in 1940, Axis power Japan was able to occupy Vietnam in July, 1941. To support Japan efficiently, the Japanese left intact both French colonial administration and Bao’s imperial government. Like the French, Bao served the Japanese, who used Vietnam as a military base at great cost to the Vietnamese population.

France was liberated several years later and rejoined the Allied war effort. However, on March 9, 1945, the Japanese succeeded in dismantling French rule in Indochina. Bao, prodded by Japan, declared the independence of the northern and central part of Vietnam on March 11. One day before surrendering to the Allies on August 15, Japan transferred southern Vietnam to Bao’s empire, reuniting Vietnam for the first time since 1862.

Bao became the independent emperor of Vietnam, yet he was opposed by the fiercely nationalist Communist Viet Minh , led by Ho Chi Minh. Bao felt he lacked the military power to engage in a life-or-death struggle with the Communists. He agreed to abdicate on August 25, 1945, and was made a supreme adviser to Ho’s Democratic Republic of Viet Nam (or North Vietnam, a republic proclaimed on September 2).

With the French returning to Vietnam in late 1945, Ho Chi Minh sent Bao to China to keep him from French contact. Bao agreed, and from China he flew to voluntary exile in Hong Kong on March 16, 1946. He assumed another name, married Hoang, and believed his political career had ended. In 1947, his first wife, Nam Phuong, took her and Bao’s children with her to France.

Faced with serious Communist armed resistance, the French decided on the Bao solution in 1947. France tried to persuade Bao to lead a non-Communist state of Vietnam that was to remain dependent on the French. Bao forced the French to include all Vietnam into this new state. After signing a preliminary agreement on June 5, 1948, Bao flew to France. There, the Elysée Agreement between himself and French Fourth Republic president Vincent Auriol of March 8, 1949, laid the foundation for the State of Vietnam, created on June 4. On July 1, Bao was installed as head of the State of Vietnam. Even though he was not officially called emperor, virtually all Vietnamese considered him such.

Bao quickly became disillusioned with the lack of power for himself and for the Vietnamese people. As the war against the Viet Minh raged on, he returned to France, declining to lead the anti-Communist efforts. To the contrary, he let the gangster sect Binh Xuyen control the Saigon police, allegedly for $1.25 million.

After the Viet Minh victory over the French at Dien Bien Phu, and following the conclusion of the Geneva Accords of July 21, 1954, Bao remained head of the State of Vietnam. The state governed South Vietnam , with North Vietnam awarded to Ho Chi Minh’s forces. Sensing that French power in Vietnam was replaced by the Americans, Bao accepted Diem, whom the United States favored, as his prime minister.

Residing in France, Bao left Diem in charge in South Vietnam. When Diem moved against the Binh Xuyen and defeated them on March 30, 1955, Bao called for Diem’s ouster. Diem refused, and on July 7 announced that on October 23 there would be a referendum on turning South Vietnam into a republic without a head of state. As Bao left France only briefly to marry a fourth woman, Bui Mong Diep, in Saigon in 1955, Diem’s victory in the referendum was assured. Diem, however, yielded to cheating and obtained an improbable 98.2 percent of the vote for the measure, winning an impossible 133 percent in Saigon. On October 26, the Republic of Vietnam was established and Bao lost his position as head of state.

In France, Bao lived privately. After the death of Nam Phuong in 1963, he married in 1972 his fifth wife, the French woman Monique Baudot, who became Imperial Princess Monique Vinh Thuy. That year Bao also permitted Communist North Vietnam to use him briefly in a denunciation of U.S. troops in South Vietnam, modeled on the Khmer Rouge’s use of deposed Cambodian king Norodom Sihanouk. After the fall of Saigon in 1975, Bao visited exiled Vietnamese in the United States in 1982. In 1988, Bao converted from Buddhism to Catholicism and was baptized as Jean-Robert. He died in Paris on July 30, 1997.

Significance

Bao’s historical role was a tragic one. As a nineteen-year-old emperor, he idealistically sought freedom from France and independence for his country. Once rebuked, he settled on a course of accommodating those who would offer him physical safety and material comfort. He allowed the French to use him as a figurehead, indulging in pleasures granted in return for collaboration. When Japan occupied his country, he accommodated the new rulers as well.

Bao had two historical chances to assert himself. First, Japan’s surrender on August 15, 1945, nominally left him in charge of all Vietnam, notwithstanding his tainted reputation because of his earlier collaboration. However, Bao declined to fight the Viet Minh and then develop an effective, popular imperial government as a genuine nationalist alternative to Communist rule.

Second, Bao became head of state in South Vietnam after the Geneva Conference of 1954 partitioned Vietnam into North and South. The Vietnamese people still considered him their emperor. He lost their affection and the affection of the best of the young, dynamic, anti-Communist Vietnamese looking for a leader to ensure the freedom of their truncated country when he stayed in France instead of joining his people in their struggles against the Communists.

Bibliography

Chapuis, Oscar. The Last Emperors of Vietnam. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000. Pages 27-30 and 152-175 provide useful and detailed discussion, but some facts and dates quoted do not always conform to historical consensus. Best used with other secondary sources.

Jacobs, Seth. America’s Miracle Man in Vietnam. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004. Hostile review of Bao’s final nemesis, Ngo Dinh Diem. Chapters 1 and 5 deal with Bao, focusing on his deals with gangsters and his fights with Diem. Illustrated.

Karnow, Stanley. Vietnam: A History. 2d ed. New York: Viking Press, 1997. Remains the most widely available source in English. Presents mainstream U.S. historical assessments of Bao.

Lam, Quang Thi. The Twenty-Five-Year Century. Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2001. Autobiography of a South Vietnamese general illustrating young nationalist, anti-Communist Vietnam’s disenchantment with Bao’s remote rule as head of state from 1949 to 1955.