Trần Cao Vân

Trần Cao Vân (陳高雲, 1866–1916) was a mandarin of the Nguyễn Dynasty who was best known for his activities in attempting to expel the French colonial powers in Vietnam. He orchestrated an attempt to expel the French and install Emperor Duy Tân as the boy ruler of an independent Vietnam, but the uprising failed. Vân was executed while Duy Tân was exiled by the French.

Vân was born in the village of Phu Cu in the prefecture of Điện Bàn in Quảng Nam Province in central Vietnam. The prefecture was also the home area of General Hoàng Diệu, who commanded the garrison Citadel of Hanoi when it fell to France in 1882 and then committed suicide, marking the start of colonisation.

Vân's father was believed to be of scholar-gentry background, but never passed the imperial examination system. Instead, he made a living for himself by running a silkworm and rice production business. Vân was the first son of his father's wife (his father had three wives) and started his formal studies at the age of nine, and by the age of thirteen was regarded as the most adept in his village at "capping" parallel sentences.

In 1882 his outlook on life changed when news came in from Hanoi that the city had fallen to French military forces and that Hoàng Diệu had hanged himself. Hoàng Diệu's body was brought back to the area for a full dress funeral, generating a large upswell in anti-French and anti-Catholic nationalist sentiment. By 1885, Vân had concluded that pursuing a career in the imperial court through the mandarinate examination was pointless in the face of French control of the monarchy, so he bade farewell to his family and entered a Taoist temple in the mountains of Đại Lộc District. He was persuaded to come out of his mountain abode in 1888 due to family pressure, and he took the regional exams, but he failed and returned to his mountain.

Although the religious abode may have suggested a purely spiritual lifestyle, Vân also used the temple as a meeting place for anti-colonial discussions, while another scholar friend travelled the adjacent districts attempting to make contacts. The French caught wind of Vân's activities, so a colonial inspection party travelled the temple, resulting in Vân's departure for Bình Định Province to work as a geography teacher. Vân quickly garnered a reputation in Bình Định as a geomancer and soon had a following of anti-French mystics. In 1898, he was involved in a local uprising, which was unsuccessful. As a result, he fled westward into the hills near the border, as the French swept west, burning down villages. He then returned to his home in Quảng Nam without being captured by colonial authorities. However, in 1908, he was arrested for allegedly inciting tax riots in his locality.

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