Page:Voyage from France to Cochin-China- in the Ship Henry.djvu/15

112 an immense Chinese force sent thither to oppose him. But in 1779, hostilities breaking out between the brother usurpers, the present sovereign, Gia-Long, a lineal descendant of the ancient family of Nguyen, defeating his opponents in 1806, gained possession of the throne of Cochin-China, to which he has annexed Tunkin, together with Dung-Nay, the northern portion of the kingdom of Cambogia. Gia-Long is the father of the young prince, who, in 1788, repaired to France, under the care of the Bishop of Adran, a French missionary, long established in Cochin-China, to solicit aid for the restoration of his father to the throne. One unfortunate sovereign thus addressed himself to another at that moment on the eve of becoming the most unfortunate of men. The accumulating disasters of Lewis XVI. soon drove from the consideration of the French ministers those of Gia-Long.

The present government of Cochin-China is essentially absolute and despotic; in this respect second to none in the vast continent of Asia; a region in which the terms freedom and constitution have, from the very origin of history, been utterly unknown. The Mandarins possess the same power and authority as in China itself. They are styled in the country Cuang, which signifies lord or master, and the epithet Long is employed to denote a minister, or a noble of the first class. The term mandarin applied by us Europeans to the men of rank or office in Cochin-China, as well as in China itself, is Portuguese, and signifies a person of authority or command.

Gia-Long, a man not more remarkable for the vicissitudes of his fortunes than for his genius and moral qualities, has always been desirous to introduce reform and improvement into the administration of public affairs. Fearful, however, of alienating the minds of the great, by his concessions to the body of the people, he has been compelled to stop far short of his projected alterations. Educated in the school of adversity he possesses information on various subjects much beyond what usually falls to the lot of the princes of the east. He is, consequently, no stranger to the state of his people, and to their fitness for that system of government which he wishes to introduce. For this reason, in nominating his successor to the throne, he has selected, not his eldest son, but him whom he knew to possess the greatest ability and firmness, him whom he knew (to use his own expression) "to be able to wield the rod, and to apply it when requisite indiscriminately to all ranks of his subjects, great and small." "Whom he loveth he chasteneth," is a venerable saying: but in Cochin-China the sentiment is reversed. Here the subject seems to say to