Qualla: Lê Văn Duyệt https://qualla.com/le-van-duyet en-us © 2026 Bendyline Thu, 20 Aug 2026 16:39:17 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_m/w/3/f/s/le-van-duyet-wp/hero-small.webp Qualla: Lê Văn Duyệt https://qualla.com/le-van-duyet Lê Văn Duyệt: Introduction https://qualla.com/le-van-duyet/ Photo credit Donald Trung, CC BY-SA 4.0. "We still have between our teeth the rice which the missionaries gave us when we were starving." Lê Văn Duyệt wrote that to Emperor Minh Mạng, who had just ordered every Catholic missionary in Vietnam to report to the imperial capital - officially to work as translators, actually to stop them preaching. Officials in the centre and the north complied. Duyệt, who governed the entire south as viceroy and answered to nobody within a month's ride, did not. He had spent fifty years accumulating the standing to write a sentence like that, and the rest of his life discovering that an emperor's patience is finite. The canal cutting across this borderland is his, and so is much of what the delta became.

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Image: Donald Trung | CC BY-SA 4.0

]]> Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/w/3/f/s/le-van-duyet-wp/w3fs-l-v-n-duy-t-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full Lê Văn Duyệt: The Fugitive's Household https://qualla.com/le-van-duyet/ Photo credit Eugénie Marie Salanson / After Maupérin, Public domain. Duyệt was born around 1763 or 1764 in Định Tường, deep in the marsh country of the Mekong Delta. He was intersex, a fact recorded plainly by the court and later flattened by Europeans into a nickname - "the Great Eunuch" - that told them what they expected rather than what was tr...

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Image: Eugénie Marie Salanson / After Maupérin | Public domain

]]> Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/w/3/f/s/le-van-duyet-wp/w3fs-l-v-n-duy-t-the-fugitives-household.mp3 0:06 2 full Lê Văn Duyệt: Thị Nại https://qualla.com/le-van-duyet/ Photo credit Bùi Thụy Đào Nguyên, CC BY-SA 3.0. Made a general in 1789, Duyệt fought the long grinding campaigns up the south-central coast around Nha Trang and Qui Nhơn, and in 1801 engineered the naval victory at Thị Nại that broke the Tây Sơn for good. That same year a close colleague, Tống Viết Phúc, was killed in battle, ...

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Image: Bùi Thụy Đào Nguyên | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/w/3/f/s/le-van-duyet-wp/w3fs-l-v-n-duy-t-th-n-i.mp3 0:06 3 full Lê Văn Duyệt: Eighty Thousand Diggers https://qualla.com/le-van-duyet/ Photo credit Bùi Thụy Đào Nguyên, CC BY-SA 3.0. The straight line of water running southwest from Châu Đốc toward Hà Tiên is the Vĩnh Tế Canal, eighty-seven kilometres of it, begun at the end of 1819 under Gia Long and finished in 1824 under Minh Mạng. Nguyễn Văn Thoại directed the digging; Duyệt, as viceroy, supervised the wo...

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Image: Bùi Thụy Đào Nguyên | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/w/3/f/s/le-van-duyet-wp/w3fs-l-v-n-duy-t-eighty-thousand-diggers.mp3 0:06 4 full Lê Văn Duyệt: The Viceroy Who Would Not Obey https://qualla.com/le-van-duyet/ Photo credit Unknown, there is a line below the picture in the book that says: Drawn by a Chinese., Public domain. Duyệt governed the south from 1812 to 1815 and again from 1820 until his death, and Minh Mạng handed him extraordinary powers: authority over all foreign trade entering his territory and the right to set taxes in Cambodia at his own discretion. He used them like a man who had nev...

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Image: Unknown, there is a line below the picture in the book that says: Drawn by a Chinese. | Public domain

]]> Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/w/3/f/s/le-van-duyet-wp/w3fs-l-v-n-duy-t-the-viceroy-who-would-not-obey.mp3 0:06 5 full Lê Văn Duyệt: A Stele and What It Could Not Do https://qualla.com/le-van-duyet/ Photo credit Bùi Thụy Đào Nguyên, CC BY-SA 3.0. Duyệt died in the Citadel of Saigon on 30 July 1832, aged sixty-eight. Minh Mạng abolished the office of viceroy, making him the last man to hold it, then had his tomb broken open and a stele set over the ruins reading: "Here lies the eunuch Lê Văn Duyệt who resisted the law." On...

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Image: Bùi Thụy Đào Nguyên | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/w/3/f/s/le-van-duyet-wp/w3fs-l-v-n-duy-t-a-stele-and-what-it-could-not-do.mp3 0:06 6 full