On September 9, 1883, ominous smoke hung over Huế. The sun was blue-green, and throughout the day, people on the streets had no shadows. As their legitimacy relied on maintaining the Mandate of Heaven, the Nguyễn royal court was alarmed. Three high-ranking mandarins rushed to advise the Emperor to change his ways to regain Heaven’s favor. While this strange incident can be easily dismissed as another case of outdated superstitions, a closer look reveals it as a rare conjunction of astrology, power, and — given the source of the smoke — volcanism, all set against the backdrop of France’s rapid incursion into Vietnam.
The smoke of that baleful day stemmed from the island of Krakatoa in the Sunda Strait, located less than 2,000 kilometers south of Saigon. A vigorous, multi-volcano component of the Ring of Fire, Krakatoa showed the first signs of eruption on May 20, 1883, when a strong earthquake reached as far as the Dutch East Indies capital of Batavia (now Jakarta, Indonesia), rattling doors and windows. The following day, plumes of whitish steam and thick black smoke soared from various vents across the island, and molten rock burned away the lush vegetation on the volcanic slopes. This smoldering phase continued all summer; ships entering the Sunda Strait would report large, barnacled chunks of pumice bobbing in the waves. By late August, even passage through the strait became impossible, as ships were bombarded with pumice and ashes falling out of the sky, and around the island, loud bursts were heard every few hours.
A 1801 map of Southeast Asia by English cartographer John Cary. Image via Wikimedia.
The indicator of Krakatoa located towards the bottom left, between Sumatra and Java is added by Saigoneer.
Then, on the morning of August 27, Krakatoa exploded. The noise was so intense that it blew the eardrums of British sailors more than 60 kilometers away and sent shockwaves circling the world three times. Nearly 70% of the island was destroyed, and the pyroclastic flows that gurgled out of its collapse scorched entire Sumatran towns such as Ketimbang, killing more than 4,000 people. Tsunamis swallowed the nearby port city of Merak and crashed against shores as distant as South Africa. At least 21 cubic kilometers of dust and ash were launched into the sky, carried west by high-speed air currents that only scientists in the aftermath would come to identify as jet streams. As noted by British meteorologist Rollo Russell, wherever it spread, this smoke scattered the sunlight, changing the color of the sun into a bluish green, and that of the sky into an ashen grey in the day, then a bloodshot red at sunset. After wafting around the world for two weeks, the smoke entered Vietnamese skies, still thick yet more dispersed, in early September.
Footage from the Japanese weather satellite Himawari-8 of the 2022 Hunga Tonga-Hunga Haʻapai eruption, which was of similar scale to Krakatoa. Image via EUMETSAT.
At the time, the Nguyễn Dynasty was in crisis. The last few years were marked by constant French encroachments, and with the death of the staunch Confucianist Emperor Tự Đức in July 1883, the French saw an opportunity to ramp up these attacks. On August 18, Admiral Amédée Courbet launched a naval assault against the forts at Thuận An Estuary, where the Perfume River led straight into the capital. The three-day raid took the lives of many Nguyễn soldiers, including commander Trần Thúc Nhẫn who jumped into the sea to his death.
Victorious, the French marched inland, and Commissioner François-Jules Harmand gave the court an ultimatum, vowing that if they rejected French demands, then “even the worst catastrophe you can imagine will fall short of what will happen to you. The Empire of Annam, its dynasty, its princes and its courtiers will have chosen their own extinction. The name of Vietnam will be erased from history.”
On August 25, the same day Krakatoa entered its critical phase, representatives of Emperor Hiệp Hoà signed the Treaty of Huế (Hòa ước Harmand) with the French, which recognized French protectorate over their territory, renounced their own diplomatic independence, and allowed Bình Thuận Province to be annexed into the colony of Cochinchina. While the treaty was slightly revised in 1884, it had effectively put an end to Vietnamese sovereignty.
One of the few portraits of Hiệp Hoà (left) and an artist's interpretation (right). Images via Khám phá Huế.
Let us now return to the morning of August 27. According to a report by British officer Richard Strachey to the Royal Society, as soon as Krakatoa erupted, its sounds were heard in Cape St. Jacques (now Vũng Tàu, 1,800 km away) and Saigon (1,873 km away). That only two such locations in Vietnam were named was likely because Cochinchina had become a full colony and saw a stronger European presence than the rest; since the shockwaves circled the globe three times, it is possible that people elsewhere in the country heard the sounds too. Their wide propagation is also implied in Notes sur l’Annam (Notes on Annam) by explorer Etienne Aymonier. In his volume on Khánh Hoà, published in 1885, Aymonier wrote:
It is difficult to gauge just how much of this frantic response was real or exaggerated; however, the panic is not unimaginable given the intensity of the sounds. According to Richard Strachey’s report, in Singapore, there was no way to talk on the telephone line until 3pm; by shouting at the top of their lungs, both ends could hear each other, but “not one single sentence was understood.” More than 2,000 km west, in the landlocked Sri Lankan town of Bogawantalawa, the sounds “were like blasting [from the northeast] and kept on all day, from 7:30 a.m. till 4 p.m.” And far down south, in Western Australia, a local newspaper wrote that people were startled by a series of loud, artillery-like sounds, which continued “at irregular intervals till about 4 p.m. on Monday [August 27].” Sometimes, noted the newspaper, there were as many as three explosions in a minute, but “generally there was a few minutes’ interval.” With this context, we can infer that people not just in Bình Thuận, but all over Vietnam could have heard the eruption, and with the bombardment of Thuận An still fresh in their minds, many were driven to panic.
Then, two weeks later, came the strangely colored sun. An entry in the official chronicle Đại Nam thực lục (Veritable Records of Đại Nam) described that baleful day as follows:
Let us pause to situate the three mandarins’ appeal in their political lives. Tôn Thất Thuyết, Nguyễn Văn Tường, and Trần Tiễn Thành were all regents appointed by the late Tự Đức, who died without an heir. At first, they picked his 30-something adopted son, but to Thành’s horror, Thuyết and Tường teamed up to depose the new monarch after only three days for improper conduct. On July 30, the three regents crowned Hiệp Hoà, Tự Đức’s younger brother. Fearful for both his throne and his life, Hiệp Hoà quickly sought to make peace with the French, which also enraged the patriotic Thuyết and Tường.
After Hiệp Hoà approved the treaty of August 25 with Thành’s support, Thuyết and Tường devised a plot to remove Hiệp Hoà too. Seeing their conduct as a flagrant abuse of power, Thành retired to his manor north of the Perfume River. On November 28, while the French representative was away from Huế, Tường arrested Hiệp Hoà on charges of collaborationism, put him in jail, and poisoned him to death. On the night of November 30, Thành was murdered at home by unknown burglars; later historians suspected it was an assassination orchestrated by Tường and Thuyết themselves.
Tôn Thất Thuyết (left) and Nguyễn Văn Tường (right). Images via Wikimedia.
With such contexts, it is surprising that Tôn Thất Thuyết, Nguyễn Văn Tường, and Trần Tiễn Thành were appealing to Hiệp Hoà together, as noted by the official historical record Đại Nam thực lục, in response to the Krakatoa sun. Did it alarm them so much that they set aside their differences and rushed to warn the Emperor? Could there also be hidden motives for Thuyết and Tường, who already disliked Hiệp Hoà anyway? For although courtiers often saw astronomical phenomena as signs for their kingdom, they may also exploit these to their advantage.
In the 1430s, Bùi Thì Hanh rose to prominence for his forecasting; he would use this knack for astronomy to gain favors from Emperor Lê Thái Tông, becoming chief of the Bureau of Astronomy (Thái sử viện 太史院) until he was exposed for a false lunar eclipse prediction. Combing through Đại Việt sử ký toàn thư, historian Ho Peng Yoke also found that some eclipses had no match in the records of neighboring countries, and may have been invented by later compilers to condemn the kings during whose reigns they occurred, which in fact was a practice among other East Asian dynasties too. In a similar vein, Thuyết and Tường could have seized the rare opportunity of a blue-green sun to strike fear into Hiệp Hoà’s heart. Whether or not they had such motives, their appeal worked, based on Hiệp Hoà’s reaction. Unfortunately, this was not enough to prevent his fall three months later.
An illustration by William Ashcroft of a typical dramatic sunset after Krakatoa, as seen from London in 1883. Image via Bodleian Libraries/University of Oxford.
Krakatoa was not the Nguyễn’s first rodeo with volcanoes. In 1815, Mount Tambora erupted, causing a drop in global temperatures and adverse weather effects for years to come. In Europe, the cold, stormy summer simply inspired Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein, but in Vietnam, it led to a widespread famine and a Bengal-born cholera outbreak that killed hundreds of thousands of people, including the great poet Nguyễn Du. Still, the regime was able to pull through, thanks in part to Minh Mạng’s quick reactions by relieving taxes, distributing monetary aid, and supplying medicine to localities despite not fully understanding the disease himself.
Krakatoa, conversely, found the dynasty in a critical spot, with an ineffectual ruler, a domineering pair of regents, and an impending foreign conquest. Thus, although Krakatoa did not seem to take a heavy material toll on the dynasty like Tambora, it still left both the court and the commoners shaken. Whether the residents of Bình Thuận did flee en masse after hearing the explosions as Aymonier described, whether Tôn Thất Thuyết and Nguyễn Văn Tường had hidden motives in addressing the blue-green sun to the Emperor, the reality was all the same. The kingdom was no longer as it was under Minh Mạng; if anything, with the treaty signed just days before, it seemed that the kingdom was slouching towards doom.
Tôn Thất Thuyết and Nguyễn Văn Tường, the dynamic duo that they were, would go on to enthrone and dethrone another emperor, before settling with the 12-year-old Hàm Nghi. The French would maintain an arrogant, aggressive attitude, convincing the duo of imminent war. On the night of July 4, 1885, Thuyết launched a preemptive attack on the French, who quickly overpowered his forces and burned the citadel. Thuyết got away with the young Emperor and issued the Cần Vương (Aid the King) edict, exhorting patriots nationwide to rise up.
Meanwhile, Nguyễn Văn Tường stayed behind, and was arrested and exiled to Tahiti, ironically a volcanic island itself. He would live here for a year before dying of illness in 1886. That same year, Mount Tarawera erupted in New Zealand, the closest large landmass to Tahiti. It is tempting to wonder if Tường had lived to witness the effects, and if for a moment, far away in exile, he was reminded of that blue-green sun.
