Minh Hương Erotic

The Minh Hương were the Ming loyalist Chinese who fled the Qing conquest in the 17th century and settled in what is now central and southern Vietnam, together with the mixed Chinese and Vietnamese families they founded; by the early 20th century they had merged into the Vietnamese majority, and their descendants today are counted as Kinh, not as ethnic Chinese. The name says what they were about. It was first written with characters meaning Ming incense, for people who kept the incense burning for a fallen dynasty. In 1827 the emperor Minh Mạng had it rewritten as Ming village, an administrative edit that turned a political loyalty into a place of origin.

They came in waves. Fujianese merchants had a Minh Hương village at the port of Hội An by the mid 1600s. In 1679 two Ming commanders, Dương Ngạn Địch and Trần Thượng Xuyên, arrived with about three thousand men and fifty ships, and the Nguyễn lord, unwilling to keep a foreign army near his capital, pointed them south to the Mekong frontier, on land that was still Khmer. They built trading towns at Mỹ Tho and Cù Lao Phố near Biên Hòa. When the Tây Sơn wars wrecked Cù Lao Phố in the 1770s, its merchants moved downriver and built what became Chợ Lớn, now part of Ho Chi Minh City. Farther west, the Guangdong-born Mạc Cửu ran Hà Tiên as a near independent port before placing it under Nguyễn protection in 1708.

What set them apart from later Chinese arrivals was law as much as ancestry. The Nguyễn state registered Minh Hương in their own villages, separate from the congregations of "Qing people" who came afterward and stayed foreign on paper. Minh Hương men married Vietnamese women, wore Vietnamese dress, never adopted the Qing queue, were taxed under their own category, and could sit the civil service examinations. Trịnh Hoài Đức, who wrote the standard gazetteer of the south, and Ngô Nhân Tịnh were both Minh Hương mandarins, and Phan Thanh Giản, the court's negotiator with the French, came from a Minh Hương family.

Language went the way of dress. The settlers spoke Hokkien, Cantonese, Teochew and other southern Chinese tongues; within a few generations their households spoke Vietnamese, with classical Chinese kept for ritual and record. Religion held longer. Minh Hương communal houses and temples to Quan Công and Thiên Hậu doubled as guild halls and archives, and some still stand. At the Minh Hương Gia Thạnh hall in Chợ Lớn, founded in 1789, descendants still gather to honor the founding generation. Under French rule they were classed legally with the Vietnamese, and that is where they have stayed.