DOMINICANS had been sending missionaries from Manila to Annam — what is today central and south Vietnam — from the 17th century, making a considerable success in the conversion of people, especially during the first half of the 19th century. This development of Christianity was not welcomed by the Nguyen dynasty, which had a policy of national isolation and persecution of foreigners, especially friars. As a consequence, Bishop José María Díaz Sanjurjo, OP, was martyred in 1857. Fr. Melchor García Sampedro, OP, suffered the same fate in 1858 — and today is a saint.
The area was not being evangelized by Spanish friars. The Society of Foreign Missions of Paris also had friars, and they were from France. Some of them were also martyred, like Father Augustin Schoeffler in 1851 — today a saint — and Fr. Jean-Louis Bonnard in 1852.
Imperialism, the idea of conquering and subjugating territories, taking advantage of military superiority, was very much in fashion in Europe. While many European countries had been going forward with this centuries before, France had somehow delayed its participation in colonial enterprises and it had already been looking for areas of expansion in Asia. An example of this was the French blockade of Basilan island in 1845, an unknown chapter of Philippine history that deserves to be commented upon another day.
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The French minister in China contacted the Spanish consul, asking for military support in order to save the French missionaries that were being imprisoned by the Emperor Tu Duc and help to escape the ones hiding in the forests and mountains in order to avoid imprisonment. The Spanish Governor-General Fernando de Norzagaray agreed to send forces, and a thousand soldiers, both Filipinos and Spanish, were sent to Vietnamese shores.
The official history — the one propagated by the French since the very beginning in newspapers — says that French soldiers gloriously and bravely attacked, backed by a Filipino-Spanish force, the citadel of Saigon. But Fr. Francisco Gaínza, OP, who was there and witnessed the entire operation, tells a very different version. Moreover, the fake news spread by the French was the reason that pushed Father Gaínza to write his own account, La Campaña de Cochinchina (The Cochinchina Campaign).
When the troops from Manila arrived on the shores of Vietnam to join the French troops, Father Gaínza found that most of the French soldiers were tired, sick and demotivated. They were not used to the humid and hot weather and, after such a long trip, they looked quite weak. For unknown reasons, French admiral Charles Rigault de Genouilly, forced the Filipino-Spanish troops to wait in deep waters before approaching to attack. The days were passing, and anger started to rise. They were getting bored, food was not abundant and they just wanted to enter the action.
Finally, the citadel of Saigon was besieged and taken with little resistance by a team of Filipino soldiers led by a Spanish colonel, Palanca. The French troops only entered the city after the citadel surrendered. Gaínza praises the bravery and the loyalty of the Filipino soldiers, which in my opinion, formed two-thirds of the forces. Catholic friars — foreign and Vietnamese — were liberated from Saigon prisons after some confusion.
Little did they know that the operation was not being carried out to liberate the friars, but to help the French to establish a colony. The paradox is that colonial subjects were supporting inadvertently the creation of another colony. Once the mission was accomplished, they returned to Manila and left the territory surrounding Saigon to be taken by France.
Unfortunately, Gaínza is not very explicit when it comes to the names of the Filipino soldiers who took part in the military operation, but he mentioned the death of at least two Filipinos, one of them named Victor Castillo. Gaínza deeply laments their death and regrets the Spanish participation in the campaign: the lives of the Filipino soldiers were too precious to be sacrificed in an adventure that would only help the French, a colonial plan that he only discovered afterwards.
And that’s precisely why Gaínza’s version of the account was kept hidden in the archives of the University of Santo Tomas until Father Fidel Villarroel rescued it in 1972: Gaínza was on the side of Catholicism and of the Filipino people, and criticized very harshly the Spanish government for its strategic stupidity. The manuscript could not be published.
So, there we have a paradoxical and somehow controversial battle where Filipinos took part decisively, a battle unknown to most people in the Philippines, but that decided the fate of Vietnam for the next 100 years. The event deserves archival research, because what I have presented is no more than a shallow summary of Father Gaínza’s version.
Still, the fact seems clear to me: Saigon, a very important city of a nation known for having defeated the Chinese and the United States, was conquered by a small group of valiant Filipinos in 1859.
