Wedding & Thanks

In the firmament of the Son of Heaven a brilliant new star has risen! Supple as the neck of the swan is the charm of her graceful form. Her black and sparkling eyes, in hours of ease, envelop and thrill that happy mortal allowed to see. O, Nguyen Huu Hao! Beautiful are all thy ways.

Thus to the sighing of bamboo and banyan trees along the River of Perfumes sang the minstrels of Annam last week of the coming of a new Queen. The cultivators of rice turned from their fields; on the river bank the elephant washers turned from their elephants. In the Imperial Red City itself the three Dowager Empresses, relicts of the late Emperor, looked up from their tea.

All these knew what the Occidental Press had not bothered to find out. Behind the youth who is now Emperor of Annam, docile Vinh Tuy, whose reign is known as Bao Dai. is a dynasty scarcely 150 years old. The preceding dynasty was a figurehead for two powerful families. One of these was the family of Nguyen. With the aid of a French bishop,

Pigneau de Behaine, and French troops, Nguyen phua Anh reconquered Annam and Cochin-China and made himself Emperor under the name Gia Long. When the bishop died, Gia Long built him a great temple and wrote his epitaph. Some of the Nguyens turned Catholic, remained true to the memory of great Pigneau de Behaine. The Imperial line did not. It massacred great quantities of Annamite Catholics, including its own distant Nguyen kin, and brought more French troops tramping across the rice fields into the Imperial City of Hue. Prince Vinh Tuy (Bao Dai), educated from nine to 19 in France, was France's crowning accomplishment. And it was no accident that the French Resident General of Annam allowed him to fall in with pretty Nguyen Huu Hao, his very, very distant kin 150 years back. Her ancestors had been Catholic martyrs. Her father had prospered in Cochin-China under French protection. She was French-educated, pretty, smart and Catholic. Though she is a commoner, her name is great along the China Sea. But to Annamites, if not to their Emperor, it smelled high of French chicanery.

Little Mariette Nguyen Huu Hao was beautifully married. It took four days. On her way up Annam's great mandarin road along the coast she stopped off to climb a mountain and drink of the "frozen spring." Outside Hue, a cavalcade of palace mandarins on short native Phu-Yen horses met her in the Valley of Clouds and escorted her through the three walls of the Red City into the Palace of Passengers. Next day, dressed in a great brocaded Annamite gown, she stepped into an automobile and was driven to the Emperor's Palace, followed by the Imperial princesses and the blue-turbaned wives of the mandarins. Two scrolls, on which were written a prayer to Bao Dai's ancestors and the name and age (18) of Nguyen Huu Hao, were burnt on the altars. Finally the two young people were brought face to face and married. It took three more days of Buddhist rites behind the locked gates of the Red City to complete the ceremony. On the fourth day a battalion of mandarins led in musicians and the bearers of the royal insignia. The new Queen, her hair elaborately wound about a tiara encrusted with precious stones, received the Imperial seal and the golden book. Finally she arose and bowed her forehead to the floor three times, in the traditional Chinese kowtow (pronounced ker-toe) of thanks.

When the Emperor announced his choice of a wife, someone blundered by giving out the news that Pope Pius XI was considering a bargain to let Nguyen Huu Hao remain a Catholic if she gave the Church her girl children. The Holy Father is thoroughly aware of the political and religious state of affairs in Annam. It would be foolish to embarrass the French Government with any dogmatic decisions. The Christian girl may have much or little to say about what her children become. And the less the Annamites know about it the better.

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