Nguyen Truong To's Points of View on the Way of National Salvation in Vietnam in the Second Haft of the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

It is very factual that, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, fearful of Western sciences and technologies a number of Vietnamese Confucianists presumed that the French were invicible. Nguyen Truong To, however, tried in one way or another to learn from the French civilization. He believed that, by learning to the world and Western civilization, the Vietnamese could become as good as, or even better, the other nations. From this point of view, Nguyen Truong To confirmed in the late nineteenth century that the urgent task of the Vietnamese, that of the Hue court in particular, was to reform the country in order to make it powerful so that Vietnam could get to the same rank of the dominant nations at that time.