Old Ironsides in Vietnam: Diplomacy at Cross-Purposes, 1845

In 1845, what began as an official visit of the USS Constitution to Vietnam ended in a hostage crisis and deep mutual resentment. This episode, along with other mid-nineteenth-century encounters between the United States and Vietnam, reveals how the ripple effects of the Opium War and the expansion of global commerce reshaped diplomatic expectations on both sides. American officials and merchants, steeped in decades of English-language travel accounts and circulating port gossip, approached Vietnam with suspicion and a growing conviction that forceful measures in support of trade were justified. The Vietnamese government, closely monitoring developments in Asian treaty ports, sought to tightly control foreign commerce to maintain their advantage. Reassessing early Nguyễn foreign policy, this paper argues that the Vietnamese government was neither ignorant of nor indifferent to Western powers. Rather, it was actively gathering intelligence on Euro-American states and attempting to manage engagement on its own terms. Drawing on Vietnamese records, I reconstruct the court’s perspective and fill gaps left by Western-focused narratives, offering a different perspective on diplomacy at a moment of mounting global pressure.

Kathlene Baldanza is an Associate Professor of History and Asian Studies at Penn State University. She is a historian of early modern Vietnam and China whose work explores book history, diplomatic and cultural exchange, and environmental history. Her first monograph, Ming China and Vietnam: Negotiating Borders in Early Modern Asia(Cambridge, 2016), highlights mutuality and negotiation in Sino-Vietnamese relations during the Ming and Mạc periods. She has published on book history in leading journals, examining the interconnected publishing cultures of Vietnam and China and arguing that the scale of Chinese printing shaped Vietnamese publishers’ focus on widely read works such as dictionaries and manuals. Her research also reconstructs the intellectual world of the nineteenth-century scholar Phạm Thận Duật to challenge conventional North–South binaries in Sino-Vietnamese studies. She is currently pursuing two projects: one on the history of miasma in the Sino-Vietnamese borderlands, and another on the 1845 visit of the U.S.S. Constitution to Vietnam as a lens into the early history of U.S.–Vietnam relations.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

Get App

Host or Publisher Center for East Asian Studies