Bao Dai; Last Emperor of Vietnam Deposed in ’45

Bao Dai, the last emperor of Vietnam, who was forced to abdicate by the Communists in 1945, has died after living quietly in France for four decades. He was 83.

He died Thursday at the Val de Grace military hospital in Paris, the French Defense Ministry said.

Bao Dai was emperor of France’s protectorate of Annam, now part of Vietnam’s narrow central strip of land, from 1925 to 1945.

But he was emperor in little more than name. Bao Dai was manipulated and cajoled into supporting, in turn, Vietnam’s colonial French rulers, occupying Japanese forces, Ho Chi Minh’s conquering Communists, and again the beleaguered French.

He was born under the name Vinh Thuy on Oct. 22, 1913, the son of Khai Dinh, emperor of Annam, in a dynasty founded in 1803.

With the death of his father in 1925, he assumed the throne and the imperial name Bao Dai, which means “Keeper of Greatness.”

Annam had already been incorporated into French Indochina.

As Southeast Asia was sucked into World War II with Japan’s expansionist army rolling over much of Indochina, Bao Dai was co-opted by the Japanese to retain his throne to demonstrate continuity in Vietnam.

In 1945, with the Japanese on the run and Ho Chi Minh’s Communist and nationalist Viet Minh guerrillas approaching his imperial seat of power in the city of Hue, Bao Dai abdicated. Soon afterward, he became an advisor to Ho in Hanoi.

As France began to reassert its colonial claim to much of northern and central Vietnam--then Tonkin and Annam--Bao Dai left Hanoi for China, where he lived until the Communist takeover there in 1949.

Urged by France to return to Vietnam as a possible alternative to Ho, Bao Dai eventually did, in 1949, and France made him Vietnam’s chief of state.

When the 1954 peace accord between the French and the communists resulted in the division of Vietnam into north and south, Bao Dai tried to assume true power in nominally independent South Vietnam.

But by 1955, he was deposed by Ngo Dinh Diem, who himself was later ousted and assassinated in a U.S.-backed coup. Vietnam’s last emperor fled to France, where he spent the rest of his life, except for a few years in Hong Kong.

In 1982, during a two-week visit to the United States, Bao Dai appeared at a Tet fair in Westminster in Orange County. The 4,000 Indochinese who gathered to celebrate the Lunar New Year chanted, “Long live his majesty.”