12. Dục Đức was Emperor of Vietnam for just three days, before being deposed for his allegedly inappropriate behavior
Dục Đức was the fifth emperor of the Nguyễn dynasty and who served as Emperor of Vietnam from July 20 to July 23, 1883. Upon the death of Emperor Tự Đức, widely considered to have been the last Emperor of Vietnam to rule genuinely independent of colonial interference, the three imperial regents – Nguyễn Văn Tường, Tôn Thất Thuyết, and Tran Tien Thanh – unanimously declared that the thirty-one-year-old, now called Dục Đức, would succeed his uncle as Emperor of Vietnam. This move was controversial within the Vietnamese imperial court, as, unbeknownst to the wider public, Tự Đức had amended his will to name Kiến Phúc as his heir. It is believed that Tự Đức disapproved of Dục Đức’s lifestyle and thought that he was too decadent to rule effectively. Nevertheless, the Tam Cung – an alliance of powerful palace women – strongly supported Dục Đức and convinced the regents to posthumously alter the late emperor’s will in his favor.
Despite this intervention, Dục Đức only reigned as Emperor of Vietnam for just three days before he was deposed and sentenced to death by the very regents who had proclaimed him. The precise reasons for this sudden reversal remains unclear, but the most subscribed to theory is that the new emperor acted in such a debauched and inappropriate manner at his coronation that the regents felt compelled to revert to the late emperor’s opinion. It is equally proposed that the regents feared the limiting of their influence at court, and so acted against the new monarch to protect their own interests. Either executed and buried in an unmarked grave or imprisoned and left to die in captivity, Dục Đức was succeeded as Emperor of Vietnam by his uncle Hiệp Hòa before he too was deposed and killed.