This Week in History recalls memorable and decisive events and personalities of the past.

7th November 1426 – Lam Sơn uprising: Lam Sơn rebels emerge victorious against the Ming army in the Battle of Tốt Động – Chúc Động

In 1400, a Vietnamese noble launched a revolt against the Kingdom of Dai Viet, which controlled what is today north Vietnam. This revolt was largely successful, prompting the surviving members of the royal family to flee into Ming dynasty China to seek refuge – and allies to retake their throne. The rebels got more than they bargained for: in 1406, a huge Chinese army invaded Dai Viet and soon crushed the Vietnamese armies.  The Chinese then annexed Vietnam and ordered all Vietnamese writing to be destroyed and replaced with Chinese culture and writing, save for one copy of each, which would be preserved in China.

The emperor’s order read: ‘Buddhist and Taoist texts; all books and notes, including folklore and children books, should be burnt. The stelae (stone slab or column typically bearing a commemorative inscription) erected by China should be protected carefully, while those erected by Annam should be completely annihilated. Do not spare even one character.’

A violent attempt to colonise the region followed and many valuables were taken north into China, with Chinese settlers being sent south into Vietnam. Multiple rebellions were launched against the Chinese by Vietnamese nobles, but ultimately all failed and, after 1413, there was a period of relative peace.

This all changed when, in February 1418, a Vietnamese noble called Lê Lợi, launched a fresh uprising against the Chinese on the Vietnamese new year, Tet. Today this uprising is known as the Lam Sơn uprising. Lê Lợi was the youngest son of a wealthy and influential noble. He had joined earlier rebellions against the Ming, being arrested by the Chinese but later released. For a brief time he worked as a tutor to a Chinese colonial administrator until being denounced by a rival as a rebel, an act that forced him to go into rebellion to avoid the authorities.

Lê Lợi received some support from other noble families, but he struggled for the first years of his rebellion to gather significant forces to challenge the Chinese. As a consequence, he was compelled to engage the invaders via guerrilla warfare. The conflict was complicated by the fact that the Chinese had recruited many ethnic minorities in the region, who regarded siding with the Ming as an opportunity to escape Vietnamese domination.

Lê Lợi was almost caught in the course of several battles that ensued, and there are many legends and stories about how he and his trusted lieutenants evaded the Chinese time and again through acts of great heroism and cunning.

By 1426, after years of war, the Chinese were growing weary. This decided the Chinese emperor to dispatch a massive force of somewhere between 50 000 and 100 000 troops to finish off the rebels and end the conflict.

Staging a series of mock retreats, the much smaller Vietnamese army lured the Chinese force into many traps and the Ming army suffered several setbacks.

The final disaster occurred at the Battle of Tốt Động – Chúc Động, between 5 and 7 November 1426, when the Vietnamese army decisively smashed the Chinese invaders and crippled their forces. Within two years of their defeat, the Chinese were forced to withdraw and Lê Lợi had himself crowned as emperor of Dai Viet.

9th November 1867 – Tokugawa shogunate hands power back to the Emperor of Japan, starting the Meiji Restoration

The chaotic period of the Sengoku Jidai, which lasted from the 15th to the 17th century, was finally ended in 1603 when Tokugawa Ieyasu, a cunning warlord of the Tokugawa clan, finally defeated all his opponents and established himself securely as the Shogun of Japan. The Shogun, essentially a military dictator ruling in the name of the emperor, was considered to be descended from the Sun goddess and was therefore above the day-to-day management of Japan. This period of Japanese history is known to historians as the Edo period.

The Edo period was when many of the things we today consider typical of traditional Japanese culture were firmly established. Many of the rites, customs and practices of Geisha and Samurai were firmly established at this time and there was a flowering of ritual culture and a firm establishment of a very strict social hierarchy which placed obedience to one’s lord as supreme and a warrior’s honour as more important than his life.

The Edo period also saw the closing off of Japan to the outside world, and Japanese who left the country were subject to execution if they returned. Foreigners who landed in Japan were often killed or expelled, and Christians were persecuted. Only the Dutch and Chinese were allowed to trade with the Japanese from a small artificial island in Nagasaki bay. This hurt Japan’s economy, which essentially stagnated, and its technology barely advanced during this period.

During the mid-1800s, the imperialist European powers began to make inquiries into opening trade with Japan – all of which failed and were often met with violent rebuke. This changed in 1853 when an American commander, Commodore Mathew Perry, sailed four modern American steam ships into the harbour of Edo and demonstrated the power of his modern artillery.

This terrified the Japanese, who were still largely using cannons based on technology from the 1600s. The Shogun panicked and soon opened trade negotiations with America. All the major powers of Europe, Britain, France and Russia soon arrived with their own warships – and Japan was opened up to the world for trade.

The opening of Japan’s economy global business after centuries of isolation caused great disruption and hardship. The trade treaties the Shogun was forced to sign also favoured the Westerners and this compounded the shock of opening the isolationist economy. Another sore point for the Japanese was that foreigners in Japan were to be subject to the laws set by their consulates, which meant that local Japanese courts could not try foreigners involved in crime.

Many Samurai lords were outraged by the actions of the Shogun; soon, dissent began to grow, with some suggesting that the emperor should take part in political affairs and overrule the Shogun.

In the early 1860s the Satsuma and Chōshū domains (regions of Japan assigned to specific Samurai lords by the Shogun) made an alliance and began to plot the overthrow of the Shogun. Warlords across Japan began to modernise their realms, seeing the value in adopting Western military and economic means and technologies. It was a policy of learning the ways of the foreigners so as to better resist them.

On 11 April 1863, the emperor issued an ‘Order to expel barbarians’. Some anti-Shogun lords carried this out and began to attack and expel foreigners. The emperor’s order forced the Shogun to break treaties with the Western powers. In the violence that followed, the Americans, French, British and Dutch retaliated against the Japanese and smashed the anti-foreigner forces.

Temporarily, the Shogun regained control, but the balance of forces had shifted; multiple revolts against the Shogun continued and his power diminished across Japan.

Finally, after more revolts, on 9 November 1867 the Shogun ‘put his prerogatives at the Emperor’s disposal’, resigning 10 days later. Though the new young Emperor Meiji assumed power, the old supporters of the Shogun had not given up. In the next year, the imperial faction would clash with the forces of the Shogun in what became known as the Boshin War.

Ironically, the xenophobic imperial faction had modernized their army far more than the pro-Shogunate forces and so defeated the army of the Shogun despite being outnumbered. With the emperor firmly coming out against the forces of the Shogun, most of the lords in Japan defected to the imperial side and the Shogun’s troops were soon in retreat.

In 1868, the imperial forces captured the capital at Edo (Tokyo) and the remnants of the Shogun’s forces, along with some French military advisers, fled to the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido where they attempted to establish a separate island republic. This was duly crushed by the imperial army and soon Japan was set on a path to rapid modernisation.

Over the next few decades, under imperial rule, Japan modernised its army and economy at an incredible speed, turning from a backwater string of islands stuck in 1650, to a major world power by the 1890s, when it defeated China. Soon after that, Japan would defeat Russia in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, and become the dominant power in Asia until the Second World War.

12th November 1997 – Ramzi Yousef is found guilty of masterminding the 1993 World Trade Center bombing

While almost everyone knows of the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 on the World Trade Center in New York, far fewer remember the previous attempt by Al Qaeda-affiliated attackers to destroy the towering building using a truck bomb.

Ramzi Yousef, the nephew of the ‘architect of the September 11 attacks’, was born in Kuwait to Pakistani parents. He studied in the United Kingdom, graduating with a degree in electrical engineering before returning to Pakistan. At some point in 1991 he joined up with Al Qaeda operatives and was trained in Afghanistan in bomb-making. He was then financed by Al Qaeda to travel to the United States, where he arrived illegally in 1992. Working with a group of other Al Qaeda agents, he planned to build a massive truck bomb with which to destroy the north tower of the World Trade Center by detonating the explosives in the basement of the tower.

On 26 February 1993, Ramzi and his friend, Eyad Ismoil, drove a van packed with explosives to the Manhattan landmark, and parked it around midday in the huge building’s public parking garage. When the bomb was detonated, it opened a 30-metre wide hole through four sublevels of concrete, killing seven, including a pregnant woman, and injuring 1 000, most of them in the course of the evacuation. Smoke from the explosion filled the escape stairwells, leading to many people evacuating the building having to be treated for smoke inhalation.

The building did not collapse as planned, as the bomb was planted in the wrong place.

Initially, investigators thought that an electrical transformer had exploded; forensics soon revealed it was a bomb blast. Ramzi meanwhile had fled to Pakistan.

A vehicle identification number (VIN), found on a piece of metal from the truck’s axle was the breakthrough which led investigators to the rental agency from which the truck had been hired, and enabled them to begin tracing the bomb. The van had been rented by one of Ramzi’s co-conspirators, who reported the van stolen. When he returned to the rental agency to collect the deposit, he was arrested.

Ramzi, who carried out several other terror attacks across the world, was eventually arrested in Pakistan.

After a trial, he was found guilty of planning the bombing and sentenced to 240 years in prison, the judge recommending the sentence be served in solitary confinement. Today, Ramzi is held at the high-security Supermax prison, ADX Florence, in Florence, Colorado, where he continues to serve his sentence.

If you like what you have just read, support the Daily Friend