Thiệu Trị
French missionaries had been active in Vietnam since the seventeenth century, and by the middle of the nineteenth century there were perhaps 300,000 Catholic converts in Annam and Tonkin. Most of their bishops and priests were either French or Spanish. Most Vietnamese disliked and suspected this sizeable Christian community and its foreign leaders. The French, conversely, began to feel responsible for their safety. During the reigns of the Vietnamese emperors Minh Mạng (1820–41) and Thiệu Trị (1841–47), Catholic missionaries were forbidden to live and work in Vietnam, and several European missionaries who ignored this edict were either banished or, on occasion, executed.