Manuscript Borg.tonch.1, “Truyện nước Annam: Quyển thứ nhất nói sự Đàng Ngoài” (A History of Annam: Book One, on Đàng Ngoài), is the first part of the work “Truyện nước Annam Đàng Ngoài chí Đàng Trong” by Father Philiphê do Rosario Nguyễn Văn Bỉnh, CO. It is written throughout in Vietnamese in chữ Quốc ngữ and was completed in 1822 in Lisbon, Portugal. Despite its title, the book is in fact a chronicle of Catholic evangelisation in northern Vietnam. It runs to 739 pages in 50 sections. It opens with the creation account from Genesis, tracing the origin of the Annamese people back to Adam and Eve. The sections that follow recount the arrival of Catholicism in Đàng Ngoài in 1627 and the lives of the Jesuit missionaries most prominent in preaching to the faithful there — Alexandre de Rhodes, Girolamo Maiorica, Francisco Pimentel, Manuel Ferreira and others. The book also describes the repeated edicts proscribing the faith issued by the Trịnh lords in Đàng Ngoài and the punishments borne by missionaries who defied them, most notably the martyrdom in 1723 of the Jesuit fathers Giovanni Battista Messari and Francisco Bucciarelli together with nine Đàng Ngoài converts, and the martyrdom in 1737 of the four Jesuits Bartolomeu Alvares, Manuel de Abreu, Vicente da Cunha and Johann Kaspar Kratz. Later sections relate events from Father Bỉnh's own lifetime: the martyrdom of Father Manuel Xavier Nguyễn Văn Triệu at Huế, the departure of Fathers Quyền and Thiều to study in Rome, the Garasa schism, and Father Bỉnh's own embassy to Lisbon. He also records events in Europe during his exile there — the delegation's fourteen petitions to King João VI, the obstruction they met from representatives of the Holy See, Napoleon Bonaparte's campaigns and the Portuguese court's flight to Brazil, and Pope Pius VII's restoration of the Society of Jesus after forty-one years of suppression. The book closes with biographies of Father Bỉnh's companions on the embassy: Simão Xavier Liễn, Thomé Vicente Nhân, Francisco do Rosario Ngần and José do Rosario Trung. This manuscript offers scholars of Vietnamese studies further material on the history of Catholicism in northern Vietnam between 1627 and 1822.
The original is held by the Vatican Library (Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana). The images are copyright the Library and are loaded directly from the Vatican Digital Library (DigiVatLib); Digitizing Việt Nam presents this manuscript by permission of the Vatican Digital Library.