Son of Minh Mang---Third Emperor of the Nguyen Dynasty in nineteenth-century Vietnam.  Thieu Tri reigned at a time when the French challenge to Vietnamese independence was growing increasingly insistent.  Like his father Minh Mang, Thieu Tri was poetic and intellectually curious and cautiously attempted to learn from the West, but was often hindered by a cumbersome and xenophobic bureaucracy.  He attempted to resolve the continuing dispute over the presence of French missionaries in Vietnam, but his efforts were sabotaged by a brutal French bombardment of Da Nang in 1847.  He died shortly after at the age of 37.