quality:corruption
Đông Kinh and urban life

Đông Kinh (present-day Hanoi) has been the capital of Vietnam since the 11th century. During the Later Lê dynasty it was divided into 13 districts and 239 wards (with 36 main business-trading wards) and communes. Since the mid-16th century, Đông Kinh became the silk and ceramic manufacturing center of Southeast Asia. Vietnamese merchants exported to the Ottoman Empire and Safavid Empire, these exports include Tonkinese octagonal bottles with underglaze -cobalt decoration or dishes with peony sprays painted in underglaze-cobalt were considered as good as Chinese products. Vietnamese ceramics from Bát Tràng villages produced famous high-quality pottery and dishes. With Tomé Pires noting in 1515 "They have porcelain and pottery-some of them great value-and these go from there to China to be sold.Chinese and Japanese traders came to Đông Kinh to buy both high quality silk and raw silk. Besides silk textiles that were made in villages, the majority of them were produced in state-owned factories in Đông Kinh, this was produced for the imperial family, noblemen and foreigners.

In 1594, the Imperial court allowed a Western presence in the capital, and encouraged Dutch, Spanish and the British to open trading ports. In 1616, the British established a factory in Đông Kinh, but their business ended in failure due to the pressures from the Lê court, and finally withdrew in 1720. During the 17th and 18th century, Westerners commonly used the name Tonkin (from Đông Kinh) to refer to northern Vietnam, then ruled by the Trịnh lords (while Cochinchina was used to refer to Southern Vietnam, then ruled by the Nguyễn lords, and Annam, from the name of the former Chinese province was used to refer to Vietnam as a whole). Tonkin had been a major industrial and trading center in Asia until the 1730s.

The prosperity during the Le dynasty was described through the urbanization in Tonkin through Western narratives: "...Cachao (Đông Kinh) probably had 200,000 houses. The city size was some larger than some of the largest cities in Europe but similar in size to other major Asian cities. It lies along the Red river...there are 36 stone-paved major streets, many foreigners such as Chinese, Japanese, English held their business companies, factories and stores here...the Emperor has three small but magnificent palaces, mostly built by red wood and terracotta bricks, surrounded by 15-feet height wall, and its main gate never opens expect when the Emperor wants to go outside. The Trinh lord and his families live in the 30-meter high Ngũ Long castle, near Tạ Vọng lake, which can be seen at its highest from the Red river..."

In 1612, the Joseon army encountered a Vietnamese merchant ship from Tonkin wrecked in Jeju Island which carried a large heap of treasure and money. The Koreans killed all the sailors, looted the treasures on board and then falsely reported the ship "was a pirate ship".

In 1637, the Dutch successfully established commercial and diplomatic relations with Tonkin and maintained their trading station in Đông Kinh until 1700. The lucrative Dutch ‘Vietnamese-silk-for-Japanese-silver trade‘ later also attracted the English and the French to Tonkin in 1672 and early 1682 respectively. The British imported Vietnamese silk around the 1670s, but not regularly. The city had a Chinatown, as well as factories owned by the Dutch and English companies along the Red river.

However, by the last quarter of the 17th century, Tonkin was no longer a profitable trading place. Vietnamese silk no longer reaped a handsome profit in Japan and Vietnamese ceramics proved unmarketable in the insular Southeast Asian markets. In Tonkin, trading conditions also deteriorated rapidly. Subsequently, natural disasters ravaged the economy of the country and a wave of successive famines discouraged local craftsmen from producing goods for export. Worse still, after the protracted civil war with the southern Vietnamese kingdom of Quinam (or Đàng Trong) that ended in 1672, the Tonkinese rulers seemed to be more indifferent towards foreign trade as they were no longer in urgent need of a supply of weapons from the Westerners. Bearing in mind their long-term strategy, especially the prospect of opening up trading relations with China, the Dutch still wanted to maintain their Tonkinese trade despite its current unprofitable state, perceiving that it would be extremely difficult to re-establish the relationship with Tonkin once they left the country. Despite Dutch persistence, the relationship between the VOC and Tonkin deteriorated rapidly during the last two decades of the 17th century, especially after Chúa (Lord) Trịnh Căn (r. 1682–1709) succeeded to the throne.