stylistic:tone, stylistic:style_transfer
Bureaucratic reforms

Lê Thánh Tông introduced reforms designing to replace the Thanh Hoá oligarchy of Dai Viet's southern region with a corps of bureaucrats selected through the Confucian civil service examinations. Following the Chinese model, he divided the government into six ministries: Finance, Rites, Justice, Personnel, Army, and Public Works. Nine grades of rank were set up for both the civil administration and the military. A Board of Censors was set up with royal authority to monitor governmental officials and report exclusively to the king. However, governmental authority did not extend all the way to the village level. The villages were ruled by their own councils.

In 1469, all of Dai Viet was mapped and a full census, listing all the villages in the kingdom, was taken. Around this time, the country was divided into 13 dao (provinces). Each was administrated by a Governor, a Judge, and the local army commander. Thánh Tông also ordered that a new census should be taken every six years. Other public works that were undertaken including building and repair of granaries, using the army to rebuild and repair irrigation systems after floods, and sending out doctors to areas afflicted by outbreaks of disease. Even though the emperor, at 25, was relatively young, he had already restored Dai Viet's stability, which was a marked contrast from the turbulent times marking the reigns of the two emperors before him. By 1471, the kingdom employed more than 5,300 officials (0.1 percent of the population) into the bureaucrat army, equally divided between the court and the provinces, with at least one supervising officer every three villages.

A national-wide census was conducted in 1490, reported approximately 8,000 village-level jurisdictions throughout the country including the thirty-six urban wards that lay between the royal compound and the Red River at Dong Kinh, the only city in the country; with the total population was approximately 3.7 million people, the Red River delta had been the most densely inhabited region of Southeast Asia in the early-modern era.

The new government proved to be effective and represented a successful adaptation of the Chinese Confucian system of government outside of China. However, following the deaths of Thánh Tông and of his son and successor, Lê Hiến Tông (r. 1498–1504), this new model of government crashed not once but twice in the next three following centuries.