The birth of retirement in history and the retirement regime under the Vietnam’s monarchy

Abstract

In the history of the Vietnam’s monarchy (since the Ngo, Dinh, Tien Le to Nguyen dynasty), serving officials in the state apparatus shall be allowed to retire at hometown when they got the advanced age or illness, diseases. How was that retirement regime in details? From the old days, the old history of our country was not very clearly written. In Le Tri si, Quan chuc chi section of Lich trieu hien chuong loai chi (Regulations of Successive Dynasties by Subject-Matter), the historian Phan Huy Chu only introduced briefly this regime under the King Le Thanh Tong (1460- 1497) to the end of the Le Trung Hung dynasty (1533-1788) only. The reason that Phan Huy Chu devised to explain the deficiency mentioned above was no historical document; he wrote: “The custom of retirement already had from Tran dynasty, but we can not know how it was (for example, under Anh Tong King dynasty, Nguyen Tien Ngo retired and then became a mandarin again). The Early Le dynasty (1428-1527) just determined the term of retirement age, but the rules were also not evidenced...”[1]. Therefore, it is thought that finding out the origin, the name and the progress of the retirement regime in the history of Vietnam monarchical government is essential.