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The "Kingdom of the Sedang," 1888

Before Explainer 17 views 4 min read Back

On June 3, 1888, at the village of Kon Gung north of Kon Tum, chiefs of the Bahnar, the Rengao and the Sedang proclaimed a Frenchman their king. The Kingdom of the Sedang lasted about two years, issued stamps and orders of chivalry, and is usually told as a comic episode. It is worth telling from our side, because it was the first time highland chiefs' consent was sought by a European, and the first time it was set aside.

A gathering in front of a communal house — The chiefs who elected "Marie I" in 1888 met at Kon Gung, north of Kon Tum. Illustration.

The adventurer

Marie-Charles David de Mayréna was born in Toulon on January 31, 1842. By the 1880s he had served in the French army, failed in business, and left France under a cloud; in 1883 he fled to the Dutch East Indies to escape charges of embezzlement and was expelled from there the following year. In 1888 he came up into the highlands north of Kon Tum with a small party, ostensibly on a mission of exploration, and with the help of the Catholic missionaries who had been working among the Bahnar since 1851 (see The Kon Tum mission).

Portrait of Marie-Charles David de Mayrena — Marie-Charles David de Mayréna, “Marie I, King of the Sedang.” Photographer unknown, public domain.

June 3, 1888

At Kon Gung — today Dak Mar, in Kon Tum — chiefs of the Bahnar, Rengao and Sedang met and elected Mayréna as Marie I, King of the Sedang. Kon Gung was renamed Pelei Agna, the Great City. A constitution followed and was published in French newspapers: an absolute hereditary monarchy, Catholicism as the state religion, and a prohibition of human sacrifice. The kingdom had a flag — blue, with a white cross and a red star — orders of chivalry manufactured in Hong Kong, and postage stamps, which are today its best-known relic.

Postage stamps of the Kingdom of the Sedang — Stamps of the Kingdom of the Sedang — its best-known relic. Unknown, public domain.

What the chiefs understood themselves to be doing is not recorded in any of their own words. What is clear is that the Bahnar–Rengao confederation around the Kon Tum mission had reasons of its own to want a powerful ally against its neighbors, and that the Sedang had a long record of resisting outsiders. An election by chiefs was, in highland terms, a real political act.

How it ended

Mayréna’s aim was not to govern the highlands but to sell them. He offered his kingdom to France in exchange for trade monopolies; France declined. He tried Britain in Hong Kong in 1889 and was turned down again. A Belgian financier offered arms in return for mining rights; the French blocked the ports and seized the weapons at Singapore. Mayréna never returned to his kingdom. He died on the island of Tioman, off Malaya, on November 11, 1890 — of poison, a snakebite or a duel, depending on who tells it.

Meanwhile France, alarmed that a private adventurer had nearly handed the highlands to a rival power, moved to establish its own authority there. Within a few years the country around Kon Tum was administered by France, and annexed to it and to Annam without anyone asking the Sedang.

Why it matters to us

Every serious telling of the Kingdom of the Sedang is about Mayréna — his debts, his vanity, his stamps. Almost none is about the people who elected him. Yet the episode shows three things that recur through everything else in this library: that highland chiefs were political actors who made agreements; that outsiders sought those agreements when they were useful and discarded them when they were not; and that the great powers took the highlands as something to be settled among themselves. The anthropologist Gerald Hickey, who spent decades among the Bahnar and Sedang, wrote a whole book about the episode for that reason.

See also: The Sedang.

Gerald C. Hickey, Kingdom in the Morning Mist: Mayréna in the Highlands of Vietnam (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988) — borrow from the Internet Archive
J. P. Daughton, “Kings of the Mountains: Mayréna, Missionaries, and French Colonial Divisions in 1880s Indochina,” Itinerario 25:3–4 (2001) — the missionaries’ role, and the French view of the highlands as pays moï
Marie-Charles David de Mayréna and Kingdom of Sedang — dates, the constitution and the end
Historic Vietnam, “King of the Sedang” — Kon Gung, the flag and the stamps
Gerald C. Hickey, Sons of the Mountains: Ethnohistory of the Vietnamese Central Highlands to 1954 (Yale, 1982)

Compiled September 2026. If Sedang, Bahnar or Rengao oral tradition in your family remembers Kon Gung or the man the French called Marie I, we would very much like to hear it.

sedang bahnar rengao mayrena marie i 1888 kon gung kon tum kingdom french colonial

A country of our own, 1946 On May 27, 1946, the French High Commissioner created by decree a government for the Montagnard people of southern Indochina, over a territory with defined borders. Within four years the same lands had been handed to a Vietnamese king without our being asked, and within nine they had been absorbed by force into a republic. All three documents st... Reference 45 views Read More The first outsiders: Cham, Annam and the missions Four arrivals over a thousand years, each of which moved the Dega further from the sea, and a fifth — the missions — which moved nobody but changed everything by writing us down. This is the sequence as our records hold it, with the dates the outside chronicles give. Reference 32 views Read More Before 1800: free in the highlands For more than two thousand years before the nineteenth century the Dega governed themselves in the highlands. We farmed, hunted, traded, judged our own disputes and worshipped as we chose. Three neighboring monarchies dealt with our ritual authorities as with a power worth propitiating. That is the baseline against which everything since should... Explainer 48 views Read More The Kon Tum mission, 1851 On January 1, 1851, a French priest reached a Bahnar village called Kon Phar, having walked in from the coast. The mission that followed produced the first written form of any of our languages, the first dictionary, the first school, and the first outside description of who lived in the highlands and where. It is the beginning of the written rec... Explainer 40 views Read More The French arrive, 1876–1929 We let the French in. Most of our peoples welcomed them, believing they would help us recover the coast the Vietnamese had taken. What we got instead was a colonial administration, a plantation economy, the first Vietnamese settlers — and, entirely by accident, a single political identity that we have used ever since. Explainer 49 views Read More The Sedang (Xơ Đăng) The Sedang live in the mountains north of Kon Tum and across into Quảng Nam and Quảng Ngãi. They speak a North Bahnaric language, and gave their name to the short-lived “Kingdom of the Sedang” that a French adventurer proclaimed in 1888. They strongly resisted French rule. Reference 15 views Read More