him but after having given his sister to the warlord as a concubine. He eventually succeeded in taking Mỹ Tho, made it the main staging point for his operations, and rebuilt his army. After a hard-fought battle, his soldiers captured Saigon on 7 September 1788. Eventually, Pigneau assembled four vessels to sail to Vietnam from Pondicherry, arriving in Saigon on 24 July 1789. The combined forces helped to consolidate Nguyễn Ánh's hold on southern Vietnam. The exact magnitude of foreign aid and the importance of their contribution to Gia Long's success is a point of dispute. Earlier scholars asserted that up to 400 Frenchmen enlisted, but more recent work has claimed that less than 100 soldiers were present, along with approximately a dozen officers. Consolidation of southern Vietnam After more than a decade of conflict, Nguyễn Ánh had finally managed to gain control of Saigon for long enough to have time to start a permanent base in the area and prepare to build up for a decisive power struggle with the Tây Sơn. The area around Saigon, known as Gia Dinh, began to be referred to as its own region, because Nguyễn Ánh's presence was becoming entrenched, distinguishing and associating the area with a political base. Nguyễn Ánh's military was able to consolidate, and a civil service was reestablished. According to the historian Keith Taylor, this was the first time that the southern third of Vietnam was integrated "as a region capable of participating successfully in war and politics among Vietnamese speakers", which could "compete for ascendancy with all the other places inhabited by speakers of the Vietnamese language". A Council of High Officials consisting of military and civil officials was created in 1788, as was a tax collection system. In the same year, regulations were passed to force half the male population of Gia Dinh to serve as conscripts, and two years later, a system of military colonies was implemented to bolster the Nguyễn support base across all racial groups, including ethnic Khmers and Chinese. The French officers enlisted by Pigneau helped to train Nguyễn Ánh's armed forces and introduced Western technological expertise to the war effort. The navy was trained by Jean-Marie Dayot, who supervised the construction of bronze-plated naval vessels. Olivier de Puymanel was responsible for training the army and the construction of fortifications. He introduced European infantry training, formations and tactics while also facilitating various methods