two interpreters in 1840. They were received in Paris by Prime Minister Marshal Soult and the Commerce Minister, but they were shunned by King Louis-Philippe. This came after the Society of Foreign Missions and the Holy See had urged a rebuke for an "enemy of the religion". The delegation went on to London, with no success. Domestic program The beginning of Minh Mang rule over Vietnam was vastly unsettling. Vietnam was divided into autonomous domains governed independently by Viceroys under Gia Long. The first cholera pandemic reached Vietnam in summer 1820 removed 206,835 tax payers from royal tax registers, while political scientist Samuel Popkin suggested that millions people could have been perished, out of the total population of around eight million. On the domestic front, Minh Mạng continued his father's national policies of reorganising the administrative structure of the government. These included the construction of highways, a postal service, public storehouses for food, monetary and agrarian reforms. He continued to redistribute land periodically and forbade all other sales of land to prevent wealthy citizens from reacquiring excessive amounts of land with their money. In 1840 it was decreed that rich landowners had to return a third of their holdings to the community. Calls for basic industrialisation and diversification of the economy into fields such as mining and forestry were ignored. He further centralised the administration, introduced the definition of three levels of performance in the triennial examinations for recruiting mandarins. In 1839, Minh Mạng introduced a program of salaries and pensions for princes and mandarins to replace the traditional assignment of fief estates. Diseases, disasters and rebellions against oppression and misery were very frequent, undermining the king's strength. Vietnam was at its low point of coherence in history. About 200 rebellions were recorded during his twenty-year reign. Conquests and ethnic minority policy Despite ongoing intra-turmoil, Minh Mang exhibited his admiring to Confucian rule and classical Chinese culture, while imposing ethnic assimilation at home and pursuing territorial expansion and interference in neighboring Laos. Minh Mang put his support to Vientiane's king Chao Anou, his close ally, to wage war against Siam. But the outcome did not go for their plan. Anou was defeated and then was detaining to the Siamese in late 1828 by Chao Noi, ruler of Muang Phuan, also a tributary of Minh Mang. Chao Noi was arrested by the Vietnamese for betraying, then being executed in Hue by