and its written form chu Hán started to decline. At this time there were briefly four competing writing systems in Vietnam; chữ Hán, chữ Nôm, chữ quốc ngữ, and French. Although the first romanized script chữ quốc ngữ newspaper, Gia Dinh Bao, was founded in 1865, Vietnamese nationalists continued to use chữ Nôm until after the First World War. After French rule, chữ quốc ngữ became the favored written language of the Vietnamese independence movement. BBC journalist Nguyễn Giang noted that while the early Christian missionaries are credited with creating the Vietnamese alphabet, what they did wasn't unique or difficult and would have been done later without them had they not created it. Giang further stated that the main reason for the popularisation of the Latin alphabet in the Nguyễn dynasty (the French protectorates of Annam and Tonkin) was because of the pioneering efforts by intellectuals from French Cochinchina combined with the progressive and scientific policies of the French government in French Indochina, that created the momentum for the usage of chữ Quốc ngữ to spread. Giang stated that the Tonkin Free School only removed the stigma against using chữ Quốc ngữ for the Nguyễn dynasty elites, but didn't actually popularise it. An important reason why Latin script became the standard writing system of Vietnam but did not do so in Cambodia and Laos that were both dominated by the French for a similar amount of time and existed within the same colonial framework has to do with the fact that the Emperors of the Nguyễn dynasty heavily promoted its usage. According to the historian Liam Kelley in his 2016 work "Emperor Thành Thái's Educational Revolution" neither the French nor the revolutionaries had enough power to spread the usage of chữ Quốc ngữ down to the village level. It was by imperial decree in 1906 that the Thành Thái Emperor parents could decide whether their children will follow a curriculum in Hán văn (漢文) or Nam âm (南音, "Southern sound", the contemporary Nguyễn dynasty name for chữ Quốc ngữ). This decree was issued at the same time when other social changes, such as the cutting of long male hair, were occurring. As a result of extensive education in chữ quốc ngữ, Vietnamese unversed in Chinese characters or Chinese-origin words are unable to read earlier Vietnamese texts written in Hán-Nôm. The Hán Nôm Institute is the national centre for academic research