Confirmation by other foreign sources.

Various foreign authors confirmed that the Hoang Sa Islands were fully part of the Vietnamese territory as early as the 18th century. For instance, testimony in 1701 by a missionary travelling on the Amphitrite (reportedly the first French ship to enter South-China Sea late in the 17th century) describing frightening dangers experienced by ships in the vicinity of the Paracels, mentioned specifically that this archipelago be-longed to the Empire of Annam i.e., a former name for Vietnam (8). Another document dated April 10, 1768 and called "Note sur l'Asie demandee par M. de la Borde a M. d'Estaing" (now held in French archives) (9) provides evidence of intense patrol operations between the Paracels and the coast of Vietnam by Vietnamese naval units. When French Admiral d'Estaing was planning a raid against the Vietnamese city of Hue in order to set a French establishment in Indochina, he reported that Vietnamese vessels frequently cruised between the Paracels and the coast and thus, "would have reported about his approach ". This fact apparently caused him to cancel the raid planned against Vietnam. This demonstrates that as long as two centuries ago, the Hoang Sa Islands were already included in the Vietnamese system of defense and that the most evident acts in the exercise of state jurisdiction were regularly performed by Vietnamese authorities. In the same document, Admiral d'Estaing also gave various detailed descriptions of the defense installations on the shore. He wrote that "the Hue citadel contained 1,200 cannons, of which 800 were made of bronze, many bearing the arms of Portugal and the date 1661. There were also some smaller pieces (bearing the arms of Cambodia and the monogram of the British Company of India) that had been salvaged from driftwood of wrecked vessels in the Paracels."

In another proposal made in 1758-59 for a French attempt against Vietnam and presented in his Memoire pour une entreprise sur la Cochinchine proposee a M. de Magon par M. d'Estaing (10), admiral d'Estaing made another mention of the Hoang Sa Islands in his description of the defense of Lord Vo Vuong's palace. Built on the bank of a river, he reported "the palace was surrounded by an 8 to 9-foot high wall without any kind of fortification. There were many cannons that were designed for decoration, rather than for use. Admiral d'Estaing put the number of cannons at 400, many being Portuguese pieces "taken here from ships wrecked on the Paracels. " In a book published in London in 1806: "a Voyage To Cochinchina", John Barrow told the story of a British journey to Vietnam and indicated that the Paracels were part of the Vietnamese economic world. The journey described in the book was made by Count Maccartney, then British Envoy to the Chinese Court. Leaving England on September 2, 1792, Count Maccartney stopped in Tourane (Danang) between May 24 and June 16, 1793 in order to enter into contact with the King of Cochinchina. The 3-week long stay gave John Barrow leisure to study Vietnamese vessels. Therefore, he provided in his book a detailed description of different types of boats used by the Cochinchinese in order to reach, among other places, the Paracel Islands where they collected trepang and swallow nests (11).

Thus Vietnamese and foreign sources agree that the Hoang Sa Islands have for centuries been included within the scope of Vietnamese interests and aims. These sources recognize the perfection of the sovereign title upheld by the Vietnamese in the course of time in relation to a growing number of states. The progressive intensification of Vietnamese control over the Hoang Sa Islands reached a decisive and irreversible point at the beginning of the 19th century, when the reigning

Nguyen dynasty developed a systematic policy toward complete integration of the archipelago into the national community.