Origins
Perhaps major source of Nguyễn army's firearms was Portuguese traders, who allied with Nguyễn clan, while their rival, the Dutch formed an alliance with Trịnh lords. At the time, Chinese traders had difficulty obtaining artillery, so scholars pinpointed Macau, then was an important Portuguese trading port as the most likely source of the cannons.
In his diary, the Vietnamese speaking Jesuit priest Christoforo Borri, who worked as a Catholic missionary in Vietnam in the 1620s, asserted an unconventional hypothesis to explain the Nguyễn cannons. He claimed that the Nguyễn Lords acquired their first artillery through luck, after a wrecked ship had run aground. He claimed that Nguyễn Phúc Nguyên's decision to flout the authority of the Trịnh was prompted by the fortuitous acquisition of the cannon, writing ths his defiance was caused by being "suddenly furnished with divers pieces of artillery recovered and gotten out of the ship-wreck of sundry ships of the Portugals and Hollanders." Perhaps the new weaponry that Nguyễn lord acquired was fare superior to Trịnh's archaic cannons. Borri went on to remark that he felt that the Nguyễn Lords' army had honed their cannon operating skills to the extent that "they surpass our Europeans."
Read more about this topic: Artillery Of The Nguyen Lords
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