Background
Marie-Thérèse Nguyễn Hữu Thị Lan was born in Gò Công, a Mekong Delta town in what was then the French colony of Cochinchina, one of the three areas (the others being the protectorates of Annam and Tonkin) that composed the Union of French Indochina.
Her father, Pierre Nguyễn Hữu-Hào, described as a wealthy merchant, had been born into a poor Roman Catholic family in Gò Công. Through an introduction from the Archbishop of Saigon, he became secretary to the billionaire Lê Phát Đạt, Duke of Long-My, and eventually married his employer's daughter, Marie Lê Thị Binh, and inherited his title.
A naturalized French citizen, Nguyễn Hữu Thị Lan, who was known as Mariette, studied at the Couvent des Oiseaux, a fashionable Catholic school located in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, where she was sent at the age of 12.
She was a distant cousin of her future husband, the emperor.
Read more about this topic: Nam Phuong
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