4 ideas
Hồ Quý Ly rose as a minister at the Trần court, consolidated power through purges, moved the capital to a new stone citadel at Tây Đô in Thanh Hóa, and took the throne in 1400. He issued paper currency, capped private landholdings and slave ownership, and curbed the aristocracy and the Buddhist establishment.
Reforms imposed by decree can rebuild institutions quickly, but they do not win loyalty from the people whose lives they disrupt. When an external crisis arrives, the regime finds it has walls, armies and laws but no population willing to fight for it.
Read a ruthless modernizer by how the violence used to clear resistance undermines the reforms themselves. Killing rivals and loyalists creates fear and distrust. The reforms then need cooperation, and fear and distrust are exactly what withhold it. On this view the usurper-reformer is neither hero nor villain but a mechanism that defeats itself.
To concentrate power, the reformer attacks the institutions that hold the old order together. Here these are the hereditary aristocracy's estates and servants, and the wealth and moral authority of the Buddhist establishment. He replaces them with a bureaucratic, Confucian-leaning state. This frees resources and removes rival power centers, but it also strips away the familiar sources of meaning and belonging that bound people to the realm.