Superior of The College General (1767–1774)
In Ha Tien, Pigneau worked as head of the Seminary of the Holy Angels, the Seminary established in Asia by the Paris Foreign Missions Society, which had relocated from Ayutthaya in Siam following the 1765 Burmese invasion, with approximately forty students of Chinese, Siamese, and Vietnamese extraction.
In 1768, the missionaries were jailed for three months when Siamese authorities complained to the local ruler Mạc Thiên Tứ that the school had afforded shelter to a fugitive Siamese prince. Pigneau was put into a cangue, a wooden and iron frame fastened around his limbs weighing eight pounds. He ignored family requests to return to France, saying that his missionary work was more important than a comfortable life. In 1769, the school was attacked by Chinese and Cambodian pirates, who massacred some of the students and burnt down the establishment... Pigneau was forced to flee in December 1769 with the survivors to Pondicherry, then a French territory, after a long sea journey through Malacca. The College was established a few miles from Pondicherry, in Virampatnam.
While in Pondicherry, Pigneau continued mastering Chinese and Vietnamese languages until he was fully conversant with both. In 1773, he compiled a Vietnamese-Latin dictionary with the help of eight southern Vietnamese, following in the footsteps of Alexandre de Rhodes. His work, Dictionarium Anamitico-Latinum, would be published in 1838 by Mgr Jean-Louis Taberd.
Pigneau de Behaine was made Bishop of Adran (of Adranos in Bithynia, modern Orhaneli in Turkey, in partibus infidelium), and Apostolic Vicar of Cochinchina on 24 February 1774 in São Tomé near Madras. After his ordination in 1774, he went to Macau to gather more staff before returning to resume his work in Ha Tien. In Macau, he was able to publish and print a catechism in Vietnamese)(containing an introduction in Chinese, the body of the text in the Vietnamese alphabet, and a translation in Latin), and despatched a copy to Rome. He left Macau on 1 March 1775, and reached Ha Tien later in the month, where he again re-established missionary operations.
In 1775-76, Pigneau attempted to convert the Stieng people, but the missionaries he sent suffered greatly, and either fell ill or returned.
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