 Various European efforts to establish trading posts in Vietnam failed, but missionaries were allowed to operate for some time until the mandarins began concluding that Christianity (which had succeeded in converting up to a tenth of the population by 1700) was a threat to the Confucian social order since it condemned ancestor worship as idolatry.Vietnamese attitudes to Europeans and Christianity hardened as they began to increasingly see it as a way of undermining society.Between 1627 and 1775, two powerful families had partitioned the country