The magic crossbow, My Chau and Trong Thuy

The oldest surviving version is in Giao Chau ngoai vuc ky, a lost book preserved in the early sixth-century Thuy kinh chu.

There the crossbow is made by a spirit man named Cao Thong, and its power is given as a figure: one shot kills three hundred men. The Nam Viet king, Commandant Da, saw he could not win and pulled his army back to Vu Ninh district.²

Then Nam Viet sent its crown prince, named Thuy, to submit and serve the king as a vassal. An Duong Vuong did not know Thong was a spirit and treated him without principle, so Thong left, saying: hold this crossbow and you rule the world; lose it and you lose the world.²

What comes next is where this parts company with today's telling. The original says: An Duong Vuong had a daughter named My Chau, and seeing that Thuy was handsome, she took him as her lover. Thuy asked her to fetch her father's crossbow for him to look at; having seen it, he secretly sawed it through, and fled home to report to the Nam Viet king.²

Nam Viet advanced. The king drew the crossbow, it broke, he lost. An Duong Vuong went down to a boat and put straight out to sea.²

That is the whole of it. No golden turtle, no claw, no goose-down quilt, no daughter killed, no pearls. The young woman in this version is not deceived — she is the one who acts. Both texts have the crossbow ruined by stealth; the difference is that here it is destroyed rather than exchanged.

The Viet su luoc, the earliest surviving Vietnamese history, is briefer still — and still has no turtle.

There the crossbow-maker is also a spirit man, named Cao Lo, and the weapon is described in a strikingly technical way: a lieu crossbow that looses ten shots, and he trained ten thousand soldiers to use it.³

Trieu Da — the book calls him Emperor Vu — sent his son Thuy as a hostage, asking for friendly relations. Then the king's treatment of Cao Lo grew thin, and Cao Lo left. My Chau went to Thuy; Thuy coaxed her into showing him the crossbow and broke its mechanism.³

When the army came, the book has one cold sentence: the king went on as before. The bow broke, the troops scattered. The king put a rhinoceros horn in his mouth and leapt into the water, and the water opened a way; and the country passed to the Trieu.³

The two earliest texts, eight hundred years apart, differ in many details — but both lack exactly what we now take to be the heart of the story. And both keep something today's telling drops: the man who made the crossbow walks away because the king treats him badly. In both, the country is lost not because of a young woman but because a king mistreated a man of ability.

Every detail we know arrives together, in the Dai Viet su ky toan thu.

There the rampart keeps collapsing as fast as it is raised; the king keeps a fast and prays to heaven, earth and the spirits of the hills and rivers; and a golden turtle swims up from the east, calling itself the envoy of the river, and speaks like a human being. The turtle names the cause: the mountain and river spirits, and the ghost of a dead musician buried at Mount That Dieu, where an innkeeper named Ngo Khong keeps a daughter and a white cockerel. Kill the white cockerel, clear the evil air, and the wall will be finished in less than half a month.¹

On leaving, the turtle pulls off one of its own claws and hands it to the king, telling him to make it into a crossbow trigger. The king has Cao Lo — the book notes that some texts call him Cao Thong — make the weapon, called the holy crossbow of the sacred light and the golden claw.¹

This version also changes how the bow is ruined: Trong Thuy secretly damages the trigger and puts another in its place, rather than sawing. And it adds the parting scene — My Chau says she has a brocade quilt lined with goose down, and will pull down from it and drop it at the forks in the road so her husband can follow.¹

Then the final scene, the one every modern telling keeps: the golden turtle surfaces and shouts "the one seated behind you on that horse is the enemy"; the king kills his daughter; she prays to become a pearl to wash away the disgrace; her blood runs into the water, the oysters drink it and it turns to pearl. The king takes a seven-inch rhinoceros horn, parts the water and goes into the sea. Trong Thuy carries his wife's body back to the Snail Citadel to bury it, then throws himself down a well. Ever after, pearls from the eastern sea washed in the water of that well shine brighter.¹

This is the part almost no popular telling mentions, and it is the sharpest part of all.

Immediately after setting the story down, Ngo Si Lien adds his comment. And he does not reject the whole cluster. His opening line asks straight out whether the story of the golden turtle is to be believed, and he answers himself: spirits descending, a stone that speaks — such things may well be.¹

What he doubts is one detail: at the goose down he writes that the business of My Chau scattering feathers to mark the road need not have happened at all.¹

His reason is a point about texts, not about miracles: if it happened, once would be enough to record it; and yet the daughter of Trieu Viet Vuong is later given the same scene over again in imitation. Then his guess: perhaps the chronicler, seeing that both the Thuc and the Trieu lost their countries through a son-in-law, took one event and told it twice.¹

The Trieu Viet Vuong story he means is the one told in the last episode of the Hong Bang era: Trieu Quang Phuc in the Da Trach marsh, who also lost his country to a son-in-law, and also through a sacred object exchanged for a false one.

And he closes with a line worth reading slowly: the histories say An Duong Vuong fell because the crossbow's trigger was swapped, and Trieu Viet Vuong fell because a claw was taken from his helmet — this is only borrowed language, making marvels of objects. Holding a country and resisting invaders has a way of its own: he who has the way is helped by many and rises; he who loses it is helped by few and falls. It is not because of these things.¹

The official historian of Dai Viet, on the very page where he has just written down the golden turtle, says that the crossbow is not why the country was lost.

Ngo Si Lien doubted it, but he still wrote it down. Four hundred years later the Nguyen court's Kham dinh Viet su thong giam cuong muc did something more decisive: it took the golden turtle out of the main text.

In that history the main narrative keeps Trong Thuy swapping the trigger and the promise of the goose-down cloak. But the golden turtle rising and calling itself the envoy of the Thanh Giang, the clearing of the evil air, the claw pulled off and handed over to make the crossbow of the sacred light and the golden claw — all of that is pushed down into a note, quoted from the older history and closed off with seven words: the matter is absurd; it is now expunged.⁴

In the same note, the Nguyen historians record yet another version of the crossbow, quoted from a Chinese book: the spirit Cao Thong made An Duong Vuong a crossbow that killed ten thousand of the enemy at one shot, and thirty thousand at three.⁴

So there are four figures for one crossbow across four texts: three hundred men a shot; ten bolts at a time; ten thousand men a shot; and in the best-known version no figure at all, only the turtle's claw.

The later the text, the less the crossbow is a weapon with specifications and the more it is a sacred object.