The Qin armies come south

The story is usually told like this: Tan Thuy Hoang sent Do Thu south with five hundred thousand men to take the land of the Yue; the Qin army bogged down for three years in forest and hill; the Yue fought no pitched battle but struck at night; in the end the Qin commander was killed and several hundred thousand men lay dead.

Almost every detail in that paragraph really is in the old books. But all of it sits inside one passage of one book, and that book is not a history — it is a book written to talk a ruler out of something.¹

The Chinese history closest in time to the Qin, the Su ky of Sima Qian, gives the taking of the south a single sentence, and in it there is no Do Thu, no five hundred thousand, and no defeat.²

This episode reads both versions side by side.

The Hoai Nam Tu was put together by retainers of Luu An, prince of Huainan, and presented to the Han emperor around one hundred and thirty-nine before the common era — some seventy or eighty years after the Qin had already fallen.

The passage about the Yue lands opens with the reason for going, and the reason is very concrete: the Qin coveted the rhinoceros horn, the elephant tusks, the kingfisher feathers and the pearls of the Yue.¹ Not the widening of borders, not the putting down of a revolt. Goods.

Then the force: Commandant Do Thu was to raise five hundred thousand men in five armies — one to block the ridge at Dam Thanh, one to hold the pass at Cuu Nghi, one to sit in the city of Phien Ngung, one to guard the border at Nam Da, one to hold the river at Du Can. Then three years without unfastening their armour or letting a crossbow go slack.¹

Those three years failed over grain. The book says Giam Loc could find no way to move the supplies and had to set soldiers to cutting a canal to open a grain road. They fought the Yue, and killed the lord of Tay Au, Dich Hu Tong.

Then comes the part every Vietnamese reader remembers: the Yue all withdrew into the thickets and the scrub, living among the wild animals, and not one of them was willing to be a captive of the Qin. They set a man of rare ability over themselves as general, attacked the Qin by night, broke them utterly, killed Commandant Do Thu, and bodies lay and blood ran by the hundreds of thousands.¹

First, the passage has a conclusion. It does not stop at the victory. The book goes on: men could not till, women could not spin, the weak fell dead in the road, the sick went untended, the dead unburied — and then Chen Sheng rose in revolt and the Qin lost the empire. The closing line is: the disaster lay in guarding against the Hu while coveting the Yue.¹

That is what the passage was written to do. Luu An was arguing that his own emperor should not make war in the south, and he used the Qin as his example. A large number in the service of an argument has to be read differently from a number in a ledger.

There is a test of scale available from the sources themselves. In one hundred and eleven before the common era, when the Han destroyed Nam Viet, the overseer of Que Lam commandery brought the whole of Au Lac over to the Han, and the Han shu gives the number of those people: more than four hundred thousand mouths.³ That is, the entire population of the region, a century later, was still smaller than the army the Qin are said to have marched south.

Second, the figure of five hundred thousand appears twice in that same passage — once for the wall against the Xiongnu in the north, once for Do Thu in the south.¹ And for the northern one the Records of the Grand Historian gives a different number: Meng Tian took three hundred thousand.⁴

And in that same closing line, the original does not say whose bodies those were. The familiar reading — hundreds of thousands of Qin dead — is an inference, not a word in the text.¹

Third, the book gives the Yue general no name. The original says only that the Yue "set up among themselves one outstanding and able" as general — a phrase about ability, not a personal name.¹ The man who led the night attack that killed a Qin commander is, in the oldest text, nameless.

Some four years later, Luu An himself sent the Han emperor a memorial arguing against a campaign in Man Viet. The Han thu copies it whole — and it tells this same war in an entirely different voice.

It opens with five words worth noticing: your servant has heard the elders say. That is to say, the man whose name stands on the Huainanzi, when addressing his emperor, files the story under hearsay.⁵

Then he tells it: in the time of Qin, Commandant Do Thu was sent to strike the Yue, and Giam Loc to cut a canal and open a road; the Yue fled deep into the mountains and forests, and could not be attacked; the army stayed on, holding empty ground, the days drew out, the soldiers wore down, the Yue came out and struck, and the Qin army was heavily broken.⁵

Read it closely and this memorial has no five hundred thousand, no five armies, no three years in armour, and no killing of Do Thu.

One man, a few years apart, on the same events: the version signed and handed to an emperor is cautious and admits it is hearsay; the version in his book has the round numbers, the five-army deployment, and a commander's corpse.

The Records of the Grand Historian set it down under the thirty-third year of the First Emperor — two hundred and fourteen before the common era:

men who had once absconded, men living in their wives' households, and merchants were raised to take the land of Luc Luong, which was made into Que Lam, Tuong Quan and Nam Hai, and convicts were sent out to garrison it. In the north-west, the Xiongnu were driven back.²

That is all. The taking of the whole of Linh Nam shares a sentence with the driving back of the Xiongnu, and it is recorded as an administrative matter already concluded.

The phrase worth stopping at is "men living in their wives' households". Under Qin law these were a despised class: young men with no property who went to live in the wife's family. The Vietnamese translation of the Complete Annals glosses them bluntly — such men were regarded as "a blemish, a growth on the body, so much surplus flesh".⁶ The army in this version is not half a million picked troops; it is the people the Qin state wanted sent far away.

Nor was Luc Luong a name the Yue used of themselves. The old histories explain it: the people of Lingnan live in the hills and are stubborn by temper, and so they were called Luc Luong.⁶ It is a name given by others, and what it means is "the stubborn ones in the hills".

There is a version older still than the Huainanzi. Jia Yi's essay on the faults of the Qin, copied by Sima Qian at the end of the basic annals, says the Qin took the land of the Hundred Yue and made it into Que Lam and Tuong Quan; the lords of the Hundred Yue bowed their heads, put ropes about their own necks, and handed their lives to petty officials.⁷ In that version the Yue surrender outright — there is no Qin defeat at all.

To say "the Records of the Grand Historian do not mention Do Thu" is wrong. They do — only not in the annals, and not in Sima Qian's own voice.

His name appears in a memorial by Nghiem An to Emperor Wu of Han, which Sima Qian copied into the book whole. Nghiem An was arguing that his emperor should stop making war, and he wrote: the Qin sent Commandant Do Thu with tower-ship troops to attack the Hundred Yue in the south, and sent Giam Loc to cut a canal to carry grain; they drove deep into Yue country — and the Yue fled. The days stretched out, the grain ran out, the Yue struck back, and the Qin army was heavily beaten.⁸

So two Han men, both urging their ruler not to fight in the south, both tell of a Qin defeat in the Yue lands. But they tell it differently exactly where it matters:

Nghiem An gives no troop figure at all. Nghiem An does not say Do Thu was killed — only that the Qin army was heavily beaten. He puts the quagmire at more than ten years rather than three, and he says plainly that these were tower-ship troops, that is, a river navy.⁸

The death of Do Thu — the image that has lodged in popular memory as the strongest thing in the whole war — is in one text only.

This has to be said plainly, because it decides whether this war is our ancestors' story at all.

The man killed in the Huainanzi is the lord of Tay Au, named Dich Hu Tong.¹ Tay Au was a Yue grouping in what is now Guangxi. In that whole passage there is not one word about Au Lac, about Thuc Phan, about Van Lang, or about the land of Giao Chi.

The two words Au Lac do appear in the Records of the Grand Historian — but somewhere quite different and much later: in the passages about the Han destroying Nam Viet in one hundred and eleven before the common era, more than a century after the war with the Qin.⁹

Elsewhere in that same book, Tay Au and Lac are listed as two separate groups, standing alongside Man Viet.⁹

So the accurate sentence is this: the Qin came down into Lingnan, and those who fought them were the Yue groups south of the Five Ranges, Tay Au among them. Tying that war to Thuc Phan's Au Lac is an inference made by later ages, not a word in the texts that tell this war.