Episode 2Era Au Lac
Thuc Phan and the country of Au Lac
The oldest text about him runs to two sentences: the son of the Thuc king brought thirty thousand men against the Lac king and then styled himself An Duong Vuong. No name, no birthplace, no year — and not the name Au Lac.
The old chronicles say
What the histories of the dynastic era recorded.
The familiar telling fits in one sentence: Thuc Phan, son of the king of Shu in Ba Thuc, defeated the Hung king, founded the country of Au Lac in two hundred and fifty-seven before the common era, and set his capital at Co Loa. All of that sentence comes from one place: the national history of the Le dynasty.1
It holds five claims: a name, a birthplace, an opponent, a country, a year. Read the texts in the order they were written and it becomes clear that the five did not enter the record together — they were laid down one over another across nearly a thousand years, and the oldest text has almost none of them.
The oldest text gives him two sentences
The old chronicles say
What the histories of the dynastic era recorded.
The book Giao Chau ngoai vuc ky was lost long ago. It survives because the Thuy kinh chu — Li Daoyuan's commentary on the rivers, from the early sixth century — quotes a passage of it whole.
That passage opens by describing the society before anyone came from outside: in the old days, before Giao Chi had commanderies and districts, the land had Lac fields, fields that follow the tide up and down; the people who cleared and ate from those fields were therefore called the Lac people; there were Lac kings and Lac lords over the commanderies and districts, and most districts had Lac generals, who wore bronze seals on green ribbons.2
Then come the two sentences about the man this episode is named for:
Later the son of the king of Thuc brought thirty thousand troops and attacked the Lac king and the Lac lords, subdued the Lac generals, and thereupon styled himself An Duong Vuong.2
That is all. In those two sentences there is no personal name, no birthplace, no year, and no name for the country. Nor is the defeated party a "Hung king" — the text calls them the Lac king and the Lac lords.
The one military detail is the figure of thirty thousand. It is far smaller than the numbers the previous episode met, and it is the only troop figure to survive from an early text.
The name arrives about eight hundred years later
The old chronicles say
What the histories of the dynastic era recorded.
The earliest surviving Vietnamese history is the Viet su luoc, compiled around the end of the fourteenth century. There he has a name at last: Phan, son of the king of Thuc. But there is still no birthplace, and the country he founded still has no name.3
Only in the Dai Viet su ky toan thu, in the fifteenth century, do all five claims stand together: surname Thuc, given name Phan, a man of Ba Thuc, his capital at Phong Khe — with a note directly after it: this is today's Co Loa citadel.1
The same passage supplies the year and the country: in the year Giap Thin, the fifty-eighth year of King Nan of Zhou, he had annexed the country of Van Lang and changed the name of the realm to Au Lac.1
Set the three side by side and the order is plain: the sixth-century text has a man with no name; the fourteenth-century text adds the name; the fifteenth-century text adds the birthplace, the country and the date.
The Nguyen court historians reject the Le court historians
The old chronicles say
What the histories of the dynastic era recorded.
What is worth noticing is that the sharpest attack on "a man of Ba Thuc" comes not from a modern scholar but from the historians of the Nguyen court, in the critical notes of the Kham dinh Viet su thong giam cuong muc — quoted in the notes to the Vietnamese translation of the Complete Annals.
Their argument has three parts, each of them a concrete question.
First, the state of Shu had been destroyed by Qin in the fifth year of King Shenjing of Zhou — three hundred and sixteen before the common era — so what king was left to have a son.
Second, between Shu and Van Lang lay the states of Kien Vi, Da Lang, Cung Tac and Nhiem Bang, two or three thousand li apart — and that same note records that those states are all Yunnan today. How was Shu to cross all of them and swallow Van Lang.
Third, the old texts themselves do not agree: some write "Phan, grandson of the king of Thuc", others "An Duong Vuong, surname Thuc, name Phan, a man of Ba Thuc".
Then they pass sentence in one line: to call him the king of Shu, and a man of Ba Thuc besides, is simply wrong.4
And they offer the explanation that is still the tidiest available: perhaps out in the Southwest, beside Van Lang, there was a man of the Thuc clan, who was then mistaken for the king of Shu.4
That is to say: a chieftain of the Thuc clan out in that country — the hills bordering Van Lang — was read by later ages as the son of a king in Sichuan.
A modern scholar puts it more briefly still
How later ages remembered
What later ages did with the story — documents, ceremonies, and arguments of their own time.
In nineteen seventy-nine, in a peer-reviewed journal, Stephen O'Harrow put the same paradox again — and he says plainly that he is passing on a point made by T'eng Yuan-li: Shu was brought under Qin in three hundred and sixteen before the common era, well before Qin finished uniting China, which makes it hard for a son of that king to have been alive more than a century afterwards.5
The number is not new. It was already sitting in the Nguyen historians' note almost a hundred years earlier, written in the old manner as "the fifth year of King Shenjing of Zhou".4
He also described the state of the evidence in an image worth keeping: reconstructing this is like piecing together the skeleton of an extinct reptile from the few scraps one can find — a hip bone, a jawbone, the odd tooth — and one risks producing an animal bent permanently into an unnatural posture. The documents on An Duong Vuong, he wrote, are little better than those scattered bones.5
His conclusion is not that the man never existed, but that his ancestral home should be looked for somewhat farther afield than Sichuan, because "having come from Shu" is exactly the kind of detail that can enter a story while it passes through generations of telling before anyone writes it down. And he points a direction: the objects unearthed at Shih-chai-shan in Yunnan — north-west of the old Vietnamese homelands — resemble the finds of the Red River delta so closely that some scholars have argued for very close links between the two.5
How the Hung king died, and why we never hear it
The old chronicles say
What the histories of the dynastic era recorded.
The Complete Annals are brief but harsh about the fall of Van Lang. The king of Thuc had attacked many times and lost many times, because the Hung king's troops were strong and his generals able. Then the Hung king said one sentence: "I have divine strength — does Thuc not fear it?" — and let his defences go unrepaired, giving himself to wine and food.
When the Thuc army came close, the Hung king was still drunk and had not woken. The Chinese original goes on: the king vomited blood, fell into a well and died; his troops turned their spears about and surrendered to Thuc.1
The word in the original is fell, not leapt — and the line just before it says he had not yet woken from the wine. This is a death by drink, not a death chosen.
That last detail is missing from the popular telling, and it is also missing from one fairly common Vietnamese translation of this very history — that translation stops at the troops turning their spears.1 A death as concrete as that, dropped somewhere in translation, is worth saying out loud: it is a rare thing, a Hung king whose last act is on the record.
Fifty years, nearly empty
The old chronicles say
What the histories of the dynastic era recorded.
The Complete Annals give An Duong Vuong a reign of fifty years, from two hundred and fifty-seven to two hundred and eight before the common era.1
But read closely and those fifty years hold very little: in the third year there is the spirit and the golden turtle, and after that the fall of the Zhou, the Qin unification, the Qin march into Lingnan — all of it Chinese business. Not one event of Au Lac itself across nearly half a century.
Fifty years here is therefore not a year-by-year record. It is a frame stretched between two dates that were fixed at either end.
The earlier Vietnamese history does not even give a year: the Viet su luoc places the founding only at the end of the Zhou, and places the fall after Trieu Da had already taken the kingly title — that is, later than the date the Complete Annals give.3
The Chinese records push it later still. The Su ky says that after the death of Empress Lu — that is, after one hundred and eighty before the common era — Trieu Da used the weight of his arms and gifts of goods to bring Man Viet, Tay Au and Lac into submission.6 Read that way, the passing of Au Lac to the Trieu happens nearly thirty years later than the date in the Complete Annals.
Three sources, three different dates for the same event. This episode will not choose for the reader which is right — only make plain that no date has all three behind it.
What is left when the layers come off
How later ages remembered
What later ages did with the story — documents, ceremonies, and arguments of their own time.
Strip away what appears only in the late layers and much less remains than the familiar telling — but it is not nothing.
What remains is a real conquest in the memory of Chinese record-keepers: a chieftain of the Thuc clan with thirty thousand men, striking into a society of tide-fed fields, of Lac kings, Lac lords and Lac generals wearing bronze seals on green ribbons. The winner took the title An Duong Vuong.2
The country called Au Lac, the birthplace in Ba Thuc, the year two hundred and fifty-seven, and even the name Thuc Phan — all of these are the words of later ages.
The surest thing in the whole story is not in any book but in the ground: a citadel of three rings, its outer wall running some eight kilometres, still standing north of Hanoi. The next episode is about it: The Co Loa citadel.
Sources for this episode
Every passage points to one of the documents below. How we choose and check sources
Dai Viet su ky toan thu
Used for: The old chronicles sayBack to the text
Thuy kinh chu
Used for: The old chronicles sayUsed for: How later ages rememberedBack to the text
Viet su luoc
Used for: The old chronicles sayBack to the text
Kham dinh Viet su thong giam cuong muc
Used for: The old chronicles sayUsed for: How later ages rememberedBack to the text
O'Harrow 1979 — From Co-loa to the Trung Sisters' Revolt
Used for: How later ages rememberedBack to the text
Su ky
Used for: The old chronicles sayBack to the text