Ma Yuan's bronze pillars and the policy of assimilation

The last episode ended as Ma Yuan marched his army back to the capital. What did he leave behind in Giao Chi? Many people will answer at once: a bronze pillar engraved with six characters, "dong tru chiet, Giao Chi diet" — if the bronze pillar breaks, Giao Chi will be destroyed.

But the main text of Ma Yuan’s biography in the Book of the Later Han tells it differently: a revision of the laws, two new districts, a horse cast from bronze drums. No bronze pillar at all. And to meet the oath, you have to go through more than a thousand years of books.¹

Having put down Cuu Chan, Ma Yuan reported to the throne that Tay Vu district had thirty-two thousand households, and that its furthest reaches lay more than a thousand li from the district seat. He asked to split it into two districts, Phong Khe and Vong Hai. The court agreed. The biography goes on: wherever Yuan passed, he repaired walls and dug channels to water the fields, for the benefit of the people.¹

Then comes the passage quoted most often. Translated closely:

He set out more than ten points on which Viet law was at odds with Han law, and made the old rules plain to the Viet once more, to bind them; from then on, the Lac Viet dutifully carried out the old rules of General Ma.¹

The whole passage runs to only thirty-four Chinese characters, and the book does not say what those ten-odd points were. We know the Lac Viet followed them afterwards, but not what it was they followed. The Tang commentary of Li Xian explains only one character: Lac is another name for the Viet.²

The Jin shu, the history of the Jin dynasty, later folds all of it into one sentence: Under the Later Han, Ma Yuan pacified the land of Giao, and only then began to lay out and build walled towns, and to set up villages and hamlets.³

Yuan liked to ride, and was good at judging fine horses. In Giao Chi he obtained the bronze drums of the Lac Viet, and cast them into a model horse, which he brought back and presented to the throne. The horse stood three thuoc five tac high, and by edict it was set below the Tuyen Duc hall as the model of a fine horse.¹

The Thuy kinh chu quotes a book called the Lam Ap ky on the same event, and adds something about a name. There was a region called Dong Co, a name that means bronze drum. It was the land of the Lac Viet, and it had bronze drums, and so it got that name; Ma Yuan took their drums to cast a bronze horse.⁴

What the drums were for, you have to look for in the commentary. Li Xian quotes the Quang Chau ky of an author of the Pei clan, describing the drums of the Ly and the Lao peoples. A drum is prized for being tall and large, with a face more than a truong across. Once it is cast, it is hung in the courtyard, and wine is set out to invite people, who come until the gate is full. The daughters of rich families strike the drum with hairpins of gold and silver, and when they have finished, they leave the pins behind as a gift to the host.⁵ That note speaks of the Ly and the Lao. It does not say these were the drums of the Lac Viet.

At one end, a drum hung in the middle of a courtyard to draw people together, as the note describes it. At the other, a model horse set below a palace in the north.

Now to the pillar. At the very point where it tells of the pacification being complete, the main text of the Book of the Later Han has only four characters: south of the passes, all was pacified.¹ The words bronze pillar do not appear even once in the main text of Ma Yuan’s biography, nor in the chapter on the southern peoples.⁶

They appear only once, in the note Li Xian attached to those four characters, quoting the Quang Chau ky: When Yuan reached Giao Chi, he set up a bronze pillar as the furthest limit of the Han.⁷

The Quang Chau ky is a lost local book. Li Xian wrote in the seventh century, more than six hundred years after Ma Yuan. The pillar entered the standard history of Ma Yuan through the back door: through a note, not through the words of the man who compiled the history.

Earlier, and more detailed, is the Thuy kinh chu of Li Daoyuan, from the early sixth century. He sets three passages side by side.

His own words say only that Ma Yuan set up a marker of metal as the southernmost limit. He does not yet use the words bronze pillar. It takes the Kham dinh Viet su thong giam cuong muc of the nineteenth century to explain that this marker was a bronze pillar.⁴⁸

The passage quoted from a letter of Yu Yiqi: Ma Yuan set up two bronze pillars north of the shore of Lam Ap. More than ten households of his soldiers stayed behind and did not go home, living across the Tho Linh river, facing the pillars.⁴

The passage quoted from the Lam Ap ky: in forty-three, Ma Yuan set up two bronze pillars at the southern edge of Tuong Lam district, marking the border with the kingdom of Tay Do, as the southern frontier of the Han.⁴

Tuong Lam was the southernmost district of Nhat Nam commandery, bordering Lam Ap. Both of the passages that cite a source put the two pillars in that far south, and neither has an oath. In the two books of the Thuy kinh chu checked, the words bronze pillar occur four times, all four in this passage, and never together with the word break or the word destroy.⁴

A small-print note in the Jin shu, under the name of Tuong Lam district, also records: there are bronze pillars there now, likewise set up by the Han as a boundary marker — without naming Ma Yuan.⁹

Yu Yiqi’s letter goes on about the soldiers who stayed: all were surnamed Ma, and they married among themselves. By the time of the letter they numbered two hundred households. The people of Giao Chau called them the Ma Luu, the Ma who stayed and settled. Their speech, and their food and drink, were still like those of the Chinese.⁴

Then a sentence worth noticing: mountains and rivers have shifted, and the bronze pillars now lie in the sea. Only through those people could the old spot still be recognised.⁴ Even in one of the earliest records that survive, nobody could see the pillars any more.

The New Book of Tang later counts five pillars, planted by Ma Yuan of the Han.¹⁰ The same book records that a Tang official, Ma Tong, set up two more bronze pillars at the old site of the Han, engraved with the virtue of the Tang, to show that he was a descendant of Phuc Ba, that is, of Ma Yuan, the General Who Subdues the Waves.¹¹ From here on there are two layers of pillars, the Han’s and the Tang’s.

And the Song-era Thai Binh hoan vu ky quotes a book called the Linh bieu luc, telling of an inspector of Ai Chau who wanted to melt the pillars down and sell them to foreign merchants. The local people did not know the pillars had been cast by Yuan, and took them for sacred objects; they wept and said: if you destroy them, my lord, we will be killed by the god of the sea.¹²

In that layer of books, the local people weep to save the pillars. They do not throw stones at them.

In the Book of the Later Han, the bronze pillar sits in a note. In the Vietnamese histories it moves up into the main text. The Viet su luoc records that Ma Yuan chased the remnants of the rebels to Cu Phong, where they surrendered, and then set up a bronze pillar as the furthest limit.¹³ The Complete Annals record under the year forty-three that Yuan then set up a bronze pillar as the final boundary of the Han.¹⁴ Neither place has the oath.

As for assimilation, there is a text written by a man who was part of it: the memorial of Tiet Tong, an official of Wu, one of the Three Kingdoms, which Chen Shou copied in full into the Tam quoc chi. As a young man he had fled the disorders to Giao Chau, and he later served as governor of Hop Pho and then of Giao Chi. When Lu Dai was recalled, Tiet Tong feared the successor would not be equal to the post, and so he sent up a memorial.²⁰ The Complete Annals place the memorial in the year Tan Hoi, that is, two hundred and thirty-one.²¹

He tells the history of civilising the land from the beginning. Translated closely:

Their tongues differ, and they can be understood only through several interpreters in turn. The people are like beasts, with no distinction between old and young. They tie their hair in mallet-shaped knots, go barefoot, and wear clothes pulled on over the head, fastened on the left. From then on, a good many Chinese convicts were moved there to live among them, and little by little the people were made to learn their letters, and came to know something of the language.²⁰

Then come Tich Quang and Nham Dien: teaching ploughing and harrowing, making the people wear caps and shoes, appointing officials to arrange marriages, founding schools. He concludes: from then until now, more than four hundred years, and by now there is some resemblance.²⁰ The Siku quanshu editors of the eighteenth century noted at the end of the book that from Tich Quang and Nham Dien to that time was not yet three hundred years, and that the figure was probably a mistake.²²

The sentence about convicts sounds familiar. The Book of the Later Han, compiled some two hundred years after this memorial, has a sentence almost identical word for word, which an earlier episode has already read.⁶

Tiet Tong tells what he saw from the time he first arrived. In two districts, Me Linh in Giao Chi and Do Bang in Cuu Chan, when an elder brother dies, the younger brother takes his brother’s wife. This had been the custom for generation after generation, and the officials could not stop it. Then comes the harshest line of the whole memorial: speaking of it this way, they may be called insects, with nothing human about them but the face.²⁰

But the same memorial tells one truth. The court, by his account, values the rare things it can bring back from far away — precious gems, aromatics, ivory, rhinoceros horn, tortoiseshell, coral, peacocks — and has no need to count on the taxes of that land.²⁰

And he lists the crimes of corrupt officials. Chu Nhai was abandoned because its chief official, finding the people’s hair beautiful, shaved it off to make wigs. A governor of Cuu Chan beat his officer of merit to death, and was shot dead with poisoned arrows by troops the dead man’s younger brother led against him. Si Nhiep took an army to attack, but in the end could not win. The inspector Chu Phu forced heavy taxes on the people, demanding one measure of grain for each yellow fish, and the common people, resentful, rose in revolt.²⁰

In one and the same memorial, the writer both calls the people insects and admits that many risings had their roots in the officials of his own court.

The memorial is there in the Vietnamese histories. The Complete Annals copy it under the year Tan Hoi. The Cuong muc copies it in its Preliminary Annals, calling him by his courtesy name, Tiet Kinh Van.²¹²³

But both leave out exactly the contemptuous lines. Beasts, mallet-shaped hair knots, clothes pulled on over the head, the brother’s wife, insects — not one of these words is in the Chinese text of the woodblock edition of the Complete Annals, nor in the Cuong muc. The Complete Annals go straight from the line about Emperor Wu of Han killing Lu Gia, opening nine commanderies and appointing inspectors, to the line about moving Chinese convicts there to live among the people, teaching them little by little to read, and letting them come to know something of rites and civilisation. The lines listing the crimes of officials are kept whole.²¹²³

The books do not say why, so this episode will not guess. It can only say what is there on the page: they kept the part that accuses the rulers, and dropped the part where the ruler disparages the ruled.

No one can see the bronze pillar any more, yet with each century the oath about it was written with more certainty. The memorial survives word for word, yet on its way into the Vietnamese histories it lost its harshest lines. The next episode: The rising of Lady Trieu, 248.