Mai Thuc Loan, the Black Emperor

The last episode stopped at the siege of the protectorate seat in six hundred and eighty-seven. Thirty-five years later, a man in An Nam once again took up arms against the Tang, and the Vietnamese today call him by a very grand name: Mai Hac De, Mai the Black Emperor.

So where is that title, Black Emperor, actually written down?

The answer is a little ironic. Almost everything we know about Mai Thuc Loan — his name, the title Black Emperor, the states he allied with, the size of his army, his death — comes from the Chinese histories. The men who wrote it down were court historians who called him a bandit, and they wrote more than two hundred years after him.¹

Every version is extremely short, one to three sentences. None tells how the fighting went, how long he held out, or where he died. What gives this episode its depth is the places where the versions disagree: about his name, about the month, and above all about the numbers.

The earliest record among those opened for this episode is the Old Book of Tang, completed in nine hundred and forty-five. In its basic annals, under the tenth year of the Kaiyuan era, that is, seven hundred and twenty-two, there is exactly one sentence:

Autumn, the eighth month, day Binh Tuat: the inspecting commissioner of Linh Nam, Bui Tru Tien, reported that the bandit chief of An Nam, Mai Thuc Loan, and his band were attacking and besieging the prefectures and districts; the court sent the General of Swift Cavalry and palace attendant Duong Tu Huc to attack them.¹

That is all. The sentence is a dispatch: someone reports up from Linh Nam, and the court sends a man. It says only that he attacked and besieged prefectures and districts. There is no Black Emperor, no count of troops, no allied state.

The man sent, Duong Tu Huc, held the post of palace attendant, that is, he was a eunuch. His own biography sits in the Biographies of Eunuchs in the same history. And it is that biography which turns Mai Thuc Loan into the Black Emperor.²

The biography of Duong Tu Huc in the Old Book of Tang tells the story at greater length, and tells it differently:

Early in the Kaiyuan era, the An Nam chieftain Mai Huyen Thanh rebelled, styled himself the Black Emperor, plotted together with the state of Lam Ap and the state of Chan Lap, and attacked and took the seat of the An Nam protectorate.²

Here the name is not Thuc Loan but Huyen Thanh. The title Black Emperor comes with the words styled himself: according to the historian, he gave himself that title. And he did not act alone, but plotted with Lam Ap and Chan Lap. The capture of the An Nam protectorate appears only in this biography; the line from the basic annals above says only that he attacked and besieged prefectures and districts.

Then the Tang side:

Tu Huc reached Linh bieu, the lands beyond the mountain ranges, and recruited troops from among the sons and younger kin of the chieftains, more than a hundred thousand, advanced along the old road of the Wave-Subduing General, and struck where he was not expected.²

The old road of the Wave-Subduing General — the New Book of Tang would later write it outright as the old road of Ma Yuan, the man we met in the episodes on the first period of Chinese domination.³

The ending is told in a single breath:

Huyen Thanh, hearing that the army was coming fast, panicked and did not know what to do, and in the end was taken by the imperial troops and beheaded in front of the battle line; all his followers were killed, and their corpses were piled into a kinh quan before the army returned.²

A kinh quan is a mound of human corpses, heaped up to show off a victory. The word comes back again in the New Book of Tang, in the Zizhi tongjian and in the An Nam chi luoc.

The New Book of Tang was completed in ten sixty, more than three hundred and thirty years after the events. Its biography of Duong Tu Huc reads:

Early in Kaiyuan, the Man barbarian chieftain of An Nam, Mai Thuc Loan, rebelled, styled the Black Emperor, raised the troops of thirty-two prefectures, allied abroad with the states of Lam Ap, Chan Lap and Kim Lan, and occupied the land of Hai Nam, his army claimed at four hundred thousand.³

The name has become Thuc Loan, "styled himself" has become simply "styled", and there are three things the Old Book of Tang does not have: thirty-two prefectures, the state of Kim Lan, and an army of four hundred thousand. Among the Chinese histories opened for this episode, all three are found only here, and the book does not say where they came from.

The two characters Hai Nam mean literally "south of the sea"; there is as yet no ground for reading them as the island of Hainan.

Before the figure of four hundred thousand, the original uses the very character it used for the title Black Emperor: hieu, meaning "styled", "claimed", "going by the name of". The writer himself has marked it as a nominal figure, not a number anyone counted.³

On the Tang side, this version adds a man. Tu Huc asked to go himself; an edict had a hundred thousand sons and younger kin of the chieftains recruited, and together with the Grand Protector-General of An Nam, Quang So Khach, he followed Ma Yuan's old road and struck where he was not expected. The bandits stared, with no time to plan, and were utterly defeated; the corpses were heaped into a kinh quan, and the army returned.³

The biography stops at the words "utterly defeated". It does not say whether Mai was captured or beheaded. The basic annals of the same book fold the whole affair into a single day: the seventh month, day Binh Tuat, the An Nam man Mai Thuc Loan rebelled, and was killed.⁴ The rebellion and the killing stand together under one date; that is the day it was entered in the record, not the day the rising began.

Twenty-four years later, in ten eighty-four, Sima Guang presented his Zizhi tongjian to the throne. The main text records:

The bandit chief of An Nam, Mai Thuc Yen, and his band attacked and besieged the prefectures and districts; the General of Swift Cavalry and palace attendant Duong Tu Huc was sent to attack them. Tu Huc recruited the sons and younger kin of the various Man, and got more than a hundred thousand men; he fell on them by surprise, broke them utterly, beheaded Thuc Yen, piled the corpses into a kinh quan, and returned.⁵

A third name: Thuc Yen. This is not a slip in the digitised text: the edition with Hu Sanxing's commentary prints it the same way. The sentence has no Black Emperor, no Lam Ap, no count of troops on his side.

That silence is deliberate. In the Kaoyi, the notes Sima Guang wrote alongside the history to explain which version he chose, he records:

The old annals say the eighth month, day Binh Tuat; on examination, the first day of the eighth month was Canh Ty, and it has no Binh Tuat day. The biography of Tu Huc says the chieftain Mai Huyen Thanh styled himself the Black Emperor, plotted with Lam Ap and Chan Lap, and took the An Nam protectorate. Now we follow the Basic Annals.⁶

In other words, Sima Guang had read the story of the Black Emperor, the alliance with Lam Ap and Chan Lap, the capture of the protectorate, and deliberately left them out of his main text. Which "Basic Annals" he followed, he does not make clear.

As for the calendar, the New Book of Tang puts the Binh Tuat day in the seventh month.⁴ One and the same event, and two histories record two different months.

The basic annals of both Tang histories, along with the Tongjian, all place the event in the tenth year of Kaiyuan, that is, seven hundred and twenty-two. The two biographies of Duong Tu Huc say only "early in Kaiyuan", and give no year.²

The Kaiyuan era began at the end of seven hundred and thirteen, so a hasty reading easily turns "early" into seven hundred and thirteen. But in that very biography, the event told immediately afterwards is dated the twelfth year; "early" means only before then. In the Chinese-language texts opened for this episode, wherever a specific year is given it is the tenth; none of them gives seven hundred and thirteen for him.³

Among those opened, the earliest one to name him is the An Nam chi luoc by Le Tac, compiled around thirteen thirty-five, in China:

Early in Kaiyuan, in the reign of Xuanzong, the chieftain Mai Thuc Loan rebelled, styled the Black Emperor, allied abroad with Lam Ap and Chan Lap, his army claimed at three hundred thousand, and occupied An Nam.⁷

Three hundred thousand, not four hundred. The thirty-two prefectures and the state of Kim Lan have dropped away. On the Tang side it is still Duong Tu Huc together with the Protector-General Quang So Khach, following Ma Yuan's old road, breaking the bandits utterly, heaping the corpses into a kinh quan.⁷

About a hundred and forty years later, in fourteen seventy-nine, Ngo Si Lien brought the event into the Dai Viet su ky toan thu, the Complete Annals, under the year Nham Tuat, the tenth year of Kaiyuan:

The bandit chief Mai Thuc Loan seized a prefecture, called himself the Black Emperor, allied abroad with the people of Lam Ap and Chan Lap, his army claimed at three hundred thousand. The Tang ruler sent the palace attendant and General of the Left Gate Guard, Duong Tu Huc, together with the Protector-General Nguyen So Khach, to put him down.⁸

The Vietnamese national history uses the Chinese histories' own word: tac soai, bandit chief. The figure of three hundred thousand follows the An Nam chi luoc, not the New Book of Tang. The year the Complete Annals pin firmly to seven hundred and twenty-two, following the basic annals, even though the rest is detail from the biography of Duong Tu Huc. Which prefecture he seized, where he came from, the passage does not say, and there is no historian's comment here.⁸ As for the name Nguyen So Khach, the Cuong muc would later note that the old history's Nguyen is a mistake — and this Nguyen is a different word from the family name of the later Nguyen dynasty.⁹

The Kham dinh Viet su thong giam cuong muc, compiled by the Nguyen court's National History Office between eighteen fifty-six and eighteen eighty-four, gives its headline entry as follows: autumn, the seventh month, Mai Thuc Loan of Hoan prefecture seized the prefecture and called himself emperor; the Tang sent the palace attendant Duong Tu Huc and others to attack and break him.¹⁰ This history follows the seventh month of the New Book of Tang, and places him in Hoan Chau.

The detailed entry quotes the New Book of Tang almost word for word, with all of it: the thirty-two prefectures, Kim Lan and the four hundred thousand.¹¹ Then the court historians add a passage headed "respectfully examined":

Respectfully examined: under the Tang, in the Kaiyuan era, the An Nam protectorate was still at Giao Chau, governing twelve prefectures and fifty-nine districts, each with officials set over it to govern. Taxes in grain and cloth were paid and soldiers were furnished, all at the command of the Tang. And of the protectorate and the prefectures of Phong, Ai, Luc and Dien, none is heard of as having been lost. How could Thuc Loan have raised the troops of thirty-two prefectures, with an army claimed at four hundred thousand?¹²

They answer themselves:

We venture to think that Thuc Loan held one prefecture, and his strength was slight. At that time Xuanzong was fond of winning glory on the frontiers, and Tu Huc and So Khach took advantage of the remote and rugged distance to inflate the bandits' strength in hope of reward, and that is all. Otherwise, with arms and land on such a scale, why did he scatter in fear the moment the Tang army arrived?¹²

Then they rebuke their own national history: the old history also records that Thuc Loan allied abroad with Lam Ap and Chan Lap, with an army of three hundred thousand; this was taken in outline from the Tang histories, without examining the facts.¹²

This is nineteenth-century commentary, not new evidence. But it is sharp: the men compiling the national history for a Vietnamese dynasty did not believe the very figures that give the rising its size, and held that they had been blown up by the very men sent to crush it.

The argument also has a gap. It disputes the New Book of Tang, but it does not mention the words "attacked and took the seat of the An Nam protectorate" in the Old Book of Tang's biography of Duong Tu Huc — words that run directly against its claim that the protectorate was never lost.² And its charge that the old history took three hundred thousand from the Tang histories does not match what can be read: the New Book of Tang records four hundred thousand, the Old Book of Tang gives no figure at all for his troops, and three hundred thousand, among the books opened, appears first in the An Nam chi luoc.⁷