Era
Au Lac
The first stretch of Vietnamese history whose place names and people can be matched against contemporary Chinese records — from the Qin campaign into the south to the fall of Au Lac to Trieu Da.
At a glance
- Also known as
- In the Su ky the land named beside Man Viet and Tay Au is simply Lac; Au Lac is the name of the realm the Complete Annals say the king took after annexing Van Lang, in the year Giap Thin, the fifty-eighth year of King Nan of Zhou12
- Dates
- The Complete Annals give 257–208 BC, exactly fifty years; the Viet su luoc gives no year, placing the founding at the end of the Zhou and the fall after Trieu Da had taken the kingly title; the Su ky has the submission come after the death of Empress Lu, that is after 180 BC231
Overview
The old chronicles say
The familiar telling folds the whole era into one sentence: Thuc Phan, a man of Ba Thuc, defeated the Hung king, founded the country of Au Lac in 257 BC and set his capital at Co Loa. That sentence holds five claims — a name, a birthplace, an opponent, a country, a year — and all five come from one place, the national history of the Le dynasty. Read the texts in the order they were written and the five did not enter the record together: the sixth-century text has a man with no name, the fourteenth-century text adds the name, and the fifteenth-century text adds the birthplace, the country and the date.432
The Complete Annals give An Duong Vuong a reign of fifty years, from 257 to 208 BC. But 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 and 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 fixed at either end.2
No two texts agree on the closing date either. The Complete Annals put the fall in 208 BC. The Viet su luoc gives no year at all: it places the founding only at the end of the Zhou and the fall after Trieu Da had already taken the kingly title. The Su ky pushes it later still — after the death of Empress Lu, that is after 180 BC, Trieu Da used the weight of his arms and gifts of goods to bring Man Viet, Tay Au and Lac into submission, nearly thirty years later than the date in the Complete Annals. Three sources, three dates for one event, and no date has all three behind it.231
Archaeology finds
The surest thing about this era is not in any book but in the ground. A section cut through the Co Loa rampart shows that the main wall of the middle circuit was built in the closing centuries BC, before the coming of Han imperial China, and that it was not the first defence on that ground. The dating overlaps the span the old histories give An Duong Vuong: it proves nothing about him and rules nothing out. The archaeologists state their own limit — the material evidence lends support to the possible existence of an Au Lac polity but does not prove it unequivocally — and raise another possibility: that Nam Viet, after taking the place around the early second century BC, may itself have added to the works.5
Episodes
- Episode 1The Qin armies come south15 min
- Episode 2Thuc Phan and the country of Au Lac10 min
- Episode 3The Co Loa citadel8 min
- Episode 4The magic crossbow, My Chau and Trong Thuy11 min
Sources for this page
Every row of the profile and every passage below points to one of these documents. How we choose and check sources