Hong Bang and Van Lang

The old chronicles say

Three old books tell of the founding of the country, and tell three different stories. Linh Nam chich quai, a collection of folk tales compiled around the fourteenth century, holds the fullest telling of the sac of a hundred eggs. Dai Viet su ky toan thu, completed by Ngo Si Lien around 1479, writes Au Co as De Lai’s daughter rather than his concubine — one character changed, and the seizing of another man’s wife becomes an ordinary marriage. Viet su luoc, an anonymous history of the late Tran dynasty a hundred years earlier, does not mention the Hong Bang clan once: no Kinh Duong Vuong, no Lac Long Quan, no Au Co, no sac of eggs, only a stranger in the district of Gia Ninh who subdued the tribes by magic and proclaimed himself king.²⁴⁶

Divide eighteen generations into 2,622 years and each reign averages more than 145 years. The historians who compiled the Cuong muc did not dodge it: they copied the figure down, then added a note directly beneath, that 2,622 years in all, it is not known where that came from, and for now let it stand to be looked into later. Later generations found a way to patch it: read eighteen generations not as eighteen kings but as eighteen branches of a line, each covering several reigns in succession. The trouble is that the reading is not in the Chinese characters of the old chronicles — both the Toan thu and the Cuong muc use a single character meaning generation, and neither has any word carrying the sense of branch or lineage.⁵

Strike out everything the Nguyen court historians crossed off and what is left stands reasonably firm. In the first centuries CE, Chinese writers recorded that this land had once had a layer of local chiefs called Lac Vuong, served by Lac Hau and Lac Tuong, and that those Lac Tuong wore bronze seals on green silk cords — which is to say insignia, rank, organisation. What also remains is a farming system tied to the rise and fall of the tide, distinctive enough that outsiders had to give it a name of its own: Lac fields produce Lac people, and Lac people produce a Lac Vuong. What does not remain is the figure of 2,622 years, the map running up to Dongting Lake, and the sac of a hundred eggs.⁸⁵

How later ages remembered

A line of kings that the Nguyen national history itself demoted to a footnote became the country’s largest holiday, and that process lies in the paperwork of the last hundred years, not in the old histories. Before the twentieth century Den Hung was tended by the local people, who kept the memorial day of the eighteenth Hung king on the eleventh day of the third lunar month and were exempt in return from land tax, from compulsory labour service and from military service. In 1917 the governor of Phu Tho, Le Trung Ngoc, asked the Ministry of Rites to fix the tenth day of the third month as a rite of the state — set exactly one day before the villagers’ own. The decree of 1946, the decree of 2001 and the act of 2007 each widened the holiday’s reach.⁹¹⁰

The last step took place in Paris. At the seventh session of the Intergovernmental Committee of the 2003 Convention, held at UNESCO headquarters from 3 to 7 December 2012, file number 00735 was approved by decision 7.COM 11.36, inscribing the Worship of Hung kings in Phu Tho on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. What was inscribed needs reading correctly: UNESCO inscribed the worship, that is, a practice of a living community — not a ruling that the Hung Kings were real. The anthropologist Oscar Salemink, who attended the Den Hung festival both in the 1990s and in April 2011, recorded that the local ritual committees had not only been stripped of their role but had lost some of their old ritual objects as well.¹¹¹²