Episode 10Era Hong Bang and Van Lang
The rice cakes and Lang Lieu
The Tet story every Vietnamese knows was never once written into the official histories. The oldest text opens with a line that ties it straight to Thanh Giong, and closes by explaining the names of villages — an ending no telling today has kept.
Legend has it
A tale passed down by word of mouth and later written down — not a verified event.
The legend tells that a Hung king, grown old, wished to choose an heir and set his sons a task: whoever found a fine dish to offer the ancestors would have the throne. The princes vied with one another for delicacies from the forests and the sea. Only Lang Lieu, who was poor, was taught in a dream to take glutinous rice and make two kinds of cake — one square, one round. The king tasted them, praised them, and gave him the throne.
This is probably the most retold legend of the Vietnamese year, because every Tet it is told again.
Its oldest surviving text is in Linh Nam chich quai, in the tale named for the steamed cake.1 Reading the original, we meet three things no telling today has kept — and one thing stranger than all three: this story was never written into the official histories.
The cake story begins the moment the invaders are beaten
Legend has it
A tale passed down by word of mouth and later written down — not a verified event.
The first surprise is in the opening line.
The original begins: after the Hung king had defeated the Yin army, the country being at peace, he wished to pass the throne to a son.1
The Yin were the invaders of the episode on Thanh Giong — two episodes back. In the old book the two tales do not stand side by side, two other tales lie between them; but the cake tale opens on that very line, joined straight to the beating of the invaders: the invaders beaten, the country quiet, the king turns to the question of who will follow him.
Today's telling separates them completely. Thanh Giong is one story, the rice cakes another, usually told on different occasions — one about war, one about Tet. The link between them is cut, and with it goes a rather fine idea of the compiler's: the choosing of an heir is placed immediately after the driving off of an invasion, because those are the two largest things a king does.
Twenty-two sons, and a god with very little to say about the divine
Legend has it
A tale passed down by word of mouth and later written down — not a verified event.
The old text gives a number: the king assembled his quan lang — that is, his sons, twenty-two of them — then set the task. The task was not the vague "find something good to eat" but something more precise: whoever could meet his wish, find rare and delicious things, and at the year's end offer them to the former kings so as to fulfil filial duty, would be given the throne.1
Two conditions, not one. The food, and the filial duty.
The man who edited the book in the fifteenth century read exactly that in it. In his preface of fourteen ninety-two, Vu Quynh runs through the tales one by one, and of this one he writes a single short line: the tale of the steamed cake praises the nurture of one's parents.2
The eighteenth son was named Lang Lieu. The book records that his mother was of humble station and had died of illness before this, that he had few attendants on either side and could hardly manage — so he lay thinking day and night and slept badly.1
The words of the god in the dream, read in the original, are far less otherworldly than we tend to imagine. The god grants no miracle. The god says something about food: of all the things of heaven and earth, none is more precious to people than rice; rice feeds people and makes them strong, one never tires of eating it, and no other thing comes before it. Only then the instruction: take glutinous rice and make cakes, some square, some round, to figure the shapes of heaven and earth, wrap them in leaves, place delicacies in the middle, to signify the weight of a parent's care in bearing and raising a child.1
A god appears in a dream to say that the most precious thing on earth is rice. That is the dream of a rice-growing country.
In the old book, the round cake is not called banh giay
Legend has it
A tale passed down by word of mouth and later written down — not a verified event.
The second surprise is the two names.
The original explains plainly why each cake is called what it is. The cake wrapped in green leaves in a square shape, with delicacies inside, figures heaven and earth enclosing all creatures; because it is boiled until done it is called the steamed cake — chung here means to boil or steam.1
And the other: glutinous rice steamed, pounded until smooth, shaped round to figure heaven, and therefore called bac tri binh.1
Bac tri binh. Not banh giay. The familiar name of today is not in the old text, and the characters in the book hold nothing answering to the sound "giay" — that is a popular name given later, nobody knows quite when.
One more detail should be put correctly, one that almost all of us learned as square is earth, round is heaven. The original says only half of that: the round cake shaped to figure heaven, that line is there; but of the square cake the book writes that it figures heaven and earth enclosing all creatures, not that the square answers to earth alone.1 The tidy square-earth-round-heaven reading we know is a later balancing of the pair.
The lost ending: from a cake to the names of villages
Legend has it
A tale passed down by word of mouth and later written down — not a verified event.
The third surprise is the ending. No popular telling today keeps it, and it is the part that shows what the old writers used stories for.
On the appointed day the sons presented everything, nothing was lacking; Lang Lieu alone presented his two rice cakes. The king, surprised, asked, and the son told him the dream. The king tasted them himself, found them agreeable and not cloying, better by far than what the other sons had brought, and praised them for a long while. Then he placed Lang Lieu first and gave him the throne.1
Immediately after this the book sets down two explanations.
The first is a play on words: because the cakes were bound to the name Lang Lieu, the custom of using them at the feasts of the year came to be called Tiet Lieu.1
The second goes much further. The king gave the throne to Lang Lieu, while his twenty-one brothers divided the frontier posts between them and formed parties. Later the commanders quarrelled over precedence, and each raised a wooden palisade to shield himself — and from that came the words sach, thon, trang, phuong for the places where people live.1
The tale of the rice cake, in its oldest form, ends with an account of where the names of village units came from. The compiler is not only telling the story of a cake; he is using it to answer the question of why this place is called a sach and that one a phuong — and to say that the practice goes back to the day twenty-one of a king's sons divided the land between them.
This way of telling runs through the whole collection: a story has to explain something the reader can see in front of him.
Not one word in the official histories
The old chronicles say
What the histories of the dynastic era recorded.
Here is the strangest thing, and it deserves its own place.
The two previous episodes met official histories that recorded legend warily: Ngo Si Lien set down Thanh Giong and Son Tinh and Thuy Tinh, a few lines each, then remarked at once that the matter was monstrous and absurd, and that to believe books is worse than having no books at all.3
With the rice cakes it is different. There is no remark, because there is no story to remark upon. Read through the whole first book of the Outer Annals of the Le dynasty history, from Kinh Duong Vuong to the end of An Duong Vuong, and there is not one word of Lang Lieu or the two cakes.3 In the Nguyen dynasty history the Hung kings are reduced to a short genealogy — nothing there either.4
So it must be said clearly: the best-known Tet story of the Vietnamese was never taken into the official record. It lived for centuries inside a collection of folk tales, and lived very well — better than many stories that did make it into the histories.
That does not make it worth less. It only shows two things running side by side: what the court historians were willing to write down, and what people actually told one another.
What later ages added, and what they kept
How later ages remembered
What later ages did with the story — documents, ceremonies, and arguments of their own time.
Today's telling has a detail the old text does not: Lang Lieu is usually called the son of the sixth Hung king, becoming the seventh. The original assigns no reign number at all; it places the story only by its setting, "after the Yin army had been defeated".1 The sixth and the seventh are later arrangements, fitted into that genealogy of eighteen reigns — the genealogy the episode on the eighteen Hung kings argued could not be traced to a source.
Against that, there is one line in the old text that later ages kept exactly, better than any other detail. The book records that from then on, at each seasonal feast of the year people would take those cakes to serve their parents, and all the world has imitated it down to the present day.1
"The present day" in that sentence is around the fourteenth century, when the book was compiled. Six or seven hundred years later the sentence still holds, word for word.
A legend that never entered the histories, with no tomb, no great temple, no anniversary of its own — and yet every year millions of households rebuild it out of glutinous rice, leaves, and a night spent watching a pot. That is the most durable way of surviving a story can choose.
The next episode has two more tales from the age of the Hung kings, likewise absent from the official histories: Chu Dong Tu and Mai An Tiem.
Sources for this episode
Every passage points to one of the documents below. How we choose and check sources
Linh Nam chich quai
Used for: Legend has itUsed for: How later ages rememberedBack to the text
Linh Nam chich quai
Used for: Legend has itBack to the text
Dai Viet su ky toan thu
Used for: The old chronicles sayBack to the text
Kham dinh Viet su thong giam cuong muc
Used for: The old chronicles sayBack to the text