Kinh Duong Vuong and the Line of Than Nong

The old histories record Than Nong as a distant ancestor of the Vietnamese. But Than Nong is a figure of Chinese myth, and Chinese books wrote about him very early.

Hoai Nam Tu, a work compiled under the Western Han and presented to the emperor around 139 BC, tells how in ancient times the people ate grasses and drank water, picked fruit from the trees and ate the flesh of snails and clams, and so suffered much sickness and poisoning. Than Nong then taught them to sow the five grains, to see which soil suited which plant, and he tasted for himself the flavours of a hundred herbs and of the spring waters, so that the people would know what to avoid. The book adds a line worth remembering: on some days he was poisoned seventy times.²

That is the root of the tale of "Than Nong tasting a hundred herbs" that Vietnamese still repeat today. It was written in Chinese characters, in a Chinese book, before any Vietnamese history existed.

The old histories borrowed two more names, and this is where it gets interesting.

A Chinese work of the Jin dynasty, De Vuong the ky, records the genealogy of the line of Viem De Than Nong. The original is lost, but the genealogical passage survives, quoted in a great Song-dynasty compendium. By that account, Viem De was followed by eight generations in succession: De Thua, De Lam, De Minh, De Truc, De Lai, De Ai, De Du Vong.³

That list contains De Minh, and it contains De Lai — exactly the two names the Vietnamese histories use. But the arrangement is entirely different.

In the Chinese book these are eight generations succeeding one another in a single line. De Minh and De Lai stand two generations apart, with De Truc between them.

In the Vietnamese histories, De Minh has two sons: one rules the north, one goes south. De Lai becomes a grandson. And De Nghi, the elder brother to whom the throne was yielded, does not appear in the original list at all.

In other words, the old histories took names that really do occur in a Chinese genealogy and refitted them into a different family structure, skipping the man in the middle and adding a new one. And the frame of "the elder brother keeps the north, the younger keeps the south" — the finest part of the story, because it makes the Vietnamese an equal rather than a vassal — is precisely the part that is not in the original.

There is one more detail in that genealogy that few people have stopped at: Kinh Duong Vuong married the daughter of the Lord of Dongting.¹

Lake Dongting is a real lake, lying in the north of Hunan province in China. The name Hunan means literally "south of the lake" — and it is this lake the province is named against.

From Lake Dongting down to Viet Tri, where legend places the capital of Van Lang, is more than 1,100 kilometres as the crow flies, across the whole mountain country of Guangxi and Guangdong. For a Bronze Age community, that is not a distance across which families arrange marriages.

The most striking thing is that the historian did not hide his source at all. He wrote it down plainly.

Setting down the line "Kinh Duong Vuong married the daughter of the Lord of Dongting", Ngo Si Lien added a note: consulting a history of the Tang dynasty, it records that in the time of Kinh Duong there was a woman herding goats who called herself the youngest daughter of the Lord of Dongting, who married the second son of the Kinh Xuyen clan, was cast aside, and had to ask a man named Lieu Nghi to carry a letter back to her father. Then he concluded: so the Kinh Xuyen clan and the Dongting clan had long been intermarrying, generation after generation.¹

He brought that tale in to shore up the story, treating it as evidence.

But the tale he cited is not history. It is Lieu Nghi truyen, a Tang-dynasty tale of the marvellous — that is, fiction. At the end of it the author gives his own name as Ly Trieu Uy. The content is a supernatural romance: a scholar who has failed his examinations meets a woman herding goats by the road, she asks him to carry a letter down to the dragon palace, the dragon king reads it and weeps for his daughter, the dragon king's younger brother flies off in a rage as a red dragon to kill the faithless husband, and in the end the dragon maiden is reborn as a human to marry the scholar.⁴

A story like that was brought into the national history as evidence for the origins of a people.

Three hundred years later, someone saw it.

Ngo Thi Si, an 18th-century historian — and let it be clear that this is a different man from Ngo Si Lien, the two of them three centuries apart — wrote in Dai Viet su ky tien bien that the whole genealogical passage was wild and reckless invention, fit to be thrown out. Then he named the mechanism of the error outright: the fault lies with meddlers who read the tale of Lieu Nghi, saw in it that the daughter of the Dongting king was married to the second son of Kinh Xuyen, and recklessly took Kinh Xuyen to be Kinh Duong. Once there is a husband and wife there must be fathers and sons, rulers and subjects, and from that they embroidered a text to fill out the count of reigns; then the historians took it up and used it, believing it to be fact.⁵

He also asked a question nobody has yet answered neatly: what sort of name is Xich Quy, to be used as the name of a country?⁵

The two names Kinh Xuyen and Kinh Duong differ by a single character. Both are Chinese place names, tied to the Kinh River in Shaanxi. One character slips, and a founding ancestor-king is born.

By the middle of the 19th century this was no longer one man's private opinion but a decision of the court.

The Nguyen dynasty's National History Office compiled Kham dinh Viet su thong giam cuong muc. In the pham le, the section that sets out the principles of compilation, the court historians wrote: the old histories begin the national line with Kinh Duong, a matter shrouded in obscurity, with truly no reliable evidence for it. Now, by imperial decree, we begin specifically with the annals of the Hung Kings, to mark where the legitimate line starts; as for the two annals of Kinh Duong and Lac Long, they are moved down into notes below, still recorded in outline, in keeping with the principle that what is doubtful should be transmitted as doubtful.⁶

Put briefly: Kinh Duong Vuong and Lac Long Quan were taken out of the main line of the national history and demoted to footnotes. That is an official text of the Nguyen court, not the opinion of some foreign scholar.

And not only the court. In 1920, when Viet Nam su luoc appeared and became the most widely read popular history of the country, Tran Trong Kim opened his Hong Bang chapter with the words "according to what is handed down", meaning oral tradition. He set down the figure 2879 BC and then put a question mark right after it himself. Reaching the passage on the land of Bach Viet, he wrote plainly: this too is only a guess, and nothing can make it exact.⁷

The old histories left behind a beautiful genealogy, one that joins the Vietnamese to a king of myth and sets us level with the north from the very beginning. It was built out of names that really do occur in Chinese books, refitted into a new order, and propped up by a work of Tang fiction.

What matters is not that the story is untrue. What matters is that the Vietnamese have known it themselves for a long time. An 18th-century historian laid out the mechanism.⁵ The 19th-century Nguyen national history struck the name from the main record.⁶ A scholar in 1920 put a question mark in the middle of his own page.⁷ Three times, across three hundred years, before any of today's scholarly arguments began.

We inherit a legend, and we inherit along with it the tradition of doubting it.

The next episode takes up what the Nguyen court historians themselves kept as the beginning of the legitimate line: The Eighteen Hung Kings and the Kingdom of Van Lang.