Episode 1Era Hong Bang and Van Lang
Lac Long Quan and Au Co
Every Vietnamese knows the story of the sac of a hundred eggs. But three old books record three different stories, and one of them never mentions a dragon or a fairy at all.
Legend has it
A tale passed down by word of mouth and later written down — not a verified event.
The legend that opens the history of our country begins with a marriage between a dragon and a fairy. Almost every Vietnamese knows it by heart: Mother Au Co gave birth to a sac of a hundred eggs, which hatched into a hundred sons; then fifty sons followed their father down to the sea, and fifty followed their mother up to the mountains.1 From this comes the saying children of the Dragon, grandchildren of the Fairy.
The story is so familiar that few people ask it again: where was it written down, by whom, and how long ago. This episode goes looking for the answer, and meets a surprise. Three old books all tell of the founding of the country, but they tell three different stories. One of them never mentions a dragon or a fairy at all.
The fullest telling
Legend has it
A tale passed down by word of mouth and later written down — not a verified event.
The legend is recorded in the greatest detail in Linh Nam chich quai, a collection of folk tales compiled around the fourteenth century.1
According to that book, Kinh Duong Vuong had the gift of moving about in the water palace below. He married the daughter of the Dragon King of Lake Dongting, and she bore Lac Long Quan. Then Kinh Duong Vuong vanished, and no one knew where he had gone.
Lac Long Quan taught the people to grow rice, to weave cloth and to build houses. When the work was done he went back to the water palace, telling them to call him whenever trouble came and he would come up at once.
What follows is the part many people have never heard. De Lai, in the north, made a tour southward. Finding the country without a ruler, he left his favourite concubine Au Co and her serving women at a travelling palace, and went off to see the sights.1
Lac Long Quan came back, saw how beautiful Au Co was, and turned himself into a handsome young man to go to her. She consented. He took her away. De Lai returned to find nobody there and sent his men searching everywhere, but Long Quan used his powers to turn into demons, devils, dragons, snakes, tigers and elephants, frightening them until none dared come near. De Lai gave up and went back north.
Read closely, this is not a wedding. This is the story of taking another man's concubine.
Au Co then gave birth to a sac. The household took it for an evil omen and threw it out in the fields. Seven days later the sac opened into a hundred eggs, each one a son. The hundred children needed no nursing and grew up on their own.
When the time came to part, Lac Long Quan said to Au Co that he was of the dragon kind and she of the fairy kind, that water and fire destroy one another, and that they could not stay together long. He took fifty sons back to the water palace, and she led fifty up onto the land. The two sides would rule their own halves, send word to each other when anything happened, and not forget one another.1
Au Co brought her children to the land of Phong Chau, raised the eldest son to be king with the title Hung Vuong, and named the country Van Lang.
The official history records it differently
The old chronicles say
What the histories of the dynastic era recorded.
The old histories retell this story in a way that differs at the point that matters most.
Dai Viet su ky toan thu, the official national history that Ngo Si Lien completed around 1479, writes that Lac Long Quan married the daughter of De Lai, whose name was Au Co.2 The original classical Chinese uses the character nu, meaning daughter. Not concubine.
One character changed, and the whole colour of the story changes with it. In the Linh Nam chich quai version this is the seizing of another man's wife. In the national history it is an ordinary marriage between two families.
But Ngo Si Lien himself found a snag, and he wrote his unease straight into the book. Consulting Chinese works, he found De Lai recorded as the son of De Nghi. And De Nghi and Kinh Duong Vuong were brothers. That made Lac Long Quan and Au Co of one blood, and closely so. He wrote: perhaps it was because that age was still wild, and rites and music not yet established, that it was so.2
That sentence is worth pausing on. A historian of the Le dynasty, writing about the ancestors of his own people, saw something that did not sit right in the story, and rather than pass over it he set down his own doubt for later readers.
The book with no dragon and no fairy
The old chronicles say
What the histories of the dynastic era recorded.
There is one more of the old histories, and this is the one that truly brings a reader up short.
Viet su luoc is an anonymous history that scholars place at the end of the Tran dynasty, a full hundred years earlier than Ngo Si Lien's national history. In its opening passage on the founding of the state, the book does not mention the Hong Bang clan once. No Kinh Duong Vuong. No Lac Long Quan. No Au Co. No sac of a hundred eggs.3
What it records instead is that in the time of King Zhuang of Zhou in China, in the district of Gia Ninh there was a stranger who subdued the tribes by magic, proclaimed himself king, and set his capital at Van Lang. The customs were simple and honest; people knotted cords in place of written law. The throne passed down through 18 generations.3
No dragon. No fairy. Only a stranger doing magic.
There is one further detail, a matter of the written word. The title of that king, in the original classical Chinese of Viet su luoc, is not the character hung of Hung Vuong but a different one, read doi. It means a mortar for husking rice.3 The two characters are written nothing alike.
Miscopying a character in a history is nothing unusual, and the national history itself once admitted as much. In the passage on the offices of the Hung Vuong period, Ngo Si Lien noted that the term Lac Tuong was later miscopied as Hung Tuong.2 Which is to say that even people of that time knew the names from that age had passed through many copyists' hands, and that characters can slip.
So what was the king of Van Lang really called? Nobody can answer with certainty.
The number 2879
The old chronicles say
What the histories of the dynastic era recorded.
The old histories are also where the most familiar number about the Hong Bang period was born, though not in the way many people imagine.
We often hear that our country dates from 2879 BCE. That figure is nowhere written out in words in the book. The main text of the national history records only three characters: the year Nham Tuat, first year.2 Nham Tuat is the name of a year in the stem-and-branch reckoning, which comes round again every 60 years, so by itself it does not say which year in history is meant.
The number comes from the chronological table at the front of the book. That table gives the Hong Bang clan a span of 2622 years, followed immediately by the Thuc dynasty, beginning in 257 BCE. Subtract backwards from the later date and out comes the familiar figure.
In other words it is a calculation, not a record. And the calculation rests on the assumption that 18 reigns lasted more than 2600 years, an average of nearly 150 years on the throne apiece.
Viet su luoc, meanwhile, places the founding of Van Lang in the time of King Zhuang of Zhou, that is, roughly 696 to 682 BCE. The two reckonings are more than 2000 years apart.
Three books, three stories
Legend has it
A tale passed down by word of mouth and later written down — not a verified event.
The legend of Lac Long Quan and Au Co, as we have seen, is not one solid block. It is three tellings laid over one another, each belonging to its own age, and they diverge at points that are not small at all: whether Au Co was a concubine seized or a daughter given in marriage, whether the first king was called Hung or Doi, whether the country was founded nearly 3000 years before the Common Era or only 600.3
None of that makes the story worth less. A legend that has lived six or seven hundred years in the memory of a whole people is a historical fact in its own way, whether or not what it recounts is true. But knowing that it has several versions, and knowing what each of them says, means reading it with a different eye.
The next episode goes back one step further, to the genealogy this one has only touched in passing: Kinh Duong Vuong and the line of Than Nong.
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 itBack to the text
Dai Viet su ky toan thu
Used for: The old chronicles sayBack to the text
Viet su luoc
Used for: The old chronicles sayUsed for: Legend has itBack to the text