The Eighteen Hung Kings and the Kingdom of Van Lang

The old chronicles record that the Hong Bang line lasted 2,622 years, counted from the year Nham Tuat to the last of the Hung kings. Divide eighteen generations into that span and each reign averages more than 145 years.

The historians who compiled the Kham dinh Viet su thong giam cuong muc did not dodge this. They copied the figure down, then added a note directly beneath it: 2,622 years in all, and it is not known where that came from. For now let it stand, to be looked into later.²

Those words — it is not known where that came from — belong to the Nguyen court historians themselves, written in the national history, about the foundational figure of the whole period.

Later generations found a way to patch it: read "eighteen generations" not as eighteen kings but as eighteen branches of a line, each branch covering several reigns in succession. That reading makes the arithmetic much easier to bear. The trouble is that it 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.² The eighteen-branch reading is a modern solution, not something the old books say.

The old chronicles say Van Lang reached Ba and Shu in the west and Dongting Lake in the north. Put together, that is a territory spread across the whole of what is now southern China.

The Cuong muc rejects this, and rejects it using the old chronicles' own material. The historians write: Dongting Lake lies wedged between two lakes, in fact to the north of the land of the Bach Viet; Ba and Shu are a further region away and share no border at all. The old chronicles were inflating their language. Then they produce the decisive argument: moreover, the fifteen districts the old chronicles themselves list all lie within Giao Chi, Chu Dien and inward, not one of them to the north — proof enough that the claim is false.²

This is a very clean piece of reasoning, and it comes from the 19th century: if your country really ran as far as Dongting Lake, then your own list of fifteen districts would have to include one up there. There is not a single one.

There is one more question, and it touches the name itself.

The earliest surviving text about the kings of that age is not a Vietnamese book but a Chinese one. The Giao Chau ngoai vuc ky, a gazetteer of roughly the fourth century preserved in the Thuy kinh chu, says: in the old land of Giao Chi, before there were commanderies and counties, the fields there were Lac fields, worked according to the rise and fall of the tide; the people who ate from those fields were therefore called Lac people; a Lac Vuong was set up, with Lac Hau to oversee the commanderies and counties; in the counties they mostly installed Lac Tuong, and the Lac Tuong wore bronze seals on green silk cords.³

Read that passage and the name grows up out of the fields. Lac fields produce Lac people, and Lac people produce a Lac Vuong. A whole system of names bound tightly to a way of farming that follows the water.

But there is another textual tradition. The Nam Viet chi, preserved in a Song dynasty compilation, says: the land of Giao Chi is fairly fertile and the force of its soil is mighty — hung — so its fields are now called Hung fields and its people Hung people; it had a paramount chief also called Hung Vuong, and deputies also called Hung Hau, and the land was divided up under Hung Tuong.⁴

The same structure, the same set of titles, differing by exactly one character. And the side that writes Hung comes with an explanation of the word of its own — the mighty force of the soil — which does not look like an accidental slip of the brush.

The Toan thu itself knows about this. In the passage on the officials of the Hung kings' time, Ngo Si Lien notes that the word Lac Tuong was later miscopied as Hung Tuong.¹

So the familiar story — that Hung Vuong is nothing but Lac Vuong miscopied — has a basis, but it is not the whole truth. The characters Lac and Hung are written much alike, and a brush slips easily. Yet there is also a book that writes Hung together with a full explanation of the word. Which means either that someone miscopied and then thought up an explanation for the mistake, or that two names already existed side by side. No one has settled it outright.

The most surprising thing in the Cuong muc is not in the historians' notes but in the king's comment written in the margin.

Reading the passage where Au Co gives birth to a hundred eggs, King Tu Duc wrote: the Book of Odes has the line "and then a hundred sons", but that is only praise for having many children; examined closely, it never went that far. How much less a hundred eggs? If it really were so, how would that differ from a beast — could such a thing still be human? Even swallowing the egg of the dark bird, or treading in the footprint of a giant, is not as bizarre as this. I fear this belongs to the same class of baseless fable as the stories of snake bodies with human heads, or heads of oxen.²

Elsewhere the historians also write that De Minh never made a tour of the south, so the story of his taking an immortal woman to wife is thoroughly bizarre, and should be kept for the time being only to pass the doubt along.²

This needs saying plainly, to avoid a misreading: this is not a king who despised his own ancestors. This is a king reading history in the Confucian manner, requiring that what a book records accord with common sense. And when he found that it did not, he wrote so straight onto the page, leaving it for later readers.

Strike out everything the Nguyen court historians crossed off, and what is left?

One thing 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 or Hung 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.³ The detail of the bronze seal and the green cord is no fairy tale; it describes a real apparatus of rule.

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.

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.

But before putting the books down to go looking for what the ancients left in the ground, there is one question to answer first. How did a line of kings that the Nguyen court historians themselves struck out of the official history become the country's largest holiday? The next episode looks for the answer in the paperwork of the last hundred years: The Hung Kings' Commemoration: From Village Festival to National Rite.