Son Tinh and Thuy Tinh

The legend tells that a Hung king had a daughter named My Nuong, famed for her beauty. Two gods came together to ask for her hand: one a god of the mountain, the other a god of the water. The king set the condition that whoever brought the betrothal gifts first would have her. Son Tinh came first and won his bride. Thuy Tinh came later, and in his anger raised the waters against him, attacking every year, and losing every year.

The oldest surviving text of this story is in Linh Nam chich quai, in the tale of Mount Tan Vien.¹ Reading it, we meet three surprises.

The first surprise lies in the most famous detail of all.

Anyone who has been to school knows the bride price by heart: an elephant with nine tusks, a cockerel with nine spurs, a horse with nine red manes. The three are so good they have passed into proverb.

In the old text they are not there. What it actually records is that the next day Son Tinh brought and offered precious jade, gold and silver, mountain birds and forest beasts — and the king consented.¹

Precious jade, gold and silver, mountain birds, forest beasts. Not one of them with nine tusks.

That familiar bride price was added by a later age, and it has to be said it was added very well — it turns a race to deliver gifts into a riddle all but impossible to solve, and gives the mountain god's victory the taste of destiny. But it is not where the story began.

The second surprise is a single short sentence, and it opens up the whole of the next episode.

The text records: My Nuong was famed for her beauty, Thuc Vuong Phan came to ask for her hand and the king refused, wanting a worthier son-in-law. Only some days later did two men appear, one calling himself Son Tinh, the other Thuy Tinh.¹

Thuc Phan. The very man who a few decades later would bring an army to overthrow Van Lang, found the state of Au Lac and take the title An Duong Vuong.

In the flow of the story he first appears not as an invader but as a suitor who was refused. The old histories have at times joined the two things straight together: a grudge born of a marriage leading to the war that lost the country.

The tale also sets these events in the reign of the eighteenth Hung king, and records My Nuong as a descendant of Than Nong in the twenty-seventh generation — the same genealogy the past three episodes have been arguing over.¹

The third surprise is the one most worth telling, and it shows how honest the old compilers were.

Within a single tale the book sets out three different origins for the mountain god, drawn from three different sources, and makes no attempt at all to reconcile them.

The first, taken from the notes of a monk of the Tang dynasty: the great king of Mount Tan Vien is a mountain spirit, of the Nguyen family, and very responsive; in drought or in flood the people pray to him and are answered.¹

The second, taken from another book of records: the great king was originally a mountain spirit of the Nguyen family, who once swore an oath with the water creatures, and lived on Mount Gia Ninh in the land of Phong Chau. This is the version that leads into the contest for the bride.¹

The third turns it all around. Taken from yet another collection, the text reads: long ago Lac Long Quan married Au Co and she bore a sac of a hundred eggs, fifty of the sons following their father back to the sea and fifty staying behind; and the great king of Mount Tan Vien was one of the fifty sons who went down to the sea with their father, not a mountain spirit born of the sacred air.¹

Three versions, three origins. Son Tinh is a mountain god in his own right, or the winner of a contest of powers, or one of the hundred sons of Lac Long Quan — the book records all three, sets them side by side, and leaves the reader to judge.

That way of working is far more honest than the tidy single version we are used to. The fourteenth-century compiler did not hide what he did not know.

The closing part of the contest for the bride describes the battle in some detail. Thuy Tinh raised the waters; Son Tinh stretched a fishing net across the river. Thuy Tinh then opened another branch of the river to come round behind the mountain, and opened a further branch to attack the front. The people at the foot of the mountain wove bamboo screens for cover, and beat drums and shouted to lend their strength; when they saw scum and twigs drifting outside the screens they loosed arrows — and those struck by the arrows died and floated up as the corpses of dragons, snakes, fish and soft-shelled turtles, filling the river.¹

Then comes the most important sentence in the whole tale. The text reads: every year around the seventh and eighth months the waters usually rise, and the people living near the foot of the mountain mostly suffer high winds and flooding, and their rice is ruined. It has been handed down that this is Thuy Tinh and Son Tinh contending to marry My Nuong.¹

There is no need to wait for some modern scholar to read this tale as a memory of the Red River flood season. The fourteenth-century text says so outright: people saw that floods came in the seventh and eighth months every year, and they told this story to explain it.

The legend here is no remote tale of gods and immortals. It is the farmer's answer to a very concrete question: why does the water rise every year just as the rice is about to be harvested.