Thanh Giong and the Yin Invaders

Every child knows this legend. A woman bore a son who at three still could not speak or laugh. Invaders came, a herald went out calling for men of ability, and the child suddenly spoke and asked to see him. He shot up to full size, mounted an iron horse, took up an iron rod, scattered the Yin invaders, and flew up to heaven.¹

That telling is good enough that few people go looking for the original. And the original differs in several places.

The legend as recorded in Linh Nam chich quai does not begin with the mother; it begins with the king.

By that book, the Hung King, trusting in the wealth of his country, dropped the rite of attendance at the northern court. The Yin king used an inspection tour as his pretext and brought an army across to invade. The Hung King gathered his officials and asked whether to fight or to hold, and a diviner offered a plan: better to pray to Long Quan for secret help.¹

The king did as told: he raised an altar, laid out gold, silver and silk, fasted, burned incense and prayed for three days. Thunder rolled and heavy rain fell, and there appeared an old man more than nine feet tall, square-faced and big-bellied, his brows and beard snow-white, sitting at a crossroads laughing and talking, singing and dancing.¹

That old man foretold that the invaders would come, and told them how it would be undone. That was three years before it happened.

So in the old version the child of the village of Giong is not a miracle dropped out of the sky. He is a promise given in advance, and the court had waited exactly three years for it. When the officials doubted that one person could fight off an army, it was the king who brushed them aside: what Long Quan said in that earlier year was not idle talk, so do not doubt it.¹

The legend goes on to the part everyone knows: the king sent for iron and had it smelted into an iron horse, an iron sword and an iron hat. The book gives the quantity precisely: fifty catties of iron.¹

But the child grew too fast, and no amount of food was enough. The neighbours brought buffalo and wine, cakes and fruit, and still his belly was not filled. Then comes the part few people know: cloth, brocade and cotton were not enough to cover him, so that reed flowers had to be joined together to clothe his body.¹

Reed flowers. Not iron armour.

That detail changes the picture entirely. The familiar telling raises up a divine general gleaming with iron and steel from head to foot. The old version gives us a child growing so fast that a whole village cannot sew him a coat, and has to wrap him for the moment in the grass that grows all along the riverbank.

The horse of iron, the coat of reed flowers. It is that poverty that makes it believable.

When the fighting was done, the invading army broke at Mount Trau in Vu Ninh, and the Yin king died on the field.¹

Any legend that lives long thickens with time, and Thanh Giong is no exception.

The popular telling today usually opens with the mother going out to the fields, stepping into a giant footprint and conceiving. That detail is not in the old written version. There, as told above, the opening is Long Quan appearing to give warning three years ahead.¹

This is not a matter of right and wrong. Folk tales live by being retold, and each retelling adds and drops a little. The giant footprint is a fine and ancient motif found in many cultures — the story of Khuong Nguyen stepping into a giant's footprint and giving birth to the ancestor of the Zhou is one example, and Emperor Tu Duc himself mentioned it when he annotated the national history.

The only thing worth saying is this: when we say "legend has it", we ought to know which telling we mean.

Set the marvels aside and the story still lets slip a few things about the age that produced it.

It speaks of iron. Fifty catties of iron smelted into a horse, a sword and a hat¹ — a possession precious enough that the king had to order it gathered, and new enough to be worth putting in a story. In the previous episode we saw archaeology divide the Dong Son culture into two phases, with iron only in the later one. A story that makes a marvel of iron is a story from the time when iron had just arrived.

It speaks of a community pooling rice to feed a soldier. The whole village gave rice, gave buffalo and wine, gave cloth — and it still was not enough.

And it speaks of a real fear: the north. Whether or not the Yin ever came down, the fear of being attacked from the north had become a plot very early, and will return in almost every later episode of this history.

The next episode is another legend of the Hung age, about two gods who courted the same woman: Son Tinh and Thuy Tinh.