Lu Gia and the last fight against the Han

The last episode was about how later ages argued over the Trieu: a legitimate dynasty or a foreign conquest. This one goes back to the dynasty itself, in its final years. And its central figure is not a king.

He is a chancellor named Lu Gia. A banquet was laid on to kill him. The queen dowager wanted to run him through with a spear, and the one who stopped her was the king. Later, Lu Gia led troops and killed that very king.¹

To understand how it came to that, we have to go back three reigns.

Trieu Da died in one hundred and thirty-seven BC. According to the Su ky, his successor was his grandson, named Ho — known to history as Trieu Ho, with the posthumous title Van Vuong.¹

Two years later, by the date another chapter of the Shiji gives, the neighbouring state of Man Viet sent troops into Nam Viet.² Trieu Ho did not fight back. He sent a letter up to the Han:

The two Viet states are both vassals of the throne, and may not raise troops against each other on their own authority. Now Man Viet has raised troops and invaded your servant; your servant does not dare raise troops, and asks only that the Son of Heaven issue an edict.¹

The Han praised him as a man of principle, and sent an army against Man Viet. The affair ended with a killing inside a family: the younger brother of the king of Man Viet, Du Thien, killed his own brother in order to surrender.¹

Trieu Ho promised to go to court and wait upon the Son of Heaven. Then he pleaded illness and did not go, because his high ministers warned him in very blunt words: go to court and you will not come back — that is the way a country is lost. He only sent his crown prince, Trieu Anh Te, to the Han capital to serve in the palace guard. More than ten years later, Ho fell gravely ill and died.¹

Anh Te came home to take the throne. The first thing the Shiji records of him is that he at once hid away the seal of Emperor Vu from the reign before.¹ The seal bearing Trieu Da’s imperial title was still there, and the new king chose to hide it.

While he was still at Truong An, Anh Te had married a daughter of the Cu clan, a woman of Ham Dan, and she had borne him a son named Hung. On taking the throne, he asked leave to make the Cu woman his queen, and Hung his heir.¹

The Shiji has no praise for him. It records that he still liked to kill people at will, and gave free rein to his own desires; and that, afraid that going to court would mean being bound by Han law like the lords inside the Han realm, he likewise pleaded illness and did not go, sending only another son, Thu Cong, to serve in the guard. He died, and was given the posthumous title Minh Vuong.¹

Two kings, two pleas of illness. Nam Viet kept up the forms of a vassal with letters and hostages, but would not let its king go to court.

When Minh Vuong died, Trieu Hung came to the throne while still young. His mother, the woman of the Cu clan, became queen dowager — the Vietnamese histories call her Queen Dowager Cu.¹

The Shiji is not coy about her. The main text records that before she became Anh Te’s wife, she had carried on an illicit affair with a man of Ba Lang named An Quoc Thieu Quy.¹

In one hundred and thirteen BC, the Han sent that very man south to persuade the king of Nam Viet to come to court. And the Shiji adds one terse line: the envoy carried on the affair with her again.¹

The consequence is set down straight after: the people of the country knew of it fairly well, and most did not side with the queen dowager.¹

So on the throne sat a young king; behind the throne, a mother from Ham Dan; and beside her, a Han envoy whom people in the country knew fairly well to have been her lover. Where, then, did real power lie?

The Shiji answers that with a portrait of Lu Gia:

The chancellor, Lu Gia, was old in years, and had served as chancellor under three kings. More than seventy of his clan held office at the rank of senior official. His sons all married the king’s daughters, and his daughters were all married to the king’s sons and younger brothers and to men of the royal house; and he had ties with Tan Vuong in Thuong Ngo.¹

Then comes the weightiest line: he carried great weight in the country; the Viet trusted him, and many served as his eyes and ears; he held the people’s hearts more than the king did.¹

The Lu and the Trieu had been woven together by marriage so tightly they could hardly be pulled apart. The king sat on the throne, but the eyes and ears of the country belonged to the chancellor.

The king sent a letter up to the Han; Lu Gia remonstrated again and again; the king would not listen. The Shiji goes on: Lu Gia had a mind to rebel, and several times pleaded illness rather than meet the Han envoys.¹ Pleading illness was how the two kings before him had handled the Son of Heaven. Now the chancellor used the very same move on the envoys.

The Dai Viet su ky toan thu copies this passage almost word for word, calls him chief minister, and adds one date: in the year Dinh Ty, that is one hundred and twenty-four BC, Lu Gia was made grand tutor.³

One thing should be made clear here. Today he is often described as a chancellor who was himself Viet. But neither the Complete Annals nor the Kham dinh Viet su thong giam cuong muc notes where he came from: the Complete Annals call him only by his office, chief minister or grand tutor; the Cuong muc gives only his name.^{3 4} What the old histories do let us be sure of is something else: the Viet trusted him, and his family was bound tightly into the royal house.

Now comes the central scene of the whole story. Sima Qian records it so closely that he notes which way each person sat facing.

A banquet with wine was laid on in the palace. Its purpose, the Shiji says without any hedging, was to borrow the might of the Han envoys to kill Lu Gia and his people.¹

The seating is set down like this: the envoys all sat facing east; the queen dowager faced south; the king faced north; the chancellor Lu Gia and the high ministers all faced west, sitting in attendance at the wine.¹

Picture it: Lu Gia sat face to face with the Han envoys, while the queen dowager and the king sat facing each other.

Outside the palace there is one detail, and the Shiji places it right after the seating plan: Lu Gia’s younger brother was a general, and had his troops encamped outside the palace.¹

When the wine had gone round once, the queen dowager turned to Lu Gia and said:

For Nam Viet to become part of the Han is to the country’s advantage — and yet you, lord chancellor, keep insisting it is not to our good. Why is that?¹

The Shiji says plainly what the words were for: to provoke the envoys to anger.¹ The queen dowager wanted the Han men themselves to strike.

But the envoys hesitated, each waiting on the others, and in the end none dared to act.¹

Lu Gia saw that everything he heard and saw was wrong, and at once rose and walked out. The queen dowager flew into a rage and wanted to take a spear and stab Lu Gia. The king stopped the queen dowager.¹

Read the scene again, person by person. The queen dowager is the one who was set on killing. The envoys are the ones handed the moment who did not dare to use it. Lu Gia is the one who read the board and stepped out at the right time, while outside the palace his brother’s troops were still in place. And the young king is the one who stopped a killing.

After that, Lu Gia rebelled. He sent an order out to the whole country, and the Shiji records its words verbatim:

The king is young. The queen dowager is a woman of China, and lives in lewdness with the envoy besides; she is bent only on making us part of the Han, on taking all the treasures of the former kings to present to the Son of Heaven to curry favour, and on leading many people off with her, to be seized and sold as bond-servants once they reach Truong An. She grasps only at the gain of saving herself for the moment, with no thought for the altars of the Trieu clan, and no mind to plan for ten thousand generations.¹

The proclamation does not speak of the country in the abstract. It makes its charges with concrete things: the treasures of the former kings, the people led off and then sold, and the altars of the Trieu clan. Lu Gia took up arms in the name of the very house whose king he was about to kill.

Then he and his brother led troops that attacked and killed the king, the queen dowager and the Han envoys. He sent word to Tan Vuong in Thuong Ngo and to the commanderies and districts, and then set up as king the eldest son of Minh Vuong by his Viet wife, the marquis of Thuat Duong, Trieu Kien Duc.¹

The words "Viet wife" stand in the main text itself. The king who was killed was the son of a mother from Ham Dan, the one Anh Te had chosen as his heir. The king who was set up was the eldest son of the same king, and his mother was Viet.¹

The Complete Annals copy the proclamation with one change in how she is named. There the queen dowager is no longer "a woman of China" but Han by origin: the king is young in years, the queen dowager was Han by origin, and lives wantonly with the Han envoy besides, set with one heart only on submitting to the Han.³ The Complete Annals also call the king who was killed by a posthumous title: Ai Vuong.³

On the Han side, the court had already sent Han Thien Thu, formerly chancellor of the state of Te Bac, together with Cu Lac, the queen dowager’s younger brother, with two thousand men into Nam Viet.¹

Han Thien Thu had once made a remark the Shiji preserves: over that paltry little country of Viet... give me two hundred brave men, and I will surely cut down Gia and come back to report.¹

The force that actually set out was two thousand men, ten times the number he had boasted of. The army entered Viet territory and took several small settlements. Then the Viet did something strange: they simply opened the road and gave them food to march on. When the army was forty li short of Phien Ngung, the Viet brought up their troops, attacked Thien Thu and his men, and wiped them out.¹

What came next had two sides, done at the same time. Nam Viet had men put the banners of office of the Han envoys in a box, seal it, and set it at the frontier pass, cleverly composed deceitful words to apologise for the offence, and then sent out troops to hold the strategic strongpoints.¹

Return the banners, send an apology, and post troops across the road: one hand apologising, the other holding the gate. The word "deceitful" is the word of the Han historian.

More than a thousand years later, the Vietnamese histories had to decide what to think of this man. And within the single work of the Complete Annals, two of its historians went two different ways.

Le Van Huu, a historian of the thirteenth century, praises him first. He writes that Lu Gia urged Ai Vuong and the queen dowager Cu not to ask to become vassal lords of the Han, and not to give up the border gates — this may be called knowing how to value the country of Viet.⁵

Then he turns it straight round. But Lu Gia went on to kill his own king to vent a private grudge, and could not hold the country either, leaving Viet to be carved up and made subject to the Han — so Lu Gia’s crime is such that even putting him to death would not wipe it out.⁵ One sentence of praise, one of condemnation, and the condemnation comes last.

Ngo Si Lien reads the same story and puts the root somewhere else: the disaster of Ai Vuong, though Lu Gia brought it about, in truth had its seed in Queen Cu.⁶

He does not let Lu Gia off. The closing lines of his comment bring the principles of the Spring and Autumn Annals to judge ruler and minister alike: a ruler who does not know the principles of the Spring and Autumn will surely bear the name of chief of evildoers; a minister who does not know them will surely fall into the crime of seizing the throne and murdering his king — Minh Vuong, Ai Vuong and Lu Gia were such men.⁶ Le Van Huu piles the guilt on one man. Ngo Si Lien divides it among all three, and puts the seed in the woman of the Cu clan.

Le Tung, in the general essay printed at the front of the Complete Annals, follows the same line and names one more person outright: consider the disaster of Ai Vuong — though it came from Lu Gia, it was truly opened by Minh Vuong’s doting favour for Queen Cu.⁷

In the eighteenth century, Ngo Thi Si, in his Viet su tieu an, traces it back to the same place, but sets two things side by side. By the translation of nineteen sixty, he held that the seed of the Trieu losing their country was there from the moment the Cu woman was taken as a palace consort, and from the moment Lu Gia was raised to be chancellor.⁸

So was Lu Gia the man who defended the country, or the man who lost it? The Vietnamese historians do not give the same answer, and this episode will not answer for them.

It is only worth seeing that everyone in the argument is reading the same main text: an old chancellor who held the people's hearts more than his king, who argued against becoming part of the Han, escaped a banquet laid on to kill him, then killed the king, set up another, and destroyed the army the Han sent south.¹

How that fight ended, and how he himself ended, belongs to the next era: The Han destroy Nam Viet, 111 BC.