Trieu Da takes Au Lac

The last four episodes closed with An Duong Vuong taking a rhinoceros horn, parting the water and walking into the sea, and with Trieu Da as the man who took his country — according to the text those episodes rested on.¹

This episode asks a simple question: how does the closest surviving history record that?

The answer turns out not to be simple, and it is a lesson in how to read a page of an old book.

Nam Viet differs from everything we have passed through in one respect: it has a near-contemporary history.

Sima Qian's Su ky gives the kingdom a chapter of its own. The book was compiled around ninety-one BC, less than twenty years after Nam Viet fell. Its author lived alongside people who had seen the place.

Set against the age of the Hung kings — where the earliest text stands thousands of years from the events — this is close to a luxury. We have names, letters, dated years, even Trieu Da defending himself in his own words.

So the question of how the Shiji records Trieu Da taking Au Lac is worth asking. And the answer is: the main text does not record it at all.²

Where we expect a battle, the Shiji sets down something quite different.

After telling how Empress Lu banned the sale of iron goods to the south, how Trieu Da styled himself emperor, attacked the border towns of Truong Sa, and how a Han army sent against him was stopped by plague and could not cross the hills, the book goes on:

Da thereupon used his army to overawe the border, and bribed Man Viet, Tay Au and Lac with goods, and made them subject to him; from east to west more than ten thousand li.²

The word to pause on is bribed. The original uses two characters for greasing a palm and for making a present. Not the characters for conquest.

By that sentence the peoples of the south — Lac among them — became subject through two things: a threatening army and wealth. The book records no battle.

There is a second passage, and it is the better one, because the words are Trieu Da's own.

Under Emperor Wen the Han sent Luc Gia south a second time. Da wrote to apologise and to give up the imperial title. In that letter, to make himself small, he listed his neighbours:

The south is low and damp, and lies among the tribes; to its east Man Viet, a people of a thousand, also calls itself a kingdom; to its west Au Lac, a country that goes unclothed, also calls itself a kingdom. Your old servant wrongfully usurped the imperial title, merely to amuse himself.²

Read that slowly. At the moment Trieu Da wrote — around one hundred and seventy-nine BC, long after he had "made them subject" — Au Lac is still spoken of as a country to his west, still calling itself a kingdom.

That is not how a man speaks of a country he has destroyed.

At the end of the chapter Sima Qian writes his own judgement, the place where he boils the whole story down to a few clauses.

Of Au Lac he writes four characters: Au Lac attacked one another, and Nam Viet was shaken.²

Those four characters say Au Lac fought among itself, and that Nam Viet was shaken as a result — not that Nam Viet attacked Au Lac. This is the whole of what the closest historian says about how Au Lac ended.

And one more detail, from the passage on the Han conquest of Nam Viet in one hundred and eleven BC: Cu Ong, the Nam Viet overseer of Que Lam commandery, persuaded Au Lac to submit to the Han.² Persuaded, not defeated.

It sits in the same volume — but it is not Sima Qian's writing.

The Shiji as printed today carries the notes of three commentators. Against that very sentence about bribes and subjection, the commentator Sima Zhen, a man of the Tang dynasty in the eighth century, wrote a long note. He quotes a Mr Yao, and Mr Yao in turn quotes a geography:

Giao Chi has Lac fields, worked by watching the tide rise and fall; the people who eat from those fields are called the Lac people; there are Lac kings and Lac lords; the districts call themselves Lac generals, wearing bronze seals on green ribbons, which are the magistrates of today. Afterwards the son of the king of Thuc led troops against the Lac lords, styled himself An Duong Vuong, and governed at Phong Khe district. Later the king of Nam Viet, Uy Da, attacked and broke An Duong Vuong, and set two envoys to govern the people of the two commanderies Giao Chi and Cuu Chan.³

There it is. The familiar story lives here.

But count the layers.

Sima Qian's main text, around ninety-one BC. The geography being quoted, compiled somewhere in the fourth or fifth century AD — about five hundred years later. Mr Yao quoting that book in the sixth century. Sima Zhen quoting Mr Yao in the eighth — about nine hundred years after the main text.

Three layers of quotation stacked on one another, and the first link in the chain is a book that no longer survives, which nobody can check again.

It goes one step further, and that step is why this episode is worth writing.

I opened three separate printings of that same block of commentary. They do not match, and the places where they differ are exactly the details later writers lean on.

First, the name of the book quoted. Two printings give Quang Chau ky. The third — the Suoyin commentary as it circulates on its own — gives Ich Chau truyen. Two different books, both lost. Which means even the first link of the chain is not certainly one book rather than the other.³

Second, whether there are Lac kings. Two printings read "there are Lac kings and Lac lords". One has dropped the Lac kings and keeps only the lords.³ Anyone who builds on that shortened copy, and writes that the sources know only Lac lords and Lac generals, is building on the minority reading.

Third, and dearest of all: at the end of the block stands the sentence this Lac is Au Lac. In one printing it falls inside the quotation, and so belongs to the lost geography. In the other two it falls outside — and is therefore Sima Zhen's own remark.³ The identification of "Lac" with "Au Lac", the very hinge joining the two names, may be nothing more than the inference of a man in the eighth century.

It needs saying plainly, to prevent a misreading: this episode does not claim that Trieu Da never took Au Lac.

The story has sources. Thuy kinh chu quotes Giao Chau ngoai vuc ky to almost exactly the same effect as the note we have just read, and the Au Lac episodes were built on it. Two lost geographies, preserved in two different places, carrying one account between them — that counts for something, and is not to be waved away.¹

What this episode does say is different: that account is not the writing of the closest history. The closest history records something else — subjection through a threatening army and through wealth — and then leaves four characters, "Au Lac attacked one another".

The two do not cancel each other. A country may be forced into subjection, fall into disorder within, and only then be lost. But they are two layers of evidence of different ages, and a modern printed page sets them side by side until a reader takes them for the same age.