Trieu Da founds Nam Viet

The last episode showed that the closest surviving history does not record Trieu Da breaking An Duong Vuong.

So what does it record about him?

A great deal, as it turns out. And the portrait that emerges is nothing like the "invader from the north" we are used to.¹

The opening line of the Nam Viet chapter of the Su ky is as brief as an entry on a form:

The king of Nam Viet, Uy Da, a man of Chan Dinh, of the Trieu clan.¹

The word Uy here is not a surname. It is an office — that of commandant. A Tang commentator had to spell it out: Uy is the office, Da is the name, and the clan is Trieu.²

Chan Dinh, according to the same notes, had been the name of a commandery and was later made a district, in the territory of Thuong Son — that is, in today's Hebei in China.²

So it must be said at the outset: by the Shiji, Trieu Da was a northerner, not a man of the country he ruled. That fact becomes the kernel of a seven-hundred-year argument the next episode will tell.

His post under the Qin: magistrate of Long Xuyen district, in Nam Hai commandery.¹ A district official, in the furthest corner of the empire.

Before the founding, one number is worth stopping on, because it shows how earlier readers read history.

The Shiji records that the Qin, having swallowed the empire, subdued the land of Duong Viet, set up the commanderies of Que Lam, Nam Hai and Tuong Quan, sent out those under sentence of exile, and had them living among the Viet for thirteen years.¹

But a fifth-century commentator on the Shiji did the arithmetic again. He wrote: from the Qin conquest of the empire to the first year of the Second Emperor is thirteen years; yet it took eight years after that conquest before the Viet lands were pacified, so by the first year of the Second Emperor it is only six years.²

This is a rare thing: a note openly correcting the main text, and correcting it by subtraction. Anyone using the figure of thirteen years should know that the book's own annotator doubted it fifteen hundred years ago.

The decisive passage of the whole chapter is a scene at a sickbed.

The Qin had fallen. In Nam Hai commandery the commandant Nham Ngao lay dying and summoned Trieu Da, the magistrate of Long Xuyen. The Shiji sets down his words in full.

He runs through the north: Chen Sheng and his like in revolt, the Qin without principle, the empire suffering under it; Xiang Yu, Liu Ji, Chen Sheng and Wu Guang raising troops in every province, contending for the empire like tigers; China in disorder, no one knowing where safety lies, men of standing turning on the Qin and setting each other up.

Then he speaks of the ground beneath him: Nam Hai is remote, and he feared armed bandits might reach it; he had meant to raise troops and cut the newly opened road, to defend himself and wait on events among the lords — but illness had overtaken him.

And here is the sentence that founded a country:

Besides, Phien Ngung has steep hills at its back and the South Sea barring its front, runs several thousand li from east to west, and has no few men of the central plains to help — this too is the master of a province, and a state can be founded on it.¹

He ends: among the senior officials of the commandery there is no one worth speaking to of this, and so he had sent for him to tell him.¹

Read closely, this means something: the idea of founding a kingdom was not Trieu Da's. It belonged to a dying man who saw an opening as an empire came apart, and passed it to someone he trusted.

Sima Qian does not let it slip by. He opens his closing verdict with six characters:

Uy Da became king, and the root of it was Nham Ngao.¹

As for how the office changed hands, the main text says only that Nham Ngao gave Da a letter making him acting commandant of Nam Hai. But a Tang note, quoting an earlier commentator, is blunter: Nham Ngao forged an imperial edict to make Da commandant.²

If that is so, the kingdom of Nam Viet began with a forged piece of paper.

Nham Ngao died. The Shiji records Trieu Da's first action, and it shows how quickly he understood what he had been handed.

He at once sent word to the passes to the north: armed bandits are coming, cut the roads, gather troops and hold.¹

Then he did a second thing, slower and colder: he gradually put to death, under the law, the senior officials the Qin had appointed, and installed his own people in the commandery and district posts.¹

The two acts sit together and say one thing plainly: he did not rise against the Qin. He waited for the Qin to die outright, shut the door, and then cleared the old court's men out from inside.

Only once the Qin had been utterly destroyed did he seize Que Lam and Tuong Quan and set himself up as martial king of Nam Viet.¹

Two words in that sentence are worth keeping: set himself up. Nobody enfeoffed him. And what he seized were two Qin commanderies, not some other country.

There is a small detail the notes catch, and it says a good deal about the man.

The title he took was martial king of Nam Viet. "Martial" is a posthumous style — the sort of word later generations bestow on a ruler once he is dead.

A fifth-century commentator preserves an earlier scholar's remark on it: while still living he took "martial" for his title, which does not follow the old usage.²

A district magistrate in the furthest corner of an empire, making himself a king, and then handing himself his own posthumous name. He was not waiting for anyone's recognition.

It is worth being clear about what the Shiji does not say, because those are the gaps later ages fill.

It gives no year for the founding. The main text says only "the Qin having been destroyed", and then the self-elevation. Anyone who puts a year on it is calculating, not quoting.¹

Nor does it say outright that he made Phien Ngung his capital. Phien Ngung is the place Nham Ngao pointed to as fit for founding a state, and the place the Han armies converged on when they destroyed the kingdom — so it follows from the context, but what follows from context should be said to follow from context.¹

That is the precision the closest history allows. Less than we would like, and a great deal firmer than what was added later.

The next episode is the argument that begins right here: a northerner who founded a kingdom in the south — to the Vietnamese histories, was he a founding sovereign or an invader? The Trieu: legitimate dynasty or foreign conquest.