An Duong Vuong

The old chronicles say

The two sentences the oldest text gives him come directly after a description of the society before anyone came from outside: in the old days, before Giao Chi had commanderies and districts, the land had Lac fields that follow the tide up and down; the people who cleared and ate from them were called the Lac people; there were Lac kings and Lac lords, and most districts had Lac generals, who wore bronze seals on green ribbons. Then: later the son of the king of Thuc brought thirty thousand troops and attacked the Lac king and the Lac lords, subdued the Lac generals, and thereupon styled himself An Duong Vuong. That is all — no personal name, no birthplace, no year, no name for the country, and the defeated party is not a Hung king.¹

The name arrives about eight hundred years later. The Viet su luoc, compiled around the end of the fourteenth century, calls him Phan, son of the king of Thuc, but still gives no birthplace, and the country he founded still has no name. Only in the fifteenth-century Complete Annals do all five claims stand together: surname Thuc, given name Phan, a man of Ba Thuc, his capital at Phong Khe — with a note directly after it that this is today's Co Loa citadel — together with the year Giap Thin and the name Au Lac. Each layer lies centuries away from the one before it.²³

The sharpest attack on a man of Ba Thuc comes not from a modern scholar but from the historians of the Nguyen court, in the critical notes of the Cuong muc. Their argument has three parts: Shu had been destroyed by Qin in 316 BC, so what king was left to have a son; between Shu and Van Lang lay several states two or three thousand li apart, all of them Yunnan today; and the old texts do not agree among themselves, some writing grandson of the king of Thuc, others son of the king of Thuc and a man of Ba Thuc. Then they offer the explanation still the tidiest available: perhaps out in the Southwest, beside Van Lang, there was a man of the Thuc clan, who was then mistaken for the king of Shu.⁴

How later ages remembered

In 1979, in a peer-reviewed journal, Stephen O'Harrow put the same paradox again, saying plainly that he was passing on a point made by T'eng Yuan-li: Shu was brought under Qin in 316 BC, well before Qin finished uniting China. He described the state of the evidence in an image worth keeping — reconstructing this is like piecing together the skeleton of an extinct reptile from a hip bone, a jawbone and the odd tooth, at the risk of producing an animal bent permanently into an unnatural posture. His conclusion is not that the man never existed, but that his ancestral home should be looked for somewhat farther afield than Sichuan.⁵

The old chronicles say

In the crossbow story the two earliest texts charge him with the same fault. The Giao Chau ngoai vuc ky says he did not know Cao Thong was a spirit and treated him without principle, so Thong left, saying: hold this crossbow and you rule the world, lose it and you lose the world. The Viet su luoc says the king's treatment of Cao Lo grew thin, and Cao Lo left; then, when the Trieu army came, the book has one cold sentence — the king went on as before. In both, the country is lost not because of a young woman but because a king mistreated a man of ability.¹²