Person
Au Co
The fairy-born figure of legend, mother of the hundred sons; the old books disagree on whether she was De Lai's daughter or his concubine.
At a glance
- Role
- Mother of the hundred sons hatched from a sac of eggs; after parting from Lac Long Quan she led fifty sons up onto the land, brought them to the land of Phong Chau, raised the eldest to be king under the title Hung Vuong and named the country Van Lang1
- Family
- Two books record two different relations to De Lai: Linh Nam chich quai calls her the favourite concubine whom Lac Long Quan took away, while the Toan thu writes her as De Lai’s daughter, the original using the character nu. Ngo Si Lien added himself that by the Chinese works she and Lac Long Quan were of one blood, and closely so12
- End
- She parted from Lac Long Quan on his word that dragon and fairy, water and fire, destroy one another and could not stay together long; she led fifty sons up onto the land, the two sides ruling their own halves, sending word to each other and not forgetting one another1
Life
Legend has it
In Linh Nam chich quai she enters the story not as a bride but as someone left behind. De Lai, in the north, made a tour southward; finding the country without a ruler, he left her and her serving women at a travelling palace and went off to see the sights. Lac Long Quan came back, saw how beautiful she was, and turned himself into a handsome young man to go to her; she consented, and he took her away. De Lai returned and sent his men searching everywhere, but Long Quan turned into demons, devils, dragons, snakes, tigers and elephants until none dared come near, and he gave up and went back north. Read closely, this is not a wedding but the taking of another man’s concubine.1
The old chronicles say
The national history differs at exactly that point. Dai Viet su ky toan thu, completed by Ngo Si Lien around 1479, writes that Lac Long Quan married the daughter of De Lai, whose name was Au Co; the original classical Chinese uses the character nu, meaning daughter, not concubine. One character changed, and the whole colour of the story changes with it: in the Linh Nam chich quai version this is the seizing of another man’s wife, in the national history an ordinary marriage between two families. But Ngo Si Lien then caught on the new arrangement himself: consulting Chinese works he found De Lai recorded as the son of De Nghi, and De Nghi and Kinh Duong Vuong were brothers.21
How later ages remembered
The sac of a hundred eggs is where later readers stopped longest. Reading the passage in the Cuong muc, King Tu Duc wrote: the Book of Odes has the line and then a hundred sons, but that is only praise for having many children; examined closely, it never went that far. How much less a hundred eggs? If it really were so, how would that differ from a beast — could such a thing still be human? Even swallowing the egg of the dark bird, or treading in the footprint of a giant, is not as bizarre as this. This is not a king who despised his own ancestors, but a king reading history in the Confucian manner, requiring that what a book records accord with common sense.4
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