Chu Dong Tu

Legend has it

The poverty in this story is not symbolic poverty. Their house caught fire and every possession burned, leaving one cloth loincloth, which father and son wore in turn when either went out. The father, old and ill, told his son to bury him naked and keep the loincloth for himself; the son could not bring himself to do it, and buried the loincloth with his father, leaving himself bare. From then on he lived by standing in the water with his hands out to the passing merchant boats, or by fishing with a rod. A man so poor that his family's only property was one piece of cloth, and he put it in the ground.¹

Tien Dung's boat put in at the bank with gongs, drums and pipes and a large retinue. Frightened, he hid in a clump of reeds, scooped out a hollow in the sand to bury himself and pulled sand over the top; she had a curtain drawn around that very clump for bathing, the water poured down, the sand washed away, and a man was revealed. Tien Dung thought a long while and said that she had never wished to marry, and now that both of them were bare in one hollow of sand, this was heaven's arrangement. He refused outright; she answered that heaven had joined them, so how could he refuse.¹

Cast off by her father, the two did not withdraw into hiding; they went into business. They opened a landing market, put up shops and stalls, traded with the people, and it grew into a large market, where foreign merchants came and went to deal and honoured the two of them as its masters. A rich man proposed a scheme: put up one dat of gold, go out to sea to buy precious goods, and next year it will be ten. He sailed out and put in at Mount Quynh Vien, met a monk named Phat Quang, was taught the Way and stayed on to study, handing the gold to his household men to buy goods with; when the ship came back for him the monk gave him a staff and a conical hat, saying the power resides in these.¹

He came back and spoke of the Way, Tien Dung awoke to it too, and the two gave up the market, the shops and the whole estate to go looking for a teacher. One evening, with no village in reach, they planted the staff and set the hat on top for shelter; by the third watch there appeared walls and gates, jewelled towers, treasure halls, storehouses, shrines, gold and pearls, immortal boys and jade maidens, officers and guards, and by morning it was a separate kingdom with its own officials. The Hung king took it for his daughter's rebellion and marched against her; at midnight a great wind rose, flinging sand and tearing up trees, and the citadel and all who followed them rose into the sky at once, the ground sinking into a great marsh.¹

The old chronicles say

The compiler did not regard this as a closed fairy tale: the book carries on with something that happened some five hundred years later. Trieu Quang Phuc hid his troops in that very marsh to resist Tran Ba Tien, then fasted, raised an altar in the middle of the marsh and burned incense in prayer; a divine being — one version says plainly that it was him — came down on a dragon and said that where he had risen to heaven the power remained, then drew off a dragon's claw and gave it to him, telling him to fix it to his helmet and he would win wherever he struck. To the compiler this was a holy place still in working order, and the proof was that five hundred years later it helped a general defend the country.¹