Person
Queen Dowager Cu
The woman of the Cu clan from Ham Dan, wife of Anh Te and mother of Trieu Hung. Queen dowager when her son came to the throne young, she held that for Nam Viet to become part of the Han was to the country's advantage, and was the one set on killing Lu Gia at the banquet laid on to kill him.
At a glance
- Origin
- A woman of Ham Dan1
- Family
- Wife of Anh Te, married while he was at Truong An, made queen when he took the throne; mother of Trieu Hung; her younger brother was Cu Lac1
- End
- Attacked and killed by Lu Gia and his brother, together with the king and the Han envoys1
Life
The old chronicles say
The Shiji is not coy about her. The main text records that before she became Anh Te's wife, she had carried on an illicit affair with a man of Ba Lang named An Quoc Thieu Quy. In 113 BC the Han sent that very man south to persuade the king of Nam Viet to come to court, and the book adds one terse line: the envoy carried on the affair with her again. The consequence is set down straight after: the people of the country knew of it fairly well, and most did not side with the queen dowager.1
She is the one who was set on killing Lu Gia. At the banquet she sat facing south; when the wine had gone round once, she asked why the chancellor kept insisting that for Nam Viet to become part of the Han was not to their good, meaning to provoke the envoys to anger so that they would strike. The envoys hesitated, and none dared to act. When Lu Gia rose and walked out, she flew into a rage and wanted to take a spear to him, and it was her own son, the king, who stopped her.1
Lu Gia's proclamation takes her as its target: the queen dowager is a woman of China, lives in lewdness with the envoy besides, is bent only on making the country part of the Han and presenting the treasures of the former kings to the Son of Heaven, with no thought for the altars of the Trieu clan. The Complete Annals copy the proclamation with one change in how she is named: there she is no longer a woman of China but Han by origin. In his closing verdict, Sima Qian writes that the kingdom was lost in the end, and the omen began with the woman of the Cu clan.134
How later ages remembered
Later Vietnamese historians came back to exactly that point. Ngo Si Lien writes that the disaster of Ai Vuong, though Lu Gia brought it about, in truth had its seed in Queen Cu. Le Tung, in the general essay at the front of the Complete Annals, names one more person: that disaster was truly opened by Minh Vuong's doting favour for Queen Cu. In the eighteenth century, Ngo Thi Si in his Viet su tieu an, by the translation of 1960, held that the seed of the Trieu losing their country was there from the moment the Cu woman was taken as a palace consort, and from the moment Lu Gia was raised to be chancellor.256
Mentioned in
Sources for this page
Every row of the profile and every passage below points to one of these documents. How we choose and check sources