Person
De Minh
In the old histories a great-grandson of Shennong who fathered Loc Tuc, later Kinh Duong Vuong. His name is real in the Chinese genealogy, but sits in a different place there.
At a glance
- Role
- The man who splits the world in two in the old histories’ genealogy: he wished to pass the throne to his younger son Loc Tuc, but Loc Tuc yielded it to his elder brother De Nghi, so De Nghi ruled the north while Loc Tuc was enfeoffed as Kinh Duong Vuong and ruled the south1
- Family
- A third-generation descendant of Than Nong in the old histories; on a tour of inspection to the south he met a fairy at the Ngu Linh mountains, married her, and they had a son, Loc Tuc, later Kinh Duong Vuong; his elder son De Nghi kept the north, while in the Vietnamese histories De Lai became his grandson1
- Earliest record
- His name really does occur in the genealogy of the line of Viem De Than Nong in De vuong the ky, a Chinese work of the Jin dynasty whose original is lost but whose genealogical passage survives quoted in Thai Binh ngu lam, book 78; there he is one of eight generations succeeding one another: De Thua, De Lam, De Minh, De Truc, De Lai, De Ai, De Du Vong2
Life
The old chronicles say
A Chinese work of the Jin dynasty, De vuong the ky, records the genealogy of the line of Viem De Than Nong: after Viem De came eight generations in succession, De Thua, De Lam, De Minh, De Truc, De Lai, De Ai, De Du Vong. That list contains De Minh and it contains De Lai, exactly the two names the Vietnamese histories use, but the arrangement is entirely different. In the Chinese book these are eight generations succeeding one another in a single line, De Minh and De Lai two generations apart with De Truc between them. In the Vietnamese histories De Minh has two sons, one ruling the north and one going south, and De Lai becomes a grandson.21
And De Nghi, the elder brother to whom the throne was yielded, does not appear in the original list at all. In other words, the old histories took names that really do occur in a Chinese genealogy and refitted them into a different family structure, skipping the man in the middle and adding a new one. The frame of the elder brother keeping the north and the younger keeping the south — the finest part of the story, because it makes the Vietnamese an equal rather than a vassal — is precisely the part that is not in the original.21
How later ages remembered
The historians who compiled the Cuong muc rejected that tour outright: they wrote that De Minh never made a tour of the south, so the story of his taking an immortal woman to wife is thoroughly bizarre, and should be kept for the time being only to pass the doubt along. In the same work, the pham le declares that the old histories’ beginning of the national line with Kinh Duong is a matter shrouded in obscurity, with truly no reliable evidence for it, so the Nguyen national history begins specifically with the annals of the Hung Kings and moves the two annals of Kinh Duong and Lac Long down into notes below. The genealogy that opens with De Minh was thus taken out of the main record by the middle of the nineteenth century.34
Mentioned in
Sources for this page
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