De Nghi

The old chronicles say

He appears at the exact hinge of the whole genealogy. The old histories record that De Minh wished to pass the throne to his younger son Loc Tuc, but Loc Tuc yielded it to his elder brother; so De Nghi ruled the north, while Loc Tuc was enfeoffed as Kinh Duong Vuong, ruled the south and named his country Xich Quy. That frame — the elder brother keeps the north, the younger keeps the south — is the finest part of the story, because it makes the Vietnamese an equal rather than a vassal.¹

Set beside the Chinese genealogy, that frame turns out to be later work. The De vuong the ky lists the line of Viem De Than Nong as eight generations succeeding one another in a single line, where De Minh and De Lai stand two generations apart with De Truc between them. In the Vietnamese histories De Minh has two sons, De Lai becomes a grandson, De Truc disappears — and De Nghi, the elder brother to whom the throne was yielded, does not appear in the original list at all. The old histories took names that really do occur in a Chinese genealogy and refitted them into a different family structure: dropping the man in the middle and adding a new one.²¹

His name is also where the historian himself found a snag. Consulting Chinese works, Ngo Si Lien found De Lai recorded as the son of De Nghi, and De Nghi and Kinh Duong Vuong were brothers; which made Lac Long Quan and Au Co of one blood, and closely so. He did not pass over it but wrote his unease straight into the book: perhaps it was because that age was still wild, and rites and music not yet established, that it was so.³