Dich Hu Tong

The old chronicles say

His name is set down in a single clause on the Qin fighting the Yue, placed just after the three years in armour that failed over grain and just before the Yue withdrawal into the thickets and the scrub. What is striking is that in the same passage the winning side has no name: the original says only that the Yue set up among themselves one outstanding and able as general, a phrase about ability rather than a personal name. In the oldest text on this war, the one Yue man called by a personal name is the man who was killed.¹

He was lord of Tay Au, a Yue grouping in what is now Guangxi, and that fact decides whose story this war is. In the whole Huainanzi passage there is not one word about Au Lac, about Thuc Phan, about Van Lang, or about the land of Giao Chi. The two words Au Lac do appear in the Records of the Grand Historian, but somewhere quite different and much later: in the passages on the Han destroying Nam Viet in 111 BC, more than a century after the war with the Qin. Elsewhere in that same book, Tay Au and Lac are listed as two separate groups, standing alongside Man Viet.¹²

How later ages remembered

Today's telling pulls that war down into the Red River delta and assigns it to Au Lac or to Thuc Phan, when the words in the book speak only of Tay Au. The man killed here was lord of a different Yue grouping in a different region; tying the war to Thuc Phan's Au Lac is an inference made by later ages, not a word in the texts that tell this war.¹