Do Anh Han

The old chronicles say

All four Chinese passages compared for the events of 791 call the leader Do Anh Han. The Old Book of Tang: the Annam leader Do Anh Han rebelled and attacked the protectorate; the protector-general Cao Chinh Binh died of worry. The basic annals of the New Book of Tang: the Annam leader Do Anh Han rebelled, and was killed — the words was killed appear only here. The Zizhi tongjian: the Man chieftains, Do Anh Han and his like, raised troops and besieged the protectorate; Chinh Binh died of worry; when the Man heard the news, they all submitted. The biography of Trieu Xuong in the New Book of Tang also opens with his rebellion and Cao Chinh Binh dying of worry. Not one of them has the name Phung Hung.¹²⁴³

The Complete Annals give him a different part: the brothers Phung Hung and Phung Hai fought Cao Chinh Binh for a long time without winning, and only then took up the plan of a man from their own village, Do Anh Han, and brought their troops to besiege the seat. Here he is the man who offered the plan, and the leader is Phung Hung. The Nguyen court historians who compiled the Cuong muc saw this mismatch and explained it themselves in a note: the basic annals of the Book of Tang, under the seventh year of Zhenyuan, record only the Annam chieftain Do Anh Han, and not the affair of Phung Hung — perhaps because the land was far away and not clearly known. The word perhaps is their own — a nineteenth-century guess, not a newly found document.⁵⁷

Not every Vietnamese writer on the year 791 used the name Phung Hung. The An Nam chi luoc of Le Tac, finished in 1335, still follows the Chinese histories in its entry on Trieu Xuong: it happened that the Annam chieftain Do Anh Han had rebelled. Ngo Thi Si, in the eighteenth century, in a comment the Cuong muc quotes, writes: Chinh Binh taxed the province heavily and so stirred up Anh Han's troops; as soon as Trieu Xuong arrived, the people were at peace. That sentence names the rising after Do Anh Han.⁸⁹

How later ages remembered

Le Tung's general essay of 1514, printed at the front of the Complete Annals, grieves that Phung An could not hold on to what he inherited and surrendered to Trieu Xuong: though he had Do Anh Han as a minister to plan the affairs of state, even that could not save the Phung from being lost. Here Do Anh Han is the Phung family's adviser, nothing like the leader in the Chinese histories, and there is not a word about him being killed. The editorial principles, in the same opening pages of that history, likewise record that King Bo Cai took advantage of disorder and used Do Anh Han's plan to besiege the protectorate.⁶¹⁰