Emperor Wu of Han

The old chronicles say

According to the Shiji, he opened the war not with a rallying call but with an amnesty: when the Son of Heaven is weak, the lords rule by force, and a subject who does not strike at rebels is blamed; now Lu Gia, Kien Duc and their kind have rebelled and set themselves up, as calmly as if it were nothing; send the convicts, together with a hundred thousand men of the towered ships from south of the Jiang and the Huai rivers, to strike them. A hundred thousand is the overall total the edict gives. Part of the army that destroyed Nam Viet was made up of men pardoned so that they could go and fight.¹

The sources do not put the destruction of the kingdom under his reign in the same year. The Shiji and the Han thu keep two points apart: the army set out in the autumn of the fifth year of Yuanding, and the city fell in the winter of the sixth, that is 112 and 111 BC. The Book of the Later Han folds it into one sentence: in the fifth year of Yuanding under Emperor Wu, it was destroyed, and divided into nine commanderies. The Thuy kinh chu is further off, in both the year and the number of commanderies: in the second year of Yuanding, Emperor Wu of Han at last took in the Bach Viet, and opened seven commanderies.¹²³⁴