Kinh Duong Vuong

Legend has it

According to the old histories the line runs like this: Than Nong begot many generations, and in the time of De Minh, a third-generation descendant of Than Nong, the king went on a tour of inspection to the south, met a fairy at the Ngu Linh mountains, married her, and they had a son, Loc Tuc. Loc Tuc was of saintly virtue. De Minh wished to pass the throne to his younger son, 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 south, naming his country Xich Quy. Heard once through, it is a coherent genealogy; read each of those names closely and a different story appears.¹

The old chronicles say

The most striking thing is that the historian did not hide his source. Setting down the line that Kinh Duong Vuong married the daughter of the Lord of Dongting, Ngo Si Lien noted that a Tang history records how in the time of Kinh Duong a woman herding goats called herself the youngest daughter of the Lord of Dongting, married the second son of the Kinh Xuyen clan, was cast aside, and asked a man named Lieu Nghi to carry a letter back to her father; he concluded that the Kinh Xuyen and Dongting clans had long been intermarrying. He brought the tale in to shore up the story. But it is not history: it is Lieu Nghi truyen, a Tang tale of the marvellous whose author names himself at the end as Ly Trieu Uy.¹⁷

Three hundred years later Ngo Thi Si wrote in Dai Viet su ky tien bien that the whole genealogical passage was wild and reckless invention, fit to be thrown out, and then named the mechanism of the error outright: the fault lies with meddlers who read the tale of Lieu Nghi, saw the Dongting king's daughter married to the second son of Kinh Xuyen, and recklessly took Kinh Xuyen to be Kinh Duong; once there is a husband and wife there must be fathers and sons, rulers and subjects, and from that they embroidered a text to fill out the count of reigns, and the historians took it up believing it fact. He also asked a question nobody has yet answered neatly: what sort of name is Xich Quy, to be used as the name of a country?²

How later ages remembered

By the middle of the nineteenth century this was a decision of the court. In the pham le of the Cuong muc, the section that sets out the principles of compilation, the Nguyen dynasty’s National History Office wrote that the old histories begin the national line with Kinh Duong, a matter shrouded in obscurity, with truly no reliable evidence for it; now, by imperial decree, they begin specifically with the annals of the Hung Kings, to mark where the legitimate line starts, while the two annals of Kinh Duong and Lac Long are moved down into notes below, still recorded in outline, in keeping with the principle that what is doubtful should be transmitted as doubtful. He was taken out of the main line by an official text of the Nguyen court, not by the opinion of some foreign scholar.⁴