Lac Long Quan

Legend has it

The part of Linh Nam chich quai that many people have never heard is how he met Au Co. De Lai, in the north, made a tour southward; finding the country without a ruler, he left his favourite concubine Au Co and her serving women at a travelling palace and went off to see the sights. Lac Long Quan came back, saw how beautiful Au Co was, and turned himself into a handsome young man to go to her; she consented, and he took her away. De Lai returned to find nobody there and sent his men searching everywhere, but Long Quan used his powers to turn into demons, devils, dragons, snakes, tigers and elephants, frightening them until none dared come near. Read closely, this is not a wedding.¹

Au Co then gave birth to a sac. The household took it for an evil omen and threw it out in the fields. Seven days later the sac opened into a hundred eggs, each one a son; the hundred children needed no nursing and grew up on their own. At the parting, Lac Long Quan said to Au Co that he was of the dragon kind and she of the fairy kind, that water and fire destroy one another and they could not stay together long. He took fifty sons back to the water palace and she led fifty onto the land, each side to send word to the other and not forget. Au Co brought her children to Phong Chau, raised the eldest to be king with the title Hung Vuong, and named the country Van Lang.¹

The old chronicles say

The national history changed exactly one character, at the point that matters most: the Toan thu writes that Lac Long Quan married the daughter of De Lai, whose name was Au Co, the original classical Chinese using the character nu, meaning daughter, not concubine. But Ngo Si Lien himself found a snag, and he wrote his unease straight into the book: consulting Chinese works, he 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 wrote: perhaps it was because that age was still wild, and rites and music not yet established, that it was so.²

How later ages remembered

Later readers did not take that sac easily. Reading the passage where Au Co gives birth to a hundred eggs, King Tu Duc wrote in the margin of the Cuong muc that the Book of Odes has the line and then a hundred sons, but that is only praise for having many children; examined closely, it never went that far, how much less a hundred eggs; if it really were so, how would that differ from a beast, could such a thing still be human. In the same work, the pham le moved the annals of Lac Long down into notes below, still recorded in outline, in keeping with the principle that what is doubtful should be transmitted as doubtful.⁴⁵