Lang Lieu

Legend has it

After the Yin army had been defeated and the country was at peace, the king assembled his quan lang — his twenty-two sons — and set the task. It was not the vague find something good to eat but something more precise: whoever could meet his wish, find rare and delicious things, and at the year's end offer them to the former kings so as to fulfil filial duty would be given the throne. Two conditions, not one. The man who edited the book in the fifteenth century read exactly that in it: in his preface of 1492, Vu Quynh runs through the tales one by one, and of this one he writes a single short line, that the tale of the steamed cake praises the nurture of one's parents.¹⁴

The words of the god in the dream are far less otherworldly than we tend to imagine. The god grants no miracle; the god says something about food: of all the things of heaven and earth, none is more precious to people than rice, rice feeds people and makes them strong, one never tires of eating it, and no other thing comes before it. Only then the instruction: take glutinous rice and make cakes, some square, some round, to figure the shapes of heaven and earth, wrap them in leaves and place delicacies in the middle, to signify the weight of a parent's care. A god appears in a dream to say that the most precious thing on earth is rice — that is the dream of a rice-growing country.¹

In the old book the round cake is not called banh giay. The cake wrapped in green leaves in a square shape, with delicacies inside, is explained as figuring heaven and earth enclosing all creatures, and because it is boiled until done it is called the steamed cake — chung here means to boil or steam. The other is glutinous rice steamed, pounded until smooth and shaped round to figure heaven, and therefore called bac tri binh; nothing in the characters of the book answers to the sound giay. The tidy reading that square is earth and round is heaven is only half right: the original has the round cake figuring heaven, but the square one figuring heaven and earth enclosing all creatures.¹

No popular telling today keeps the ending of the old text. Immediately after the throne is given, the book sets down two explanations: because the cakes were bound to the name Lang Lieu, the custom of using them at the feasts of the year came to be called Tiet Lieu; and the twenty-one brothers divided the frontier posts between them, and later the commanders quarrelled over precedence and each raised a wooden palisade to shield himself — from which came the words sach, thon, trang and phuong for the places where people live. The book also records that from then on people took those cakes to serve their parents at each seasonal feast, and all the world has imitated it down to the present day; the present day there is around the fourteenth century.¹

The old chronicles say

For other stories the official history at least set down a few lines and then remarked that the matter was monstrous; for this one there is no remark, because there is no story to remark upon. Read through the whole first book of the Outer Annals of the Le dynasty history, from Kinh Duong Vuong to the end of An Duong Vuong, and there is not one word of him or of the two cakes; in the Nguyen dynasty history the Hung kings are reduced to a short genealogy, and there is nothing there either. The best-known Tet story of the Vietnamese was never taken into the official record, and lived very well without it — better than many stories that did make it in.²³