Le Tac

How later ages remembered

On the oath of Ma Yuan's bronze pillar, the An Nam chi luoc opens with it has come down from of old, then records that if the bronze pillar breaks, Giao Chi will be destroyed, and that the people of Giao, passing by, throw tiles and stones at it. The episode on the pillar sets it at the end of a chain: in 1178, Zhou Qufei's Linh ngoai dai dap opens with I hear: every Annamese who passes by lays down a stone, because by the oath, if the bronze pillar pushes up out of the ground, Giao Chi will be destroyed; in the thirteenth century the Phuong du thang lam copied it with the word changed: if the bronze pillar breaks, the people of Giao will be destroyed.⁴⁵⁶

On Lady Trieu, he places her — under the name Trieu Au — in the section headed Rebels, alongside Trung Trac and Ly Bi: a girl of Quan Ninh district in Cuu Chan, her breasts three feet long and slung over her back, riding on an elephant's head to fight; the regional inspector of Giao Chau killed her. Among the books examined for that episode, this is the earliest place with the figure of three feet and the detail of slinging them over her back, exactly as the later Vietnamese histories would use them. The young men of the earlier versions have vanished, and the ending is harsher: the older version says the inspector put her down; this one says he killed her.⁷

On Trieu Quang Phuc, the An Nam chi luoc follows the account of the Chinese histories closely: Ly Bi is pursued to the Khuat Lao grotto and beheaded, his head is sent to the capital, and then the rest of his troops, who were besieging Ai Chau, are put down. That passage goes straight from Ly Bi's death to the mopping-up of his remaining forces, and leaves no room for any standoff in a marsh. Together with the Viet su luoc, these are the two fourteenth-century Vietnamese books that are silent about him, just as the Complete Annals themselves admit that the old histories do not record him.²

On the events of 602, the An Nam chi luoc records them exactly in the words of the Sui history. The episode sets it beside two Vietnamese histories: the Complete Annals put the Nha Lang story in the main text, but the compiler's note says that part is taken from unofficial histories; the Viet su luoc, the earlier of the two, has no Dao Lang Vuong, no Nha Lang, and no annal of the Later Ly Nam De.²⁸⁹

On Mai Thuc Loan, among the books opened, the An Nam chi luoc is the earliest one to name him: the chieftain Mai Thuc Loan rebelled, styled the Black Emperor, allied abroad with Lam Ap and Chan Lap, his army claimed at three hundred thousand, and occupied An Nam. Three hundred thousand, not the four hundred thousand of the New Book of Tang; the thirty-two prefectures and the state of Kim Lan have dropped away. On the Tang side it is still Duong Tu Huc together with the Protector-General Quang So Khach, following Ma Yuan's old road, breaking the bandits utterly, heaping the corpses into a kinh quan. About a hundred and forty years later, the Complete Annals' army claimed at three hundred thousand follows this book, not the New Book of Tang.¹¹⁰

On the siege of 791, the An Nam chi luoc, 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. There is no name Phung Hung. The episode cites the book to show that not every Vietnamese writer on the year 791 used the name Phung Hung; among the histories compared there, the name Phung Hung appears only in the Complete Annals and the Cuong muc.³