Lu Gia

The old chronicles say

The Shiji sketches his power through age and marriage: old in years, chancellor under three kings, his clan and the Trieu woven together so tightly they could hardly be pulled apart. Then comes the weightiest line: the Viet trusted him, many served as his eyes and ears, and he held the people's hearts more than the king did. When the king sent a letter up to the Han, he remonstrated again and again, and the king would not listen. The Shiji says he had a mind to rebel, and several times pleaded illness rather than meet the Han envoys — the very move the two kings before him had used on the Son of Heaven.²

The central scene of his life is a banquet with wine in the palace, laid on to borrow the might of the Han envoys to kill him. The Shiji notes even the seating: the envoys faced east, the queen dowager south, the king north, Lu Gia and the high ministers west; his younger brother, a general, had troops encamped outside the palace. When the wine had gone round once, the queen dowager asked why the chancellor kept insisting that becoming part of the Han was not to their good, meaning to provoke the envoys to anger. The envoys hesitated, each waiting on the others, and none dared to act. Lu Gia rose and walked out; the queen dowager wanted to take a spear to him, and the king stopped her.²

After that he rebelled and sent an order out to the whole country. The proclamation, which the Shiji records verbatim, charges the queen dowager with concrete things: she was a woman of China, lived in lewdness with the envoy, meant to present the treasures of the former kings to the Son of Heaven and to lead many people off to Truong An to be sold as bond-servants, with no thought for the altars of the Trieu clan. He and his brother led troops that killed the king, the queen dowager and the Han envoys, then set up the eldest son of Minh Vuong by his Viet wife, the marquis of Thuat Duong, Kien Duc. The two thousand Han troops sent south were wiped out by the Viet forty li short of Phien Ngung.²

In 111 BC the Han army reached Phien Ngung; Lu Gia and Kien Duc were holding out inside the city. When it was set on fire, the two of them fled by night with a few hundred followers, out to sea. Phuc Ba questioned the nobles who had surrendered, only then learned where Lu Gia had gone, and sent men after him. The man who captured him was a Viet palace gentleman named Do Ke, who was made Marquis of Lam Thai. In his closing verdict, Sima Qian calls him neither a traitor nor a loyal minister: Lu Gia held to a small loyalty, and left Da with no one to carry on his line.²⁴

How later ages remembered

Later verdicts on him split. A eulogy by Sima Zhen under the Tang, printed right after Sima Qian's verdict, calls him savage and perverse. In the Complete Annals, Le Van Huu praises him first: he urged the king and the queen dowager not to become vassal lords of the Han, which may be called knowing how to value the country of Viet; then turns it round: he killed his own king to vent a private grudge and could not hold the country, so even death would not wipe out his crime. Ngo Si Lien puts the root elsewhere: the disaster of Ai Vuong, though Lu Gia brought it about, had its seed in Queen Cu — though he still counts Lu Gia, with Minh Vuong and Ai Vuong, among those who did not know the principles of the Spring and Autumn.⁵⁶⁷