Person
Luu An
The Han prince of Huainan whose name stands on the Huainanzi. He set down the Qin defeat in the Yue lands while arguing that his own emperor should not march south.
At a glance
- Also known as
- The texts call him Luu An, prince of Huainan; the book his retainers put together carries the name Huainanzi1
- Dates
- The Huainanzi was presented to the Han emperor around 139 BC, some seventy or eighty years after the Qin had already fallen; some four years later he sent up a further memorial against a campaign in Man Viet21
- Role
- The Han prince of Huainan whose name stands on the Huainanzi, put together by his retainers. The passage on the Yue lands in that book is the one place carrying the five hundred thousand men, the five armies, the three years in armour and the death of Commandant Do Thu; it was written to argue the Han emperor out of war in the south, with the Qin as its example2
- Earliest record
- His memorial against the campaign in Man Viet is copied whole into the Han shu at book 64 part one, in the life of Nghiem Tro1
Life
The old chronicles say
The passage in his book was written to do a very specific job. It opens with the reason for going — the Qin coveted the rhinoceros horn, the elephant tusks, the kingfisher feathers and the pearls of the Yue — and it does not stop at the Yue victory: men could not till, women could not spin, the weak fell dead in the road, the sick went untended, the dead unburied, then Chen Sheng rose in revolt and the Qin lost the empire. The closing line is that the disaster lay in guarding against the Hu while coveting the Yue. A large number in the service of an argument has to be read differently from a number in a ledger.2
Some four years later the same man sent the Han emperor a memorial against a campaign in Man Viet, and told this same war in an entirely different voice. It opens with five words worth noticing: your servant has heard the elders say — that is, the man whose name stands on the Huainanzi, when addressing his emperor, files the story under hearsay. Then he tells it: in the time of Qin, Commandant Do Thu was sent to strike the Yue and Giam Loc to cut a canal and open a road; the Yue fled deep into the mountains and forests and could not be attacked; the army stayed on holding empty ground, the days drew out, the soldiers wore down, the Yue came out and struck, and the Qin army was heavily broken.1
The memorial under his own signature has no five hundred thousand, no five armies, no three years in armour, and no killing of Do Thu. One man, a few years apart, on the same events: the version handed to an emperor is cautious and admits it is hearsay; the version in his book has the round numbers, the five-army deployment and a commander's corpse. A test of scale is available from the sources themselves: in 111 BC, when the Han destroyed Nam Viet, the overseer of Que Lam commandery brought the whole of Au Lac over, and the Han shu gives more than four hundred thousand mouths — the entire population of the region, a century later, still smaller than the army the Qin are said to have marched south.13
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