Mai Thuc Loan

The old chronicles say

The earliest record among those opened, one sentence in the basic annals of the Old Book of Tang, is only a dispatch: the inspecting commissioner of Linh Nam, Bui Tru Tien, reported that the bandit chief of An Nam, Mai Thuc Loan, was attacking and besieging prefectures and districts, and the court sent Duong Tu Huc to attack him. No Black Emperor, no count of troops, no allied state. That title, together with the plot with Lam Ap and Chan Lap and the capture of the seat of the An Nam protectorate, sits in Duong Tu Huc's own biography, in the Biographies of Eunuchs of the same history — a longer telling, and a different one.¹²

A hundred and fifteen years later, the biography of Duong Tu Huc in the New Book of Tang makes everything grow: he raised the troops of thirty-two prefectures, allied abroad with Lam Ap and Chan Lap and now also the state of Kim Lan, his army claimed at four hundred thousand. Among the Chinese histories opened for this event, all three details are found only here, and the book does not say where they came from. Before the figure of four hundred thousand, the original uses the very character it used for the title Black Emperor — hieu, meaning styled, claimed, going by the name of — so the writer himself marked it as a nominal figure, not a number anyone counted. The basic annals of the same book put the event in the seventh month, where the basic annals of the Old Book of Tang give the eighth.³⁸¹

Sima Guang had read the story of the Black Emperor, the alliance with Lam Ap and Chan Lap and the capture of the protectorate, and deliberately left them out of the Tongjian's main text — his Kaoyi note says he followed the Basic Annals, though it does not make clear which. The An Nam chi luoc of Le Tac, compiled around 1335, and Ngo Si Lien's Complete Annals, of 1479, both give an army claimed at three hundred thousand, not four hundred thousand; the thirty-two prefectures and the state of Kim Lan drop away. The Complete Annals call the protector-general who went with Duong Tu Huc Nguyen So Khach; the Cuong muc later notes that the old history's Nguyen is a mistake.¹¹⁵⁶⁷

How later ages remembered

The Nguyen court historians who compiled the Cuong muc did not believe those figures. Respectfully examined, they wrote: in the Kaiyuan era the An Nam protectorate governed twelve prefectures and fifty-nine districts, and of the protectorate and the prefectures of Phong, Ai, Luc and Dien none is heard of as having been lost, so how could Thuc Loan have raised the troops of thirty-two prefectures, with an army claimed at four hundred thousand? They ventured to think that he held one prefecture and his strength was slight, and that Tu Huc and So Khach inflated the bandits' strength in hope of reward. The argument has a gap: it does not mention the words attacked and took the seat of the An Nam protectorate in the Old Book of Tang's biography of Duong Tu Huc — words that run directly against its claim that the protectorate was never lost.¹²²

A specific home village for him, and a different explanation for his title, are recorded in a nineteenth-century note in the Cuong muc, citing no source: he came from Mai Phu, in Hoan prefecture; he had dark skin, so the people of the prefecture called him the Black Emperor — quite unlike the earliest record, where the Old Book of Tang says he styled himself so. The two explanations stand side by side, and the texts give no way to choose. Earlier, in 1821, the Dai Nam thuc luc already had the temple of Mai Hac De at Huong Lam, Nghe An, in its list of temples of emperors and kings the Nguyen court offered sacrifices to. The man the Chinese histories called a bandit chief, and whom the Complete Annals copied down under that same word, had by the early nineteenth century been placed by a Vietnamese dynasty among its emperors and kings.⁷¹⁰