My Chau

The old chronicles say

In the oldest text she is not deceived. The original says: An Duong Vuong had a daughter named My Chau, and seeing that Thuy was handsome, she took him as her lover. Thuy asked her to fetch her father's crossbow for him to look at; having seen it, he secretly sawed it through and fled home to report to the Nam Viet king. She is the one who acts in the affair, and the one who brings the crossbow out, but the ruining of it is done behind her back. This version has no golden turtle, no goose down, no sword stroke, no pearls.¹

The Viet su luoc is briefer still, and still has no turtle: My Chau went to Thuy, and Thuy coaxed her into showing him the crossbow and broke its mechanism. The difference between the two early texts is how the weapon is ruined — sawn through in one, its mechanism broken in the other — and in neither is it exchanged. Both keep something today's telling drops: the man who made the crossbow walks away because the king treats him badly, before the bow ever breaks.³¹

Every detail we know arrives together in the Complete Annals. There Trong Thuy secretly damages the trigger and puts another in its place rather than sawing, and a parting scene is added: she says she has a brocade quilt lined with goose down, and will pull down from it and drop it at the forks in the road so her husband can follow. Then the final scene, the one every modern telling keeps: the golden turtle surfaces and shouts that the one seated behind him on that horse is the enemy; the king kills his daughter; she prays to become a pearl to wash away the disgrace; her blood runs into the water and the oysters drink it until it turns to pearl.⁴

The part almost no popular telling mentions is that Ngo Si Lien doubted the goose down himself. He does not reject the whole cluster — spirits descending, a stone that speaks, such things may well be — but writes that the business of My Chau scattering feathers to mark the road need not have happened at all, since once would be enough to record it, and yet the daughter of Trieu Viet Vuong is later given the same scene over again in imitation. Four hundred years later the Cuong muc does the reverse: it keeps the goose-down promise in the main text and pushes the golden turtle down into a note, closed off with seven words — the matter is absurd, it is now expunged.²⁵