Ngo Si Lien

The old chronicles say

The most visible thing about his method is that he did not hide his source. Setting down the line that Kinh Duong Vuong married the daughter of the Lord of Dongting, he added a note: consulting a history of the Tang dynasty, it records that in the time of Kinh Duong there was a woman herding goats who called herself the youngest daughter of the Lord of Dongting, who married the second son of the Kinh Xuyen clan, was cast aside, and had to ask a man named Lieu Nghi to carry a letter back to her father. Then he concluded that the Kinh Xuyen clan and the Dongting clan had long been intermarrying, generation after generation. He brought that tale in to shore up the story, treating it as evidence.³

With legend he was wary. Thanh Giong and Son Tinh and Thuy Tinh get a few lines each, and as soon as they are down he remarks that the matter is monstrous and absurd, and that to believe books is worse than having no books at all. More telling is where he says nothing at all: read through the whole first book of the Outer Annals, from Kinh Duong Vuong to the end of An Duong Vuong, and there is not one word of Lang Lieu or the two rice cakes. The best-known Tet story of the Vietnamese draws no remark from him, because there is no story there to remark upon.⁴

The comment he wrote immediately after the crossbow story shows a man who doubted selectively. His opening line asks straight out whether the story of the golden turtle is to be believed, and he answers himself that spirits descending and a stone that speaks may well be. What he rejects is one detail only: the business of My Chau scattering feathers to mark the road need not have happened at all. His reason is a point about texts, not about miracles — if it happened, 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. His guess was that the chronicler, seeing that both the Thuc and the Trieu lost their countries through a son-in-law, took one event and told it twice.¹

He closes the comment with a line worth reading slowly. The histories say An Duong Vuong fell because the crossbow's trigger was swapped, and Trieu Viet Vuong fell because a claw was taken from his helmet; this is only borrowed language, making marvels of objects. Holding a country and resisting invaders has a way of its own: he who has the way is helped by many and rises, he who loses it is helped by few and falls, and it is not because of these things. The official historian of Dai Viet, on the very page where he had just written down the golden turtle, says that the crossbow is not why the country was lost.¹

How later ages remembered

That warning has almost never travelled with the story. He deliberately set it beside the page he had just written, saying the crossbow tale should not be read as the explanation for a lost country; but for six hundred years what has been passed on is the golden turtle, the goose down and the sword stroke, while the comment has almost never been passed on at all. The version we know today keeps the grief and drops the politics.¹