Person
Ngo Thi Si
The eighteenth-century historian who argued that the Kinh Duong Vuong genealogy grew out of a misreading of a Tang-dynasty tale. Not to be confused with Ngo Si Lien.
At a glance
- Dates
- An eighteenth-century historian, three centuries after Ngo Si Lien; no birth or death year is given, and no year for the compiling of Dai Viet su ky tien bien1
- Role
- The first to say outright that the whole Kinh Duong Vuong genealogy was wild and reckless invention, fit to be thrown out — and he did not stop at rejecting it, but named the mechanism of the error1
Life
The old chronicles say
In Dai Viet su ky tien bien he wrote that the whole genealogical passage joining the Vietnamese up to Than Nong was wild and reckless invention, fit to be thrown out. Then he traced the route the error had taken: the fault lies with meddlers who read the tale of Lieu Nghi, saw in it that the daughter of the Dongting king was married to the second son of Kinh Xuyen, and recklessly took Kinh Xuyen to be Kinh Duong. Once there is a husband and wife there must be fathers and sons, rulers and subjects, and from that they embroidered a text to fill out the count of reigns; then the historians took it up and used it, believing it to be fact.1
The sharpness of that criticism lies not in the words wild and reckless but in his being able to rebuild the whole chain: a Tang tale of the marvellous, a careless reader, a stretch of embroidery to fill out the count of reigns, and then, in the hands of the court historians, a fact. He also left a question nobody has yet answered neatly — what sort of name is Xich Quy, to be used as the name of a country?1
He is the first link in a chain of three doubts spread over three hundred years. He laid out the mechanism in the eighteenth century; by the middle of the nineteenth, the Nguyen dynasty's National History Office, compiling Cuong muc, moved the two annals of Kinh Duong and Lac Long down into notes, on the grounds that the matter was shrouded in obscurity with truly no reliable evidence for it; and in 1920 Tran Trong Kim opened his Hong Bang chapter with the words according to what is handed down, then put a question mark himself right after the figure 2879 BC. All three came before any of today's scholarly arguments began.123
Mentioned in
- Episode 2Kinh Duong Vuong and the Line of Than Nong10 min
- Episode 4The Hung Kings' Commemoration: From Village Festival to National Rite12 min
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