Person
Tan Thuy Hoang
The Qin ruler who swallowed the six states in 221 BC and then sent armies into Lingnan; the annals record the taking of the south in the same clause as the driving back of the Xiongnu in the north.
At a glance
- Dates
- His thirty-third year falls in 214 BC — where the Records of the Grand Historian place the founding of the three commanderies in Lingnan. He died in his thirty-seventh year; the entry for the year Tan Mao in the Complete Annals glosses it wrongly as the First Emperor's seventeenth, on the very line that records his death12
- Role
- The Qin ruler at the time the armies came down into Lingnan. Under his thirty-third year the Records of the Grand Historian set down that men who had once absconded, men living in their wives' households and merchants were raised to take the land of Luc Luong, which was made into Que Lam, Tuong Quan and Nam Hai, with convicts sent out to garrison it; the same sentence records the driving back of the Xiongnu in the north-west1
- End
- The Huainanzi passage on the southern campaign does not stop at the defeat: men could not till, women could not spin, the weak fell dead in the road, the sick went untended and 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 Yue3
Life
The old chronicles say
The Chinese history closest in time to the Qin gives the whole taking of the south a single sentence, records it as an administrative matter already concluded, and puts it on the same line as the driving back of the Xiongnu in the north-west. Nor is the army in that sentence a picked force: men who had once absconded, men living in their wives' households, and merchants. The phrase worth stopping at is that last but one — under Qin law these were a despised class, young men with no property who went to live in the wife's family, and the Vietnamese translation of the Complete Annals glosses them bluntly as a blemish, a growth on the body, so much surplus flesh. These are the people the Qin state wanted sent far away.12
The text that gives the war its numbers is not a history. The Huainanzi opens its passage on the Yue lands with the reason for going, and the reason is very concrete: the Qin coveted the rhinoceros horn, the elephant tusks, the kingfisher feathers and the pearls of the Yue — not the widening of borders, not the putting down of a revolt, but goods. The figure of five hundred thousand then appears twice in that same passage, once for the wall against the Xiongnu in the north and once for Do Thu in the south; and for the northern one the Records of the Grand Historian give a different number altogether: Meng Tian took three hundred thousand.35
How later ages remembered
The Complete Annals place the southern campaign inside the reign of An Duong Vuong, in the year Dinh Hoi, his forty-fourth year, and note beside it the thirty-third year of the First Emperor of Qin — exactly where the Records of the Grand Historian put the founding of the three commanderies. One fairly common Vietnamese translation instead prints the thirty-first year, 216 BC, two years out; but the cyclical year in the original refutes it on its own, since An Duong Vuong came to the throne in a Giap Thin year, his forty-fourth year is therefore Dinh Hoi, and Dinh Hoi falls in 214 BC. The two-year gap between the Vietnamese and Chinese histories here does not exist: it is a misprint in a translation.21
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