Thanh Giong

Legend has it

The oldest text does not begin with the mother but with the king. The Hung King, trusting in the wealth of his country, dropped the rite of attendance at the northern court, and the Yin king used an inspection tour as his pretext to invade. The king asked his officials whether to fight or to hold, and a diviner advised praying to Long Quan for secret help. After three days of fasting and prayer at an altar, thunder rolled and there appeared an old man more than nine feet tall, square-faced and big-bellied, his brows and beard snow-white, sitting at a crossroads laughing and singing, who foretold that the invaders would come. That was three years before it happened: the child of Giong was no sudden miracle but a promise the court had waited out exactly three years.¹

The point where the old text differs most from today's telling is his clothing. The king sent for iron and had fifty catties smelted into a horse, a sword and a hat; but the child grew too fast, and though the neighbours brought buffalo and wine, cakes and fruit, his belly was never filled. Then comes the part few people know: cloth, brocade and cotton were not enough to cover him, so that reed flowers had to be joined together to clothe his body. Reed flowers, not iron armour. The familiar telling raises up a divine general gleaming with iron from head to foot; the old version gives a child a whole village cannot sew a coat for, wrapped for the moment in the grass that grows along the riverbank.¹

The old chronicles say

The official histories record the story very guardedly. The Le dynasty history places it in the Hong Bang section yet never names the enemy as Yin: it says only that there was an alarm in the country, and then tells how the child asked for an iron horse and an iron rod and went out to fight. The name Yin sits in the folk collection, not in the story the court historians chose to record. Ngo Si Lien said outright that stories of this kind are monstrous and strange, quoting the ancients: to believe everything in books is worse than having no books at all. By the Nguyen dynasty history the story has vanished altogether.²³

The name Yin is itself a problem. The Yin, that is the Shang, were a real dynasty in China, lasting from about the sixteenth to the eleventh century BC, but they were seated in the Yellow River basin; no source shows them ever marching an army as far down as what is now northern Vietnam, and the distance lies well beyond the reach of a Bronze Age state in north China. The name was most likely fixed on by later generations for an enemy who had none, and that the national history itself does not use it is all the more reason for caution. Even so, finding no source is not the same as being certain there was none.²

How later ages remembered

The opening best known today — the mother going out to the fields, stepping into a giant footprint and conceiving — is not in the old written version; there the opening is Long Quan appearing to give warning three years ahead. This is not a matter of right and wrong: folk tales live by being retold, each retelling adding and dropping a little, and the giant footprint is a fine and ancient motif found in many cultures. The only thing worth saying is that when we say legend has it, we ought to know which telling we mean.¹