Thuy Tinh

Legend has it

He lost by a single day, in a race the old text describes very briefly. The king set the condition that whoever brought the betrothal gifts first would have her; the next day Son Tinh brought precious jade, gold and silver, mountain birds and forest beasts, and the king consented. The bride price of an elephant with nine tusks, a cockerel with nine spurs and a horse with nine red manes that every schoolchild knows is not in the original — that was added by a later age, and added so well that it turns a race to deliver gifts into a riddle all but impossible to solve. In the old text he is simply the one who arrived late.¹

His anger is described as a proper campaign. He raised the waters; Son Tinh stretched a fishing net across the river; he then opened another branch of the river to come round behind the mountain, and opened a further branch to attack the front. Against him stood a whole countryside: the people at the foot of the mountain wove bamboo screens for cover, beat drums and shouted to lend their strength, and loosed arrows when they saw scum and twigs drifting outside the screens. His troops showed what they were when they died — the corpses of dragons, snakes, fish and soft-shelled turtles floated up and filled the river.¹

The most important sentence in the whole tale comes just after the battle, and explains the tale itself: every year around the seventh and eighth months the waters usually rise, and the people living near the foot of the mountain mostly suffer high winds and flooding, and their rice is ruined; it has been handed down that this is Thuy Tinh and Son Tinh contending to marry My Nuong. There is no need to wait for a modern scholar to read the story as a memory of the Red River flood season — the fourteenth-century text says so outright. He is the farmer's answer to the question of why the water rises every year just as the rice is about to be harvested.¹