Tien Dung

Legend has it

The old text opens with her, not with Chu Dong Tu: the Hung line had passed to its third reign, and a daughter was born, named Tien Dung My Nuong, eighteen years old, of fine appearance, who did not want a husband and cared only for travelling. She went about the whole country and the king did not stop her; each year around the second and third months she would fit out boats and float out to sea, so happy she forgot to come back. A princess of the Hung age travelling for months each year with boats and a retinue of her own, and her father letting her be — that detail is in a text of the fourteenth century, not an addition by someone of our own time.¹

Her boat put in at the bank and her attendants drew a curtain around a clump of reeds for her to bathe; the water poured down, the sand washed away, and a man buried in a hollow of sand was revealed. She thought a long while and said: I never wished to marry, and now I meet this person, both of us bare in one hollow of sand — this is heaven's arrangement. Her father's reaction the original softens not at all: Tien Dung has not spared her good name, has not valued what is mine, has roamed the roads and lowered herself to marry a poor man — with what face can she come before me. She heard of it, and did not dare go home.¹

Cast off by her father, she did not withdraw into hiding but went into business. The two opened a landing market, put up shops and stalls, traded with the people, and it grew into a large market whose foreign merchants honoured them as its masters. When a rich man proposed putting up one dat of gold to go out to sea for precious goods and have ten the next year, she was delighted, and said to her husband that heaven had joined them and their food and clothing were heaven's gift, so let them take the gold and send their household men out to sea to trade and make their living so. A story of immortals, discussing a tenfold return.¹

When the Hung king took it for his daughter's rebellion and marched against her, his officers asked to divide the troops and hold her off, and she laughed: this is not my doing, it is heaven's sending; life and death rest with heaven, and how should I dare resist my father; I shall take what is right and leave myself to be put to death. The royal army camped at Tu Nhien bank, still across the great river, and night fell before it could cross. At midnight a great wind rose, flinging sand and tearing up trees, and the army fell into confusion; the citadel and all who followed her rose into the sky at once, and the ground sank into a great marsh. The people built a shrine and called the marsh the Marsh of One Night.¹