Tiet Tong

The old chronicles say

Tiet Tong had fled the disorders to Giao Chau as a young man, and later served as governor of Hop Pho and then of Giao Chi. When Lu Dai was recalled, he feared the successor would not be equal to the post, and so he sent up a memorial. Chen Shou copied it in full into the Tam quoc chi, which makes it a text on assimilation written by a man who was part of it. The Complete Annals place the memorial in the year Tan Hoi, that is, 231.³²

He tells the history of civilising the land from the beginning: their tongues differ, and they can be understood only through several interpreters in turn; the people are like beasts, tie their hair in mallet-shaped knots, go barefoot, and wear clothes pulled on over the head, fastened on the left; then a good many Chinese convicts were moved there to live among them, and little by little the people were made to learn their letters. Then came Tich Quang and Nham Dien, teaching ploughing and harrowing, making the people wear caps and shoes, appointing officials to arrange marriages, founding schools. He concludes: from then until now, more than four hundred years, and by now there is some resemblance. The Siku quanshu editors of the eighteenth century noted at the end of the book that from Tich Quang and Nham Dien to that time was not yet three hundred years, and that the figure was probably a mistake.³⁴

He tells what he saw from the time he first arrived: in two districts, Me Linh in Giao Chi and Do Bang in Cuu Chan, when an elder brother dies, the younger brother takes his brother’s wife; this had been the custom for generation after generation, and the officials could not stop it. Then comes the harshest line of the whole memorial: speaking of it this way, they may be called insects, with nothing human about them but the face. Yet the same memorial says that the court, by his account, values the rare things it can bring back from far away — precious gems, aromatics, ivory, rhinoceros horn, tortoiseshell, coral, peacocks — and has no need to count on the taxes of that land.³

He also lists the crimes of corrupt officials: Chu Nhai was abandoned because its chief official, finding the people’s hair beautiful, shaved it off to make wigs; a governor of Cuu Chan beat his officer of merit to death and was shot dead with poisoned arrows by troops the dead man’s younger brother led against him, and Si Nhiep took an army to attack but in the end could not win; the inspector Chu Phu forced heavy taxes on the people, and the common people, resentful, rose in revolt. The Complete Annals and the Cuong muc copy the memorial but leave out exactly the contemptuous lines — beasts, mallet-shaped hair knots, clothes pulled on over the head, the brother’s wife, insects — while the lines listing the crimes of officials are kept whole. The books do not say why.³²¹