To Dinh

The old chronicles say

In the books of the Book of the Later Han that deal with this land, his name appears in the main text exactly once, in book 86: a sentence of ten Chinese characters giving his office, his name, and one thing he did. Beyond that sentence there is nothing: no courtesy name, no home town, no post before or after. Even the life of Ma Yuan never names him; his name surfaces there only because the notes of Li Xian copy out the sentence from book 86. Set him beside Nham Dien, with a courtesy name, a home town and a shrine built to him while he lived, and Tich Quang, with a home town and a marquisate, and it is plain: this history writes carefully about the officials it wants to praise.¹⁴

The ten-character sentence comes right after Trung Trac's background: she was very bold and valiant; the governor of Giao Chi, To Dinh, bound her with the law; Trac was angry, and so she rebelled. The word for "bound" literally means stretching a carpenter's ink line to measure — using the law to force someone into line — and the one bound was her, not her husband. The book does not say To Dinh was greedy, does not say he killed anyone, and does not say which side was in the wrong. The Viet su luoc, the earliest surviving Vietnamese history, copied that sentence but added four characters, her actions did not follow the law, putting the fault on her side first and only then coming to the governor using the law.²⁵

Later Vietnamese histories write more about him than the Han history itself does. The fifteenth-century Complete Annals keep the reason of the law and add that Trung Trac held Dinh as her enemy for having killed her husband; among the books compared, this is the first time that is plainly recorded. Ngo Si Lien's comment in the same book speaks of the cruelty of the Han official who held the land. The nineteenth-century Cuong muc records that To Dinh governed with greed and cruelty and killed her husband; the Viet Nam su luoc of 1920 says he was brutal and killed Thi Sach. The official whom the Book of the Later Han records only as using the law grows crueler on the page the later the book.⁶⁷⁸⁹²

How later ages remembered

In 1979 Stephen O'Harrow put forward a hypothesis that turns on land. Local society may have been matrilineal or bilateral, something he himself writes cannot be known for certain; Han settlers came south looking for land, and if land passed down through the women, then to get the land the marriage customs had to be changed to the Han pattern. On that reading, Trung Trac's legal trouble was about her rights over her family's land at Me Linh, and by using Han law to strip her of that land, To Dinh could both break up a block of local power and have land to hand out to his own side. This is his inference, not something the sources record.¹⁰