Trieu Quang Phuc

Legend has it

The old text of the Marsh of One Night does not stop where Tien Dung and Chu Dong Tu rise to heaven; it carries on into another war, some five hundred years later. The Liang emperor sent Tran Ba Tien south with an army, Ly Nam De appointed him to resist, and he took his troops and hid in that very marsh. The marsh was wide and deep, its mud hard to march an army into; he used dugout canoes to dart out in raids, seizing supplies to draw the war out and wear the enemy down. For three or four years the two sides never crossed spears. Ba Tien sighed a pun: in the old days it was called the marsh of rising to heaven in one night, now it is the marsh of robbery in one night.¹

The deadlock broke when the Hou Jing revolt came at home, the Liang emperor recalled Ba Tien and left the army to a deputy. He fasted, raised an altar in the middle of the marsh and burned incense in prayer; a divine being came down on a dragon — one version says plainly that it was Chu Dong Tu — and said that where he rose to heaven the power remains, and that since the prayer had been made in earnest he had come to help. Then he drew off a dragon's claw and gave it to him, telling him to fix it to his helmet, and wherever he struck he would win. With it the spirit of his army surged, it broke the Liang force, cut down Ba Tien's deputy on the field, and afterwards he made himself Trieu Viet Vuong.¹

The old chronicles say

He returns in the national history not at the moment of victory but at the moment of losing his country, and returns as a doubt of the chronicler's. Commenting on the crossbow story, Ngo Si Lien wrote that the business of My Chau scattering feathers to mark the road need not have happened at all, since if it happened once would be enough to record it, and yet the daughter of Trieu Viet Vuong is later given the same scene over again in imitation; perhaps the chronicler, seeing that both the Thuc and the Trieu lost their countries through a son-in-law, took one event and told it twice. Then he closed: An Duong Vuong fell because the crossbow's trigger was swapped and Trieu Viet Vuong fell because a claw was taken from his helmet, and this is only borrowed language, making marvels of objects.²

The passage about him is cut from every telling of Chu Dong Tu today, and it is easy to see why: it belongs to another age and another war. But cutting it costs something. The compiler did not regard the Chu Dong Tu story as a closed fairy tale; to him it was a holy place still in working order, and the proof was that five hundred years later it helped a general defend the country. Legend here is treated as a source of power still in use.¹