Trong Thuy

The old chronicles say

The oldest text calls him only Thuy and gives him a plain errand: Nam Viet sent its crown prince, named Thuy, to submit and serve the king as a vassal. What he does there is unlike today's telling. Thuy asked My Chau to fetch her father's crossbow for him to look at; having seen it, he secretly sawed it through and fled home to report to the Nam Viet king. Nam Viet advanced, the king drew the crossbow, it broke, he lost. The weapon is destroyed rather than exchanged — and in this version he coaxes nobody, since she had acted first.¹

The Viet su luoc changes his standing: Trieu Da — the book calls him Emperor Vu — sent his son Thuy as a hostage, asking for friendly relations, not to submit. Here Thuy coaxed My Chau into showing him the crossbow and broke its mechanism. Neither early text has him marrying into the household, neither has a parting scene, and neither has a well. And before Thuy acts at all, the book records something else: the king's treatment of Cao Lo grew thin, and Cao Lo left.²

The name Trong and the familiar way of ruining the bow both belong to the Complete Annals: there he secretly damages the trigger and puts another in its place, and there is a parting scene with the promise of the goose-down quilt. That version also gives him an ending the two early texts do not have: he carries his wife's body back to the Snail Citadel to bury it, then throws himself down a well, leaving behind the story that pearls from the eastern sea shine brighter when washed in its water. Four hundred years later, when the Cuong muc took the golden turtle out of the main text, his swapping of the trigger stayed in.³⁴