Sima Qian

The old chronicles say

He lived alongside people who had seen Nam Viet, so his chapter has names, letters, dates, even Trieu Da's own words in his defence. Yet his main text does not tell of Trieu Da attacking Au Lac. In his closing verdict, on Au Lac he writes just four characters: Au Lac fought among themselves, and Nam Viet was shaken — Au Lac fighting among themselves, not Nam Viet attacking Au Lac.¹

His closing verdict on Nam Viet opens with six characters: Uy Da became king, and the root of it was Nham Ngao. Read closely, the main text shows the idea of founding a kingdom was not Trieu Da's but that of a dying man who passed it to him; the verdict does not let that slip by. It closes on the war of 111 BC: the kingdom was lost in the end, and the omen began with the woman of the Cu clan; Lu Gia held to a small loyalty, and left Da with no one to carry on his line. Then he faults Lau Thuyen as slack, arrogant and astray, praises Phuc Ba for turning misfortune into good fortune, and ends: the turns between success and failure are like a braided cord.¹²

How later ages remembered

Not every word in the Shiji as printed today is his. The familiar story of the Lac king, An Duong Vuong and Uy Da's defeat of An Duong Vuong lies in the Suoyin note of Sima Zhen, a Tang writer of the eighth century, some nine hundred years after the main text. Right after his own verdict, the printed book also carries a eulogy written by Sima Zhen; it is easy to take it for more of Sima Qian, but it is not — and that eulogy calls Lu Gia savage and perverse, where Sima Qian had written that Lu Gia held to a small loyalty.³⁴