Cuu Chan

The old chronicles say

The life of Nham Dien, in the Book of the Later Han's chapter on good officials, describes the land he was sent to in one sentence: the custom of Cuu Chan is to live by hunting; they do not know how to plough with oxen, and the people must always buy grain from Giao Chi, and are constantly in want. Nham Dien, summoned to be governor early in the Jianwu reign, had them cast farm tools and taught them to clear new land; the fields spread wider every year, and the people had enough to eat. Read closely, it does not say they did not know how to farm: it says they did not plough with oxen, and bought grain from Giao Chi, so right next door people were already growing grain to sell.⁵

The second deed is stranger still. The book says the Lac Viet people have no rites or rules of marriage, and know nothing of father and son, or husband and wife. The governor sent letters down to the districts ordering that men from twenty to fifty and women from fifteen to forty should all be matched to one another by age; officials cut their own salaries to help those too poor for betrothal gifts. More than two thousand people married at one time, and many named their children Nham. Dien held office for four years before he was summoned back, and the officials and people of Cuu Chan built a shrine to him while he still lived. The passage does not say what those two thousand and more people thought as they were paired off by age.⁵

The household table for the year two in the Han thu's treatise on geography gives Cuu Chan 35,743 households and 166,013 mouths, about four and a half people to a household, no different from the general level; the oddity lies next door in Giao Chi, not here. A second table, in the treatise on commanderies by Sima Biao of the Jin attached to the Book of the Later Han, records the situation around the year 140: Cuu Chan has 46,513 households and 209,894 mouths, more than in the year two. The same treatise measures the road from the capital at Luoyang down to Cuu Chan as 11,580 li.³¹

Giao Chi was quiet, but Ma Yuan did not go home yet. His biography in the Book of the Later Han records that he took more than two thousand tower ships, large and small, and more than twenty thousand fighting men against the remnants of Trung Trac's followers in Cuu Chan — Do Duong and his band — from Vo Cong to Cu Phong, beheading and capturing more than five thousand people; the passage closes with four characters: south of the passes, all was pacified. Li Xian's note explains that Vo Cong and Cu Phong were two districts of Cuu Chan commandery, and that Cu Phong is now Ai Chau — the now there being the Tang dynasty's.⁶²