Giao Chi

The old chronicles say

The Shiji closes the campaign against Nam Viet in four characters — and so made nine commanderies — without naming a single one. The list is in the Han thu: Dam Nhi, Chu Nhai, Nam Hai, Thuong Ngo, Uat Lam, Hop Pho, Giao Chi, Cuu Chan, Nhat Nam. In the Shiji as printed today a reader still finds that list right under the words nine commanderies, but it is a Jijie note of Pei Yin quoting Xu Guang, and Sima Zhen himself added that Xu Guang was relying on the Han thu for all of it. So the name Giao Chi, often credited to the Shiji, in fact comes from the Han thu, by way of two commentators.⁴⁵⁶⁷

The Han thu lists ten districts for Giao Chi, among them Me Linh, Chu Dien, Long Bien and Luy Lau; a lost geography, the Giao Chau ngoai vuc ky, quoted in the Thuy kinh chu, records that Luy Lau was originally the seat of the commandery. Sima Biao's treatise on commanderies, attached to the Book of the Later Han, carries a short note beside the commandery's name: this was the country of An Duong Vuong. Whether the line is Sima Biao's or that of the Liang-dynasty commentator Liu Zhao cannot yet be settled; whoever wrote it, it is a note from between the third century and the sixth, not the words of the Han thu. It tells us that people of that time regarded Giao Chi commandery as the old land of An Duong Vuong.²⁸¹

For each commandery, the Han thu's treatise on geography records households and mouths, as of the year two AD, under Emperor Ping. Giao Chi had 92,440 households and 746,237 mouths. Its mouths alone outnumber those of the other six Viet commanderies put together, which come to only 626,053; Nam Hai, the commandery that held Phien Ngung, the old capital of Nam Viet, had only 94,253 mouths — not even a seventh of Giao Chi. Around the year 140, the second table in Sima Biao's treatise records for Giao Chi only twelve cities and goes straight on to the list of districts; where the households and mouths should be, there is a blank. Anyone who gives a population figure for Giao Chi under the Eastern Han did not take it from this table.²¹

How later ages remembered

Did the registers count real people, or only those who owed tax? In 1979 Stephen O'Harrow, drawing mainly on Hans Bielenstein's analysis, gave the average household across the Han realm as 4.7 people, and argued that this very ordinary figure is the sign that we are dealing with a real census and not just tax rolls. Divide Giao Chi's mouths by its households and you get about eight people to a household; O'Harrow, following Bielenstein, gives the figure for the early Viet population he studied as closer to eight, the highest in the empire. O'Harrow offers a hypothesis: the people here were almost entirely non-Han, and may have lived with more people under one roof. That is an explanation from 1979, reading Bielenstein through O'Harrow, not something the sources record.⁹

The old chronicles say

The Book of the Later Han describes Giao Chi in the voice of its rulers: though commanderies and districts were set up, the language differs from place to place and must be interpreted again and again; afterwards a good many Chinese convicts were settled among them, and only then did they gradually come to know language, and little by little see the civilising power of rites. The governor of Giao Chi under Emperor Ping was Tich Quang; at the end of Wang Mang's time he closed the borders and held out, and early in the Jianwu reign he sent envoys with tribute and was made marquis of Yanshui. The man holding that very seat in the year forty, when the whole region rose, was To Dinh; 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 a sentence of ten characters.¹⁰¹¹