Hat Mon

How later ages remembered

Later generations remembered the three years of Queen Trung through temples. The Complete Annals, after recording that the Han army went home, note that the people of the region loved Queen Trung and built a temple to worship her; a note adds that the temple is in Hat Giang commune, Phuc Loc district, and that there is one too on the old site of the citadel of Phien Ngung. The Nguyen court's Cuong muc notes the temple as being in Hat Mon commune, Phuc Tho district. In 1920 Tran Trong Kim's Viet Nam su luoc noted that at Hat Mon village and on the Dong Nhan flats a festival is held on the sixth day of the second month.³¹⁴

Today, according to the official heritage page — a secondary source, not a historical document — the Hat Mon temple holds its festival on the sixth day of the third lunar month, out of step with the sixth day of the second month that the Viet Nam su luoc gave in 1920; when that date changed has not yet been traced. The page says plainly that it draws on the village's own book of sacred records: there is a Mound of the Hidden Seal, where by tradition the sisters hid their seal of office, and an Oath Altar with a stone pillar carved with the oath — but the page does not print the oath itself. A seal, the kind of thing that gives a dynasty its shape, lives in the village's sacred records, not in the old histories.²⁴