Place
Lake Dongting
A large lake in northern Hunan, China, over 1,100 km from the Red River delta; the old histories have Kinh Duong Vuong marry its dragon king's daughter.
At a glance
- Location
- In the north of Hunan province, China; the name Hunan means literally south of the lake, and it is this lake the province is named against. The Cuong muc describes it as wedged between two lakes, in fact to the north of the land of the Bach Viet. From the lake down to Viet Tri, where legend places the capital of Van Lang, is more than 1,100 kilometres as the crow flies, across the whole mountain country of Guangxi and Guangdong12
About the place
The old chronicles say
The detail few people stop at in the old histories’ genealogy is the line that Kinh Duong Vuong married the daughter of the Lord of Dongting. Lake Dongting is a real lake, lying in the north of Hunan province in China; the name Hunan means literally south of the lake, and it is this lake the province is named against. From Lake Dongting down to Viet Tri, where legend places the capital of Van Lang, is more than 1,100 kilometres as the crow flies, across the whole mountain country of Guangxi and Guangdong. For a Bronze Age community, that is not a distance across which families arrange marriages.1
Ngo Si Lien added a note to that very line: consulting a history of the Tang dynasty, it records that in the time of Kinh Duong there was a woman herding goats who called herself the youngest daughter of the Lord of Dongting, who married the second son of the Kinh Xuyen clan, was cast aside, and asked a man named Lieu Nghi to carry a letter back to her father; so the Kinh Xuyen clan and the Dongting clan had long been intermarrying, generation after generation. But the tale he cited is not history: it is Lieu Nghi truyen, a Tang-dynasty tale of the marvellous whose author names himself at the end as Ly Trieu Uy, a supernatural romance of a dragon king, a letter carried to the dragon palace and a dragon maiden reborn as a human.14
The lake appears again as the northern border of Van Lang: the old chronicles say that country bordered the South Sea on the east, reached Ba and Shu on the west, Dongting Lake on the north and the land of Ho Ton on the south. The Cuong muc rejects this using the old chronicles’ own material: Dongting Lake lies wedged between two lakes, in fact to the north of the land of the Bach Viet; Ba and Shu are a further region away and share no border at all; the old chronicles were inflating their language. Then the historians produce the decisive argument: the fifteen districts the old chronicles themselves list all lie within Giao Chi, Chu Dien and inward, not one of them to the north.32
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