Kham Chau

The old chronicles say

The Linh ngoai dai dap, Zhou Qufei’s Song-era notes on the lands of Linh Nam, opens with two words, I hear: on the frontier of Kham Chau, at the Co Sam cave bordering An Nam, there is a bronze pillar of Ma Yuan; every Annamese who passes by lays down a stone, and over time the stones have become a mound. The story goes that Phuc Ba swore an oath: if the bronze pillar pushes up out of the ground, Giao Chi will be destroyed; they pile up stones because they fear it will push up. The pillar now stands in Kham Chau, no longer at the southern edge of Tuong Lam. The verb is push up, not yet break. And the teller says only that he heard it.¹

Among the books examined, that is the first time the oath appears, more than eleven hundred years after Ma Yuan; every book from the tenth century or before that was opened, even those that speak of the bronze pillars, has no oath. In the thirteenth century, the Phuong du thang lam copied it under Kham Chau, and the word had changed: if the bronze pillar breaks, the people of Giao will be destroyed. In the nineteenth century, the historians of the Cuong muc did not believe the pillar stood in Kham Chau: they wondered about a rock mountain in Phu Yen, then refuted that themselves at once, and closed with the words of the Thuy kinh chu — mountains and rivers shift, the bronze pillars sank into the sea — leaning, that is, toward the south.¹²³