Place
Lang Bac
Where Ma Yuan's army broke the forces of the Trung sisters in the spring of 42, according to the Book of the Later Han. The Thuy kinh chu only places it beside a branch of a river; none of the old sources read places it in a present-day province or district.
At a glance
- Location
- The Thuy kinh chu only places it beside a branch of a river, on the high ground Ma Yuan moved up to from Tay Ly to camp. None of the old sources read places it in a present-day province or district1
- Type
- Marshland; in Ma Yuan's own recollection of the area between Lang Bac and Tay Ly, flood water below and mist above, and poisonous vapours rising thick and steaming2
- Dates
- In the spring of the eighteenth year of Jianwu, that is, 42, the Han army reached it and fought the sisters' forces2
About the place
The old chronicles say
Ma Yuan's biography in the Book of the Later Han records the battle in exactly one sentence: in spring of the eighteenth year of the Jianwu era, that is, 42, the army reached Lang Bac, fought the rebels and broke them, taking several thousand heads, while more than ten thousand surrendered. That is all. No battle order, no word of who commanded on the sisters' side, not a single name from the other side of the line. And those figures are the winner's own report.2
The same biography records Ma Yuan's own words about his days there: when I was between Lang Bac and Tay Ly, and the rebels were not yet destroyed, there was flood water below and mist above, and poisonous vapours rose thick and steaming; I looked up and saw hawks in flight falter and drop into the water. The commander of the winning side speaks not of the victory, nor of the count of heads; he remembers Lang Bac as a stifling place, and remembers it lying down. Those poisonous vapours were not a figure of speech: the same biography records that of his troops, those who died of the miasmal fevers came to four or five in every ten.2
The Thuy kinh chu, a sixth-century book on rivers, only places Lang Bac beside a branch of a river, with one sentence: Ma Yuan saw that the ground there was high, and so moved up from Tay Ly and camped here. The name Tay Ly matches the Tay Ly in Ma Yuan's own words. The Tang commentaries, when they explain the place names of this region, likewise only match them to Tang place names. Among the old sources read, none places Lang Bac in a present-day province or district; every attempt to put it on a modern map is the work of later scholars.1
Mentioned in
Sources for this page
Every row of the profile and every passage below points to one of these documents. How we choose and check sources