Place
Linh Nam
The land south of the Five Ranges, the target of the Qin campaign into the south. The texts that tell of that war do not say how far south the region reached.
At a glance
- Also known as
- The Records of the Grand Historian call the land taken Luc Luong; the old histories explain it — the people of Lingnan live in the hills and are stubborn by temper, and so were called Luc Luong. It is a name given by others, meaning the stubborn ones in the hills, not one the Yue used of themselves12
- Location
- South of the Five Ranges. The texts that tell the war with the Qin draw no boundary for the region: the old histories say only that the people of Lingnan live in the hills, and record that once the three commanderies were established the convict troops led over by Nham Ngao and Trieu Da garrisoned the Five Ranges2
- Type
- A region the Qin divided into three commanderies — Que Lam, Tuong Quan and Nam Hai — and then garrisoned with men sent out under sentence1
About the place
The old chronicles say
The Chinese history closest in time to the Qin gives the taking of this whole region a single sentence, and that sentence has to share room with the driving back of the Xiongnu in the north-west: men who had once absconded, men living in their wives' households and merchants were raised to take the land of Luc Luong, which was made into Que Lam, Tuong Quan and Nam Hai, and convicts were sent out to garrison it. That is all. No commander's name, no troop figure, no battle — it is recorded as an administrative matter already concluded.1
The name in that sentence is worth stopping at too. The land taken is called Luc Luong, and that was not a name the Yue used of themselves: the old histories explain that the people of Lingnan live in the hills and are stubborn by temper, and so were called Luc Luong. It is a name given by others, and what it means is the stubborn ones in the hills. In the earliest record of it, this region appears through two things imposed from outside: a name meant as an insult, and three commandery names.21
Those who fought the Qin here were the Yue groups south of the Five Ranges, Tay Au among them — the Yue grouping in what is now Guangxi, whose lord Dich Hu Tong the Qin killed. In the whole passage telling that war there is not one word about Au Lac, about Thuc Phan, about Van Lang, or about the land of Giao Chi. The two words Au Lac do appear in the Records of the Grand Historian, but in the passages on the Han destroying Nam Viet in 111 BC, more than a century later; and elsewhere in that same book Tay Au and Lac are listed as two separate groups, standing alongside Man Viet.34
How later ages remembered
The Le dynasty national history does carry the figure of five hundred thousand, but not for the army that came down: it attaches it to the convict troops that Nham Ngao and Trieu Da led over to garrison the Five Ranges after the three commanderies were established. One number, three texts, three different places to put it — and where it stands in the Vietnamese history is the holding of the land, not its taking.2
Mentioned in
Sources for this page
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