Place
Me Linh
A district of Giao Chi commandery under the Han, where Trung Trac's father was the Lac general. A Tang commentary and the Vietnamese histories say she made her capital here; the main text of the Book of the Later Han does not say where.
At a glance
- Location
- One of the ten districts of Giao Chi commandery in the Han thu1
- Type
- A district with a Lac general: the Book of the Later Han records Trung Trac as the daughter of the Lac general of Me Linh district2
About the place
The old chronicles say
Fan Ye's Book of the Later Han records Trung Trac as the daughter of the Lac general of Me Linh district, married to Thi Sach, a man of Chu Dien. The father has no name, only a title; more than a thousand years later the Complete Annals still record her only as the daughter of the Lac general of Me Linh district. The Giao Chau ngoai vuc ky, quoted in the Thuy kinh chu, says most districts had Lac generals, and the Lac generals wore bronze seals on green ribbons; it calls the husband the son of the Lac general of Chu Dien. A note in the Complete Annals says the same thing: the children of two generals' houses married to each other. This marriage joined two lineages that held power in two districts.2673
The main text of the Book of the Later Han says only that she set herself up as queen, not where. Me Linh comes from two lesser sources. The Giao Chau ngoai vuc ky says she attacked and broke the province and the commanderies, brought the Lac generals to submission, and they all went over to Trung Trac and made her queen, with her seat of government at Me Linh district; in that sentence the revolt is a Lac general's daughter bringing the other Lac generals under her. The Tang note of Li Xian quotes the Yuezhi: Trung Trac raised troops and made her capital at Me Linh district. The Vietnamese histories all follow Me Linh; only the translation of the Viet dien u linh tap puts the sisters' base at Chu Dien.234568
How later ages remembered
In 1979 Stephen O'Harrow put forward a hypothesis that turns on land. Local society may have been matrilineal or bilateral, something he himself writes cannot be known for certain; Han settlers came south looking for land, and if land passed down through the women, then to get the land the marriage customs had to be changed to the Han pattern. On that reading, Trung Trac's legal trouble was about her rights over her family's land at Me Linh, and by using Han law to strip her of that land, To Dinh could both break up a block of local power and have land to hand out to his own side. This is his inference, not something the sources record.9
Mentioned in
- Episode 1Ma Yuan's bronze pillars and the policy of assimilation16 min
- Episode 2Giao Chi, Cuu Chan, Nhat Nam15 min
- Episode 4The Trung sisters rise up, AD 4015 min
- Episode 5The three years of Queen Trung10 min
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