Phien Ngung

The old chronicles say

The place appears in the old text as one of five positions the Qin held. The Huainanzi has Commandant Do Thu raise five hundred thousand men in five armies: one to block the ridge at Dam Thanh, one to hold the pass at Cuu Nghi, one to sit in the city of Phien Ngung, one to guard the border at Nam Da, one to hold the river at Du Can. The other four are a ridge, a pass, a border and a river — Phien Ngung alone is called a city. Then three years without unfastening their armour or letting a crossbow go slack, and those three years failed because the grain could not be moved.¹

That five-army deployment stands in one text only. The memorial Luu An signed and handed to the Han emperor, telling the same war a few years later, has no five armies and no five hundred thousand; Nghiem An's memorial as copied into the Records of the Grand Historian gives no troop figure at all. In other words, the placing of a Qin army at Phien Ngung rests on a single source, and that source is a book written to persuade a ruler, not a book of record.²³

After the southern campaign this place returns in a scene the text sets down at some length. Nham Ngao, commandant of Nam Hai, lay gravely ill and summoned Trieu Da, magistrate of Long Xuyen county, telling him the Qin were in disorder and that men of standing were turning on them and setting themselves up; then he pointed to the ground he held: Phien Ngung has steep hills at its back and the South Sea barring its front, runs thousands of li east to west, and has no few men from the central plains to help — this too is the master of a province, enough to found a state upon. Later, once the Qin were altogether gone, Trieu Da annexed Que Lam and Tuong Quan and declared himself martial king of Nam Viet.⁴