THE TRƯNG SISTERS (40-43),
THE FIRST ANTI-CHINESE REBELLION IN VIETNAM
Nguyen Ngoc Bich
According
to legend as retold in Lê Ngô Cát and Phạm Đình Toái’s Đại Nam quốc-sử diễn
ca (“Poetic History of Dai Nam,” i.e. Vietnam , 1860-1865):
Bà Trưng quê ở châu Phong
Giận người tham bạo, thù chồng chẳng
quên
Chị em nặng một lời nguyền
Phất cờ nương-tử thay quyền tướng-quân…
Queen Trưng, a native of
Phong-châu,
Outraged by
a tyran and remembering her husband’s fate,
Swore an
oath with her sister Trưng Nhị
And
raised their women’s colors to take the place of generals…
In four
short verses, the authors have succinctly given us the background of the first
rebellion against the Chinese domination in Vietnam that started in 111 B.C.,
exactly one century and a half before.
But since they were men formed in the Confucian mold, the authors could
not resist their male chauvinist bias that presupposed that only (male)
generals could lead troops into war.
But the Trưng
sisters, as will be clear soon, were not the exception in ancient Vietnam for after their defeat in 43 CE, Ma
Yuan, dubbed “the Subduer of the Waves,” reported to the Han Court in China that “Viet law and Han law
differ on more than ten matters.” For that
reason he asked that he be allowed “to clarify the ancient [legal] system [of China ]
so as to confine them [i.e. the Vietnamese, within the Han legal
framework]. From then on, the Lạc Việt
followed the ancient [laws imposed by] General Ma.” (Hou Han shu, vol. 54, page 8b)
Viet adat and Chinese Han laws
What the Hou Han shu quoting Ma Yuan refers to as
“Viet law” was most likely ancient Viet customary laws, known as adat
in Indonesian law, i.e. unwritten laws but sets of behavior agreed to by everyone
in a community. Nowhere have I seen a
thorough analysis of the reported differences between Viet adat at the time of the Trưng sisters (beginning of the common era)
and their contemporary Han laws.(1)
So let me venture then a hypothesis as to what these differences may
have been.
First of
all, the main difference between them may have been a big difference in social
structure. While Han society was a
fundamentally patriarchal society Viet society at the time was a fundamentally
matriarchal system where it was not important to know the paternity of the
children as long as the children recognize a common mother. This is reflected to this day where in Vietnam , the
given name is more important than the family name: Very unlike the Chinese, I
am “Mr. Bich,” not “Mr. Nguyen.” The
Chinese, when they came to Vietnam ,
were so frustrated by this that they imposed on the Vietnamese Chinese family
names—which explains why most if not all the Vietnamese family names actually
were imports from China .
Secondly,
like in ancient Thai society, marriage was an affair of the heart, not of
family alliances decided by the parents (“môn đăng hộ đối” as later on in
Vietnamese high society). At the time of
the Trưng sisters, the ancient Viets most likely would have spring festivals at
the beginning of the year in which young people are free to mingle and meet, somewhat
like in the “love marts” that one still encounters in Sapa nowadays. If they liked each other they were free to
take themselves into the fields or into caves and make love. If the girl becomes pregnant the boy is
supposed to get back and marry her. If
the girl does not conceive, then next year she is free to consort with another
(or the same boy) and so on and so forth.
Thirdly, as
in the Levirate system in ancient Israel
or as in some parts of India
nowadays, a woman gets married into a family.
She would be the wife of the first-born son. Should her husband die (in battle or in the
woods, eaten by tigers, for instance), the next-born would become her
husband. In this way, the children are
always guaranteed to have a male and a female authority figures in the
home. Hence, the saying: “Mất cha còn chú,
mất mẹ bú dì” (“Should the father die, there’s still the uncle / Should the
mother dies, one can still be breastfed by her sister”).
Fourthly,
because of the importance of the mother in such a system, she is responsible
for the raising of the children. If a
child does something wrong it is the mother who is held responsible. Thus the proverb: “Con hư tại mẹ, cháu hư tại
bà” (“A spoiled child is attributable to the mother or grandmother”). Also and even more importantly, this saying
has the force of law: “Con dại, cái mang” (“If a child does wrong, it’s the
mother who bears responsibility”).
Fifthly, as
a social unit a household (the Vietnamese word for “clan,” họ, is actually a derivative from hộ, “a household”) was more important than a genetically defined
family, especially a nuclear family in the western conception, through the
father’s line. This makes a lot more
sense even statistically as it is still taken into consideration and done in
present-day U.S.
censuses.
Sixthly,
weddings were a much simpler affair that nowadays, after the Vietnamese have
been influenced by the Chinese ideas. If
a boy and a girl have fallen in love, they would arrange for the boy to come
and steal her from her family, most likely at night. So no big wedding or anything like that. (It is a bit like the Roman story of the
“rape of the Sabines.”) After a while,
this state of affair would be regularized and the man is accepted as a
son-in-law into the girl’s family.
Seventhly,
once a boy has married into the girl’s family he would have to “earn” her by
services rendered to her family. This
custom is called ở rể in Vietnamese
(literally, “to live in as a son-in-law”).
He would, for instance, follow the girl’s father to the field everyday
and help the latter with his chores, or go and seek firewood in the forests,
etc.
Eighthly,
going beyond the family structures, Ma Yuan broke up the traditional elite of
the ancient Viets. As the Trưng Sisters
relied essentially on the Lạc-hầu Lạc-tướng (local chieftains) system in place
inherited from the Hùng-vương era to carry out their hugely successful
rebellion, Ma Yuan was merciless in destroying that system. After putting down the rebellion (in the
process killing a great many of its leaders), Ma Yuan even after the last
campaign in Cửu Chân (the southernmost province) was said to have taken over
300 of the rebellion’s leaders back to the Han capital (Hou Han shu, vol. 1 part 2, page 11b). The eradication campaign was so thorough that
after it there was no longer any mention of any Lạc-hầu or Lạc-tướng in
Vietnamese history.
Ninthly, not
only did Ma Yuan do away with an entire elite of the country, he also asked for
the permission to split up their realms (or fiefs), especially the larger ones
into smaller, more manageable units, now called “districts” (huyện, or xian in Chinese), i.e. Chinese administrative units. For instance, Tây Vu, “which consisted of
32,000 households, with its frontiers over a thousand li from its principal town,” was subsequently divided into two xian, to wit Phong Khê and Vọng Hải, to
which the Han emperor agreed.” (Hou Han
shu, “Ma Yuan biography,” vol. 54, page 8b.
See also Shui-jing zhu, vol.
37, page 6a)
Tenthly, to
eliminate all traces of the Lạc-hầu and Lạc-tướng’s authority, Ma Yuan had all
the bronze drums—the symbols of ancient Viet leadership since at least the
fifth century BCE—confiscated and smelt down to make a huge, solid “model
bronze horse which he presented to the [Han] emperor.” (Hou Han shu, vol. 54, page 8b, and Hou Han ji, vol. 7, page 18b)
According to these sources, this model bronze horse measured 3 xích and 5 thốn (roughly 1.5 meter) high with a body measuring 4 xích (roughly 1.7 meter) round.
There is no
guarantee that my hypothesis is correct in every instance but it can be
presumed that the ten points of difference mentioned above must have
corresponded to some of the major changes that Ma Yuan brought to Vietnam . This means that the Trưng Sisters’ rebellion
was not merely a military conflict but also a clash of civilizations, to borrow
a modern description from Samuel Huntington.
Defeated but
unconquered
Accounts of
the Trưng Sisters’ rebellion and their short reign include:
Not quite
contemporary accounts but relatively close to that time given in Chinese
sources like the Hou Han shu (445
CE), Shui-jing zhu (before 527 CE).
The first official
history of Vietnam ,
Đại-Việt sử-ký (1272) written by Lê Văn
Hưu (thirteenth century).
The Việt-sử lược (late 13th
century) by an anonymous author.
The Annan zhilue / An-nam chí-lược by Lê Tắc
(late 13th century, printed 1340).
The Annan zhiyuan by Gao Xiung-zheng (Cao Hùng
Trưng), an early Ming author (mid-15th century).
The Đại-Việt sử-ký toàn-thư (1479) by Ngô Sĩ
Liên.
The Thiên-Nam ngữ-lục (1685-1697?) by a
courtier at the Trịnh Lords’ Court.
The Khâm-định Việt-sử Thông-giám Cương mục
(compiled in 1856-59, printed in 1884).
And the Đại-Nam quốc-sử diễn ca (“National History of Đại-Nam Put Into
Verses”) by Lê Ngô Cát (1860), revised by Phạm Đình Toái (1865), among others.
As one
studies these sources it is easy to notice two trends, both harmful to history:
One is to
try to get history to conform to the Confucian training of the historians of
monarchical Vietnam, formed in the tradition of the Four Books and Five
Classics (Tứ Thư-Ngũ Kinh) – which is just as nonsensical as the more recent
attempts by the Marxist historians of Hanoi to make history conform with Marx
and Engels’ version of history (based on class struggle and also on a modern
version of male chauvinism).
And the
other is to embellish what is already a beautiful history into a legend which
grows further and further from the truth.
For
instance, when Lê Ngô Cát concluded his section on the Trưng sisters with the
two verses:
Trưng-vương vắng mặt còn ai?
Đi về thay đổi, mặc người Hán-quan!
With
the Trưng Queens gone, who is there left?
One could
only see Han mandarins taking turns in ruling our land.
Tự Đức (reigned 1847-1883) was incensed and remarked: “How can
you be so flattering to women? Do you
mean that there were no heroes left in our country at the time?”
Then when he
read the section on Lady Triệu (248 CE) by Lê Ngô Cát:
Vú dài ba thước vắt lưng,
Cỡi voi, gióng trống trong rừng kéo
ra.
Cũng toan gánh vác sơn hà
Cho Ngô biết mặt đàn bà nước Nam
Throwing her 3-thước breasts
back over her shoulders,
She rode
her elephant out of the woods with troops drumming
And the
dream of shouldering the task of saving the country
Just to
show to the Chinese what Vietnamese women are capable of.
Again, Tự Đức wrote on the side his
royal comment: “What a shameful comment directed at Vietnamese men! Were they all dead?”
Despite
his unhappiness, Tự Đức nonetheless ordered that a silk bolt and two strings of
cash be awarded to Lê Ngô Cát for his trouble (in writing the verse
history). Lê Ngô Cát, of course, had to
accept the reward but on walking out, he commented loudly:
“Vua
khen thằng Cát có tài,
“Thưởng cho
chiếc khố với hai đồng tiền.”
“The
king praised Cát for his talent,
“And
awarded him a loincloth with two pieces of cash.”
This was, of course, irreverent and in fact, a case of lèse-majesté that could cause his head
to be chopped off. But Cát promptly
corrected himself:
“…
And awarded him with a silk piece and two strings of cash.”(2)
Emperor Tự Đức
may have been unhappy with Lê Ngô Cát’s version of early Vietnamese history but
he cannot gainsay the fact that the very first two rebellions against Chinese
domination in Vietnam
(40-43 and 248 CE) were both led by women.
Not just led but also fought by many woman warriors, companions to the
Trưng Sisters, which clearly pointed to equality between the sexes when it came
to protecting the land of their ancestors.
“Giặc đến nhà, đàn bà phải đánh”: “When bandits invade your homes, then
women must take arms and fight them.”
As for the Marxist historians, they too
are anachronistic when they could not accept the fact that at the time Vietnam was
still essentially a matriarchal system, hence it’s most natural for women to play
at least an equal role to men. Shui-jing zhu, for instance, Trần Quốc Vượng
and Hà Văn Tấn wrote, recorded that “Thi (Sách) [the husband of Trưng Trắc] was
still alive after the start of the uprising.
If that were true, it would be truly difficult to explain why… Thi Sách
did not become king and let Trưng Trắc get on the throne instead.”(3)
They are
even further off the mark when they refused to see the Trưng Sisters’ uprising
as a national rebellion in which the Vietnamese population rose together with
their tribal leaders, the Lạc-hầu and Lạc-tướng, to overthrow the yoke of
Chinese Han colonialism. They chose
instead to see the movement as a Spartacus-type of rebellion where the
Vietnamese peasants, reduced to being serfs (“nông-nô”) under the Chinese
domination, engaged in a class struggle against the Han exploiters.(4) But if this were the case, how could they
explain the fact
these same peasants chose to side with their national
exploiters against the foreign exploiters?
When the national exploiters, the Lạc-hầu and Lạc-tướng, had been left
in place to serve as collaborators to the Han administration?
Samuel
Huntington’s clash of civilizations hypothesis, it seems to me, would explain
so much better the Trưng rebellion. For
even two hundred years later, Lady Triệu could still declare in a ringing
statement of women’s (read “feminist”) rights: “I only want to ride a storm,
flatten the high waves of the sea, slash open the whales of the Eastern Sea
Commenting
on the root cause of the Trưng Sisters rebellion, the Thiên Nam ngữ-lục (“Miscellaneous Records of the Southern Realm”)
had even a racist explanation:
Nước sao bỉ ổi bấy ôi!
Để thằng răng trắng hiếp người răng đen.
O
how can the country become so horrendous
As to let a
white-teethed guy suppress us, people of black-lacquered teeth(6)!
(Verses
1433-1434)
As
for the embellishment of the story to make it into a fantastic legend which
defies belief, we will have to leave the discussion to later.
Main phases of the
rebellion
The most
plausible facts associated with the Trưng Sisters rebellion are as follows:
Both
sisters were the daughters of a Lạc-tướng (“Lạc military leader”) from the area
of Mê Linh, an area corresponding to today’s Ba Vì mountain and stretching all
the way to Tam Đảo, a mountain and wooded region contained within the original
realm of the Hùng kings. According to
one source, the mother of the Trưng sisters was a descendant of the Hùng kings
on her maternal side. Thus, one could
say that the sisters are related to the Hùng dynasty. The current confusion about the family name
of the sisters, variously said to be Hùng, Trưng and originally Lạc, is simply
due to the fact that we no longer understand the matriarchal system then
obtained.(7)
At any
rate, according to both the Hou Han shu
and Shui-jing zhu, the older sister,
Trưng Trắc was said to be “very heroic, courageous and good at
stratagems.” Her husband is said to be
named Thi (after the Shui-jing zhu)
or Thi Sách according to other sources.
He is also said to be the son of a Lạc military leader from Chu Diên in
the area near Hanoi
nowadays. Thus, both Trưng Trắc and her
husband came from the elite in Vietnamese society at the time. Their marriage must have consolidated an
alliance between two large and powerful fiefs which lay in the central region
of Giao Chỉ, the name of Vietnam
at the time, stretching from the strategically located midland region of
present-day Vĩnh Phú down to the center of the Red River
delta.
Living near
the center of colonial Han power, at the time located in Liên Lâu (present-day
Lũng Khê, Thuận Thành district, Bắc Ninh province), they must have been aware
of the exactions of the foreign administration then headed by Tô Định (Su Ting
in Chinese). The Hou Han shu confirms this situation: “The prefect of Giao Chỉ, Su
Ting, used the law to bind [the people], which made Trắc outraged and caused
her to rebel.”(8) According
to two other sources, Hou Han ji and Dong Guan Han ji, Ma Yuan is reported to
say of Su Ting that he “opens wide his eyes when he sees money but lowers his
eyes when facing the enemy.” The
biography of Liu Long in the Hou Han shu
also reports that the exactions of the colonial administration under Su Ting
were such “that the hundred clans clamor injustice and stop [government
officials] on the roads to complain.”(9)
Thus, the first obvious,
direct cause of the rebellion was the heavy taxes and corruption of the Su Ting
administration.
These
exactions must have been felt as something terrible since the rule of Su Ting
came right after the relatively benign administration of Xi Guang (Tích Quang
in Vietnamese) and Ren Yan (Nhâm Diên in Vietnamese), who were credited with
teaching the Vietnamese the Chinese rules of marriage and apparently more
advanced agricultural techniques.(10) This reading is supported by the version in Thiên Nam ngữ-lục where it is said:
“After 148 years / The North [i.e. China ] apparently ran out of [good]
people” (verses 1431-1432) since “how can the country be so horrendous / As to
let a white-teethed guy suppress us, people of black-lacquered teeth.”
Legend has
it that when Thi Sách tried to raise objections to some of Su Ting’s policies
he was accused of planned treason and killed.
This was the final blow which led Trưng Trắc to enlist her sister Trưng
Nhị to make a pact, swearing to revenge the death of Thi Sách and overthrow the
Chinese yoke.(11)
Lightning Victories
Though the
immediate motivation of the
sisters may have been personal revenge, their call to arms found resonance in
thousands and tens of thousands of others.
They launched their rebellion in the spring of 40 CE, a very propitious
time of the year since people always gathered in large numbers for the spring
festivals that took place all around the country. Word spread like wild fire for although they
started out in Giao Chỉ, not only the people in Cửu Chân, Nhật Nam (then the
southernmost provinces, corresponding to today’s Thanh Hóa and Nghệ An) but
also those in Hợp Phố (in present-day Guangdong) responded to the call for
uprising.
The
sisters’ army first rose in Mê Linh (present-day Yên Lãng, Phúc Yên province)
and after subduing the local Chinese post, they went on to attack the district
garrison of Giao Chỉ, then the capital of Giao Châu called Liên Lâu
(present-day Lũng Khê, Thuận Thành, Bắc Ninh province). The uprisings in the other three provinces
also saw similar lightning successes with the Chinese garrisons either killed
or fleeing for their lives. The Hou Han shu was very concise: “The
governor of Giao Chỉ and the [Chinese] prefects could barely manage to save
their own skins.” According to the Shui-jing zhu, the Lạc-tướng, even
though they have been made district administrators by the Chinese, all rallied
to the sisters’ side. And in no time the
sisters had “gathered 65 strongholds under their rule.”(12) Clearly, their call to save the land had hit
a national chord that resonated throughout the land. The Thiên
Nam ngữ-lục probably hits the nail on its head when it puts into the mouth
of Trưng Trắc the following pledge at the swearing-in ceremony before her
troops went out:
Một, xin rửa sạch nước thù,
Hai, xin đem lại nghiệp xưa họ Hùng;
Ba, kẻo oan ức lòng chồng,
Bốn, xin vẹn vẹn sở công lênh này.
First,
I pledge to revenge our nation.
Secondly, I
pledge to restore the dynasty of the Hùng Kings.
Thirdly,
lest my husband keep his grudge.
And
fourth, I pledge to finish the job I am out to do.(13)
Thus,
although the desire to clear her husband’s name was present as part of her
motivation, Trưng Trắc had a lot more on her mind that simple personal revenge. And just as clearly, there was no hint of a
class struggle of any sort.
On the
other hand, the Hou Han shu recorded
that when she “rose in rebellion” “the Man [i.e. ethnic minorities] and the Lý
[i.e. the majority population, ethnic Vietnamese] in Cửu Chân, Nhật Nam [the southernmost provinces at the time],
and Hợp Phố [in present-day Guangdong ]
all responded to the call.”(14)
An image beautifully captured in the Đại
Nam
Ngàn Tây nổi áng phong trần,
Ầm ầm binh mã xuống gần Long Biên.
Then war broke out in the
western highlands
With troops
and horses rumbling down towards Long Biên.
(Đại Nam
A benevolent rule
After “having
attacked and destroyed the [Chinese] posts at the provincial and district level
and after having received the submission of the Lạc-tướng,” i.e. after her Blitzkrieg campaign in the spring of 40
CE, the Shui-jing zhu reports, “they
came together and proclaimed her Queen.”(15)
Đô-kỳ đóng cõi Mê Linh,
Lĩnh Nam
For
capital she established it in Mê Linh
With a
court specific to our nation in Lĩnh Nam .
(Đại Nam
Immediately
upon her accession to the throne, the Shui-jing
zhu says, “she abolished the taxes for the population of Giao Chỉ and Cửu
Chân.”(16) This, a modern
historian infers, must mean that she had at least firm control over these two
provinces.
It is not
known what else she did during the short reign of her rule but the Thiên Nam ngữ-lục speculates:
Dấy từ Canh-tí làm vua
Đến Nhâm-dần kể thời vừa ba năm.
Thành ngoài dư sáu mươi
nhăm
Thu về một mối tay cầm lâng lâng.
Mở thông nẻo bể, đường
rừng,
Trong không ‘chuột’ (?) xã, ngoài
không cáo thành.
From
the uprising in the year of the Rat (40 CE)
She ruled
as Queen exactly three years until the year of the Tiger (43 CE).
Over
sixty-five strongholds at large
She
gathered them into her hands lightly.
Opening sea
routes and trails through the woods, she made sure
That no
rats gnaw at the foundation nor foxes climb its walls.
(Thiên Nam
In other words, her rule was benevolent (“lightly”) and she
favored commerce not only at sea but also through the hills and woods that led
to neighboring countries.
Chicks vs. an old fox
The Han
Emperor Guang-wu, however, could not swallow the defeat of Han troops at the
hands of a woman. After suppressing a
number of peasant rebellions to the north (in what would be today’s Hebei and Anhui
provinces), he turned his attention to the south. According to the Hou Han shu, he ordered troops raised in Trường Sa (Changsha ), Hợp Phố, and
Giao Chỉ to prepare carts and boats, to repair the roads and bridges, to cut
paths through the mountains and passes, and to stock rice.”(17) In the fourth month, summer of 42, he issued
an imperial edict designating Ma Yuan “the general who subdues the waves” (“Phục-ba
tướng-quân”) with the special mission to lead an army into Giao Chỉ to put down
the Lạc Việt people. Already 58 at the
time, Ma Yuan was an old hand particularly gifted as a military leader who had
recently put down the rebellion of Li Guang in Huan-cheng.(18)
Ma was
seconded by Duan Zhi, who was made an admiral of the fleet to go by way of the
sea. Liu Long, who had been a prefect in
Hubei and demoted because of corruption, was called out and promoted this time
to be a deputy to Ma on land. And
finally, there was also Han Wu, the marquess of Ping Le.
According
to the Hou Han shu, Ma Yuan’s army
came to over 10,000 troops raised in the districts of Changsha ,
Guiyang , and Lingling, all belonging to the province of Hunan
He started
out from Hunan , then went through Guangxi , Guangdong Hanoi .
Actually,
according to the Shui-jing zhu, the Nam river (one
of two rivers originating from Mê Linh) after going north of Phong Khê “came
down flowing east past Lãng Bạc. Ma Yuan
saw that it was a high ground and… decided to raise camp there. The Nam river then flows east to the
south of the Long Uyên district fort.”(20) Trần Quốc Vượng has determined that it was
the present-day Thiếp river which flows to the north of Cổ Loa (the ancient
stronghold of Phong Khê) and that the Tây Vu district corresponds to the wooded
area of present-day Tiên Du in Bắc Ninh province.(21)
From
entering Giao Chỉ from the Hạ Long Bay all the way to Lãng Bạc, it is not
recorded that Ma Yuan had any difficulty or ran into any battle. Could it be that communication over long
distances took time to travel, so Trưng Trắc did not know about the Han troops
coming? Or could it be a deliberate move
on the part of Trưng Trắc that she waited for them at a place of her choice,
especially after their long trek from China that took over a year? There may be some truth to the latter
hypothesis because Duan Zhi had contracted an illness when he reached Vietnam and
died of that illness. Even later in his
life, Ma Yuan recalled: “When I was camped out in Lãng Bạc and the Tây Vu area,
we had yet to defeat the enemy, yet the situation was such that there was flooding
everywhere, with thick clouds overhead, and affluences emanating in
abundance. One could look up and see
even vultures fall down to their death as they flew by.”(22)
Clearly, he was rather despondent and probably not too sure
of success. Soon after, his other
deputy, Han Wu the marquess of Ping Le, also died here—whether because of
illness or simply because he was killed in battle.
The Trưng
sisters (or only Trưng Nhị, the younger one, according to the Hou Han ji) came down from Mê Linh with
their grand army to confront Ma Yuan in Lãng Bạc. They must have counted on the enemy’s fatigue
after the long trek from China ,
plus the ravage of tropical diseases, and conditions of flooding in the lower
plain. Nonetheless, the big engagement
turned out to be a rout for the Vietnamese side, possibly because of their
inexperience in battle. Ma Yuan’s troops
killed several thousands of the Trưng sisters’ side, and over ten thousand
surrendered or were captured.(23)
The sisters had to beat a fast retreat, all the way to Cấm Khê.
A note to
the Hou Han shu, quoting the Yue zhi, said that “Trưng Trắc fled to
Kim Khê Cứu, and it took two years [for Ma] to capture her.”(24) The Shui-jing
zhu was even more puzzling: “Ma Yuan led his army to fight Trắc and Thi
[her husband], who fled to Kim Khê Cứu, and it took [Ma] three years to capture
them.”(25) Where Kim Khê or Cấm
Khê (an alternate reading) is nowadays is a matter of speculation. The “Liu Long zhuan” in Hou Han shu believes Cấm Khê Khẩu (instead of Cứu), possibly a
river port, to be in the Mê Linh area, and claims that Liu Long pursued the
“rebels” all the way there, where he captured Trưng Nhị, killed over one
thousand and took prisoners over twenty thousand.(26) The “Ma Yuan zhuan,” however, gives a
different story: there it is said that Ma Yuan pursued Trưng Trắc all the way
to Cấm Khê. On the way, the two sides
had many encounters in which Trắc would lose.
In the end, Ma managed to kill both sisters, chopped off their heads and
had them brought back all the way to Loyang, then the Han capital in northern China .(27) Because of all these discrepancies it is very
difficult to give credence to any one version.
(And one can see why later on, this developed into many different
legends as to what happened in the end to the two sisters.)
The
standard version of the two sisters’ death in Vietnamese legend is much more
heroic:
Cấm Khê đến lúc hiểm nghèo,
Chị em thất thế phải liều với sông.
When they reached the dead end
in Cấm Khê
The two
sisters in despair had to drown themselves in the [Hát] river.
(Đại Nam
The
story of the two sisters usually ends here.
But that’s only the main part of the story. In fact, even after the crushing defeat at Lãng
Bạc resistance still went on for a couple of years with some quite significant
clashes. For instance, a large group of
resistance fighters managed to flee to Cửu Chân. The Hou
Han shu records that “[Ma] Yuan took 2,000 boats big and small and over
20,000 soldiers to pursue Đô Dương’s group, a remnant of Trưng Trắc’s
army. From the district of Vô Công to
[the district of] Cư Phong, [Ma’s] troops chopped off the heads of and arrested
over 5,000 enemy soldiers.”(28)
In
order to get to Cửu Chân (present-day Thanh Hóa), Ma Yuan had to have huge
engineering works performed by his men, like boring through mountains, in order
to get his troops through, thus avoiding also the extremely dangerous choppy
sea routes. In the process he also went
through Đồng Cổ, so named because there were many bronze drums made there. He had those bronze drums confiscated so that
later on he could smelt these drums and make a solid bronze horse for
presentation to the Han emperor. Running
into fierce resistance in Cư Phong (part of present-day Đông Sơn district and
present-day Thiệu Hóa district), probably because the inhabitants did not want
to voluntarily give up their bronze drums, Ma Yuan had several hundred
slaughtered. Ma then went further down
into Tĩnh Gia (present-day Thanh Hóa) and Diễn Châu (present-day Nghệ An), and
“thus, Cửu Chân became peaceful,” said the Shui-jing
zhu. It is believed that Ma Yuan did
not go down further than Vô Biên (present-day Tĩnh Gia) since the Hou Han shu did not mention any other
name south of this district.
The Legend
Such is the
story of the Trưng Sisters, Trưng Trắc and Trưng Nhị, in as close a version as
we can make to what really happened nearly two thousand years ago. But surrounding them there were many legends
or what one would call legendary accretions that make their lives sound more
like hagiographies than real people’s biographies. This is because the sources themselves, owing
to their discrepancies, lend themselves to elaborations and a multitude of what
the Vietnamese would call “râu ria,” beards and mustaches, to the stories.
For
instance, what really happened to Thi Sách, Trưng Trắc’s husband? Was he a hero in the first place? If we can trust the Thiên Nam ngữ-lục then certainly he was one, and a fine one at
that: what he did was given in verses 1435-1590 (156 verses altogether). According to this version, because of his
frankness he was accused of planning a rebellion with his wife, Trưng Trắc
(verse 1507: “Nó toan làm sự gian vong,” He planned to carry out a treasonable
action). Su Ting then thought that if he
could capture Trưng Trắc (verse 1517) Thi Sách would surrender. When warned of this possible development, Thi
Sách confronted Su Ting and said he would kill him should he as much as touch
the Trưng sisters (verses 1515-16). But
Su Ting’s troops managed to overrun Thi Sách’s camp and kill Sách instead.
That is the
traditional version, although quite elaborated into a long story of romance
(between Thi Sách and Trưng Trắc), corruption (Su Ting) and misapplication of
justice (Thi Sách was falsely accused of treason and killed).
In the
Chinese accounts, however, Thi Sách apparently was not killed before the
rebellion broke out. The motivation of
the Trưng sisters therefore could not be attributed to a desire for revenge for
Sách’s death. One Chinese version, the Hou Han shu, did not mention Thi Sách at
all while the other, the Shui-jing zhu,
had Thi [Sách] fleeing with his wife to Kim Khê Cứu until 45 CE. So he was not killed at all, at least until
the complete suppression of the uprising.
It is discrepancies like this which gave rise to various
interpretations, hence the growing legends associated with the Trưng sisters,
even to this day.
For
instance, the tenuous links between the Trưng sisters and the Hùng kings,
reputedly the founders of ancient Vietnam . The Trưng sisters’ mother, according to the
legend passed down at Mèn Shrine and Nam
Nguyễn Communal
Temple (đình), was a native of Nam
Nguyễn village (in Ba Vì district, now a distant suburb of Hanoi ) and a distant descendant of the Hùng
kings on her mother’s side. If we go by
the Confucian order of things, then she is hardly related at all to the Hùng
kings. But let us not forget that Vietnam was
then still a matriarchal society, in which case her claim of relation to the Hùng
kings via the maternal side could make sense.
At any rate, there is still a tomb there today associated with her which
is called “mả Dạ,” tomb of the Old Woman (“Dạ” being archaic Vietnamese meaning
an “old and respected woman”).(29)
Typically, she is said to be a widow raising her two daughters,
sometimes said to be twins, to become good girls proficient in raising
silkworms but also well trained in the martial arts—a characteristic of the
minority groups living in the highland region of North Vietnam. In other words, women living in those areas
had to be independent (because the husbands sometimes had to be absent from
home for long stretches of time), they had to know how to defend themselves
against intruders or even wild animals.
Hence, Trưng Trắc is said to be “very heroic, courageous and good at
bold stratagems” (“rất hùng dũng,” “có can đảm, dũng lược”)—hardly the
description of the graceful, feminine Trưng sisters that one sees depicted in
posters nowadays.
But the Trưng
sisters were not untypical of their time.
According to the hagiography of Princess Thánh Thiên kept in Ngọc Lâm
village, district of Yên Dũng, Bắc Giang province, she was the daughter of Nguyễn
Huyến, a former official of Nam Việt, Zhao Tuo’s kingdom (sic!). She rose up against the Chinese even before
the Trưng sisters but had to temporarily abandon the fight. Later she went to Bắc Giang to join her
maternal uncle, who also rose against the Đông Hán (Eastern
Han ). Defeated once more,
they had to retreat to Yên Dũng. When Trưng
Trắc heard of her, she invited her to join her uprising. She thus became one of the first woman
generals to join the Trưng rebellion.
This
question, the extremely important role played by women in what was then still a
strongly matriarchal system, was very poorly understood by later
historians. They could not explain why
of the dozens of generals serving under Trưng Trắc, there could be so many
women. For instance, the mother of the
Trưng sisters herself, later elevated into “Man Hoàng Thái Hậu,” the Mán Queen
Mother (“Mán” being a general name for the ethnic minorities living in the
highlands of what is now North Vietnam), also joined her daughters’ rebellion,
fought Ma Yuan’s troops and lost. Like
her daughters later on, she also jumped into the river and drowned to save her
honor. A shrine devoted to her still
exists in Nam
An village.
It would be
too tedious to go into specific stories of the 50 or so generals, both male and
female, who joined the Trưng army and fought for the independence of Vietnam . But a quick rundown would have to mention at
least their names:
Among the
women, Man Thiện (the sisters’ mother), Diệu Tiên (an older woman), the wives
of some male generals like Princess Bát Nàn, Đào Kỳ, Lê Thị Hoa, young women
like Lê Chân, Thánh Thiên, Thiều Hoa, Xuân Nương, Liễu Giáp, Việt Huy, Ả Di, Ả
Tắc, Ả Lã, Nàng Đê etc.
And among
the men, both old and young, Ông Đống, Ông Nà, Ông Cai, Đỗ Năng Tế (said to be
the martial arts teacher to the Trưng sisters), Hoàng Đạo, Đông Bảng, Đô Chinh,
Đô Dương etc.(30)
How much
truth is there to all these accounts? A
group of historians warn against taking them all too literally: For one thing several of these names are too
sophisticated to possibly be names cuurent at the time of the Trưng sisters (at
the beginning of the common era), others can be traced back to nature
(agricultural) deities that later were turned into human deities, others yet
cannot escape the situation of “one man’s beard getting planted onto a woman’s
chin” (“râu ông nọ cắm cằm bà kia”). Be
it as it may, this proliferation of names of apparently real, historical
characters clearly pointed to the perennial popularity of the legend of the Trưng
Sisters even after nearly two thousand years in the memory of the Vietnamese
nation!
The death
of the Trưng sisters is also given as in a post-modern ending, with at least
three scenarios:
One
version, the traditional one, has them in reaching the end of their rope choose
the honorable outcome of drowning in the Hát river, just as their mother had
done, in order to avoid capture and probably shameful treatment at the hands of
Ma Yuan, the victor.(31)
Another had
both sisters fleeing before the might of Ma Yuan’s army, Trưng Nhị after the
heroic resistance stand at Lãng Bạc and Trưng Trắc thereafter. But even in the retreat to Cấm Khê (or Kim Khê
Cứu), Trưng Trắc still fought off the invaders in several battles even though
she lost out in the end. This resistance
was said to last from two to three years.
A third
reportedly had the sisters being killed by Ma Yuan, who chopped off their heads
and had them sent to Loyang, i.e. to the Han Court , tens of thousands of miles
away in North China .
This last
version, as has been said above, is probably the most unlikely, that is,
probably a lie found in the biography of Ma Yuan. For according to the very same source, Ma
Yuan before the Lãng Bạc battle (summer of 42 CE) was very despondent and
hardly sure of victory. He is said to
reflect, just before the battle, upon an advice given him by an older cousin: “In
life a gentleman only needs to have adequate food and clothing, he rides a low
cart, a thin horse, is happy with a small official’s appointment, he would be
lucky if he can stay near home to take care of the ancestors’ tombs and be
lauded as a good man, that’s plenty!”(32) Apparently he regretted aiming too high or
seeking glory in life.
The last
thing associated with the rise and fall of the Trưng Sisters is another piece
of legend which bears recounting. Starting
in the early fourth century, a Chinese source, the Wu lu (Ngô-lục) of Zhang Bo (Trương Bột), mentioned that “in Tượng
Lâm (in present-day Quảng Nam ),
there was a small beach where people could pan soft gold. […] People living there claim that they are of
Han ancestry. There is a bronze column
there, said to mark the southernmost limit of the Han empire.” The Guang-zhou
ji (4th-5th centuries) said that “Ma Yuan, when he
was in Giao Chỉ, erected a bronze column to mark the southernmost limit of the
Han empire.” The Lin-yi ji (4th-5th centuries) claims that “Ma
Yuan erected two bronze columns in the south of Tượng Lâm that marked the
southern border of the Han empire as distinct from [the kingdom of] Tây Đô.” It also says that “the aborigines called
[Chinese] immigrants there ‘Ma immigrants’ and generation after generation they
say they are descendants of Han people.”
Despite
such testimonies, the main source for Ma Yuan’s life, the Hou Han shu, is entirely mum about it, there being no mention of
any such thing. Besides, the exact
location of Ma Yuan’s bronze column(s) is unknown. The above sources seem to be quite consistent
as to its/their location but other, later sources place them in present-day Phú
Yên province (Xin Tang shu, written
in the Song dynasty), in Qin-zhou (Khâm Châu, Guangdong province), while a popular
tradition has it that it is on Lam Thành Mountain in Nghệ An (hence another
name of that mountain is Đồng Trụ, literally “Bronze Column,” in Nam Đàn
district, Nghệ An province). It was not
until Lê Tắc wrote his An Nam chí-lược (in
the fourteenth century) that the story is told that when Ma Yuan erected his
bronze column, not in Nhật Nam (where Ma never set foot on) but in Qin-zhou
(Guangdong), he did emit the curse: “Đồng-trụ chiết, Giao-chỉ diệt” (“Should
this bronze column break, the country of Giao Chỉ would meet its end.”). That is why, the narrative continues, “every
time a Giao Chỉ person [i.e. a Vietnamese] goes by, he or she would take a rock
or tile and throw it at the foot of the bronze column, which soon turned into a
mound” burying forever Ma Yuan’s column.(33)
Such are
some of the legends associated with the insurrection, reign and downfall of the
Trưng Sisters. A full account would
probably take many volumes but it is not recommended unless one wishes to study
the phenomenon as a folkloristic subject.
Latest form of the
legend
About 25
years ago, Dr. Trần Đại Sỹ in France
proposed a whole new approach to reading ancient Vietnamese history. After many field visits to China south of the
Yangzi, he came to the conclusion that Vietnam under the Hùng kings and in the
time of the Trưng sisters did not just cover the northern part of Vietnam but
englobes the entire southern part of present-day China south of the Yangzi
instead, literally south of the Five Mountain Ranges (Lĩnh Nam).
While the
evidence he adduces seems in many cases quite convincing, what his thesis
forces us to do is to reconceive the whole geopolitical history of Vietnam , projecting
the history of the Trưng sisters onto a hugely more extensive realm, something
that most Vietnamese are not quite ready to accept without much further
research. At any rate, the epic history
that he describes in his three novelistic works, Anh hùng Lĩnh Nam (“Heroes of Lĩnh Nam”), Động Đình Hồ Ngoại Sử (“The Parahistory of Động Đình Lake”) and Cẩm Khê Di Hận (“The Grudges Left at Cẩm
Khê”), is a major reconstruction of Vietnamese history at the time of the Trưng
Sisters well worth reading.
Nguyễn Ngọc Bích
January 10-13, 2015
Footnotes
(1) “It is very
regrettable that today we do not know what are the differences between Viet law
and Han law. [All we know is that] the
legal reforms of Ma Yuan as well as other reforms under him marked an important
step in the feudalization of Lạc Việt society” (Trần Quốc Vượng and Hà Văn Tấn,
Lịch sử chế độ phong kiến Việt-nam [“History
of Vietnamese Feudalism”], Hanoi: Nhà xb Giáo Dục, 1960, p. 72). As this is not a very satisfactory
conclusion, Keith Taylor in his landmark The
Birth of Vietnam speculated that “Ma Yuan simply reported discrepancies
between Han and Viet statutes; there is no indication that he attempted to
rectify these discrepancies” (Ibid., University
of California Press, 1983, p. 46).
(2) Lê Ngô Cát and
Phạm Đình Toái, Đại-Nam quốc-sử diễn ca
[“National History of Đại-Nam Put Into Verses”], Ngọc Hồ and Nhất Tâm, editors,
Saigon: Sống Mới, 1972, pp. 13-14.
(3)
Trần Quốc Vượng and Hà Văn Tấn, Lịch sử chế độ phong kiến Việt-nam [“History
of Vietnamese Feudalism”], Hanoi
(4) Ibid., p. 65.
(5) Trần Trọng
Kim, Việt-nam Sử-lược [“A Short
History of Vietnam”], Hanoi Vietnam
(6) Black-lacquered
teeth: like the Japanese until the Meiji Restoration, the ancient Vietnamese
pride themselves on having mastered the technique of lacquering their teeth
black, thereby adding an outer protection to the natural enamel of their
teeth. This was considered not only to
be a mark of beauty in women in particular (there being hundreds of folksongs
singing of black teeth) but also a sign of civilization providing real
protection against cavities. Hence it
was considered an advance over white-teethed people (like the Chinese).
(7) One version of Lĩnh-Nam
chích quái [“Strange Stories Picked Up South of the Wuling Range Nam chích quái edited by
Lê Hữu Mục in Huế, 1960, and since reprinted in the U.S.
(8) Hou Han shu, “Liezhuan” (“Biographies”)
76, Nanman-Xinanyi.
(9) Hou Han shu, 52, 8a.
(10) Hou Han shu, 106, 4a (on Xi Guang), and
116, 5b (Nanman zhuan).
(11) Thiên Nam ngữ-lục [“Miscellaneous
Records of the Southern Realm”], Nguyễn Lương Ngọc and Đinh Gia Khánh, eds., Hanoi
(12) Hou Han shu, 116, 6a. At the
time each district had its own fort with the distribution as follows: Nam Hải
had 7 forts, Thương Ngô 11, Uất Lâm 11, Hợp Phố 5, Giao Chỉ 12, Cửu Chân 5, and
Nhật Nam 5, meaning that Giao Châu had altogether 56 forts. There has been speculation therefore that the
“65 forts” or “strongholds” was only an interpolation of 56 as the manuscript
was being copied.
(13) Thiên Nam ngữ-lục, op. cit., verses
1635-1638.
(14) Hou Han shu, Liezhuan 76, Nanman –
Xinanyi.
(15)
Shui-jing
zhu, 37, 6a.
(16)
Ibid., 37, 5a. But according to
a variant version of the Shui-jing zhu (Yung-lo
da-dian edition, 14) the text says that “she received the taxes from…” Whatever be the case, the argument is still
correct that her court at least controlled Giao Chỉ and Cửu Chân.
(17) Hou Han shu, Nanmanzhuan,
116, 6a.
(18) Hou Han shu, Ma
Yuan zhuan, 54, 7b.
(19) Shui-jing zhu, 37, 7a.
(20) Shui-jing zhu, 37, 6a.
(21) See Trần Quốc
Vượng, “Một vấn đề địa lý học lịch sử” [“A Problem of Historical Geography”],
in Tập san Nghiên cứu Lịch sử (“Historical
Research Journal”), No. 6, pp. 23-38.
(22) Hou Han shu, Ma Yuan zhuan, 54.
See also Dong Guan Hanji, 12.
(23) Hou Han ji only had Trưng Nhị involved
in this battle. The defeat thus may have
been due to Nhị’s youthful inexperience, overconfidence and underestimation of
the enemy. It further said that “several
thousand surrendered, Han Wu thereafter died [of wounds in battle?], and Ma
Yuan pursued Trương Nhị and her followers all the way to Cấm Khê, where they
were destroyed.”
(24) Hou Han shu, 54, 7b. This is probably the most likely ending of Trưng
Trắc’s revolt, that is, the resistance she led against Ma Yuan lasted two years
until 44 CE.
(25) Shui-jing zhu, 37, 5a. This is very unlikely because Trưng Trắc’s
husband’s death at the hand of Su Ting (in 39 or early 40 CE) was one of the
main reasons for her revolt. Also, if
she could survive three years, that is until 45 CE, then Ma Yuan had already
been recalled to Loyang (44 CE) where it is said of the troops that went with
him to Giao Chỉ, many died of the tropical diseases found in the South while
only four or five out of ten would survive to make the trip back.
(26)
Hou Han shu, 52, 8a.
(27) This is the
most implausible ending of the story since the distance between Giao Chỉ and
Loyang in North China was and still is several
thousand miles apart. It would take
months for a courier to cover that distance and the heads would most likely rot
long before they could be shown in Loyang and still be recognizable.
(28) Shui-jing zhu, 37, 3b and 4a. The Yung-lo da-dian edition had “over 3,000
battle-seasoned enemies.”
(29) See Trần Quốc
Vượng & Hà Văn Tấn, op. cit., pp. 56-57 (footnote 5).
(30) This list is
borrowed from Phan Huy Lê, Trần Quốc Vượng, Hà Văn Tấn, Lương Ninh, Lịch sử Việt Nam Thái Bình ,
Nam Hanoi
(31) Phan Huy Lê,
Trần Quốc Vượng, Hà Văn Tấn, Lương Ninh, op. cit., Vol. I, p. 276. One version of the legend of the Trưng Sisters
had them start the insurrection at Hát Môn (at the mouth of the Đáy/Clear
River, in Phúc Thọ district, Sơn Tây province) and also had them drown in the
same river when they were hard pressed by Ma Yuan and his army. This is possibly a Buddhist influence where
one is absorbed back into the universe at the point where one is born
therefrom.
(32)
Hou Han
shu, 54, Ma Yuan zhuan.
(33) Lê Tắc, An Nam
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