Body of Jade, Pearls of Blood The Evolution of the King An Dương Story and the Moral Imagination of Fifteenth-Century Đại Việt Cuong T. Mai* Abstract This essay investigates the evolution of the story of the semi-mythical King An Dương (third century bce). I show how the different versions of the story over time increased in complexity and narrative construction. Ultimately, the final and most complex version of the fifteenth century is comprised of multiple, intertwined narrative threads, one of which focuses on the fate of King An Dương’s martyred daughter, Princess Mỵ Châu. The story depicts a morally responsive Heaven as a cosmic authority which sends miracles in response to the unjust death of the wrongly accused and which determines the rise and fall of kings and their kingdoms, in accordance with their virtue and their destiny. Furthermore, I argue that this concern with a miraculous Heaven that is morally responsive to the deeds of people from all levels of society reflects the late fifteenth-century burgeoning of a Neo-Confucian discourse, which began to shape the moral imagination of intellectual elites during the consolidation of the Lê Dynasty under Lê Thánh Tông (r. 1460–1497). Keywords: An Dương Vương; Âu Lạc; Cổ Loa; Triệu Quang Phục; Mỵ Châu; Lê Dynasty; Lĩnh Nam chích quái; Việt điện u linh tập; NeoConfucianism. Résumé Cet essai étudie l’évolution de l’histoire du roi semi-mythique An Dương (iii e siècle avant notre ère). Il y est démontré que les différentes versions de cette histoire ont gagné en complexité et en construction narrative au fil du temps. En fin de compte, la version finale et la plus complexe, qui date du xv e siècle, est composée de multiples fils narratifs entrelacés, dont l’un se concentre sur le destin de la fille martyre du roi An Dương, la princesse Mỵ Châu. Le récit s’attache singulièrement à dépeindre un Ciel moralement réceptif, un Ciel qui envoie des miracles en réponse à la mort injuste des personnes accusées à tort et qui détermine l’ascension et la chute des rois et de leurs royaumes, en fonction de leur vertu et de leur destin. En outre, il y est soutenu que cette préoccupation pour le Ciel, à la fin du xv e siècle, reflète l’essor du discours néo-confucéen sur le Ciel, qui a commencé à façonner l’imagination morale des élites Bulletin de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient, 108 (2022), pp. 217-288 intellectuelles pendant la consolidation de la dynastie Lê, sous Lê Thánh Tông (r. 1460-1497). Mots-clés : An Dương Vương ; Âu Lạc ; Cổ Loa ; Triệu Quang Phục ; Mỵ Châu ; Lê Dynasty ; Lĩnh Nam chích quái ; Việt điện u linh tập ; néo-confucianisme. Body of Jade, Pearls of Blood The Evolution of the King An Dương Story and the Moral Imagination of Fifteenth-Century Đại Việt Cuong T. Mai* Trông ơn trời đất thứ khoan, Thịt nguyện nên đá máu nguyện nên châu. Hoping for the grace of Heaven and Earth’s magnanimous pardon, Flesh vows to be stone, blood vows to be pearls.1 1. Introduction In an early fourteenth-century text known as a Brief Gazetteer of Annam, the author Lê Tắc (c. 1260s–c. 1340s) tells us that in the past a king once owned an “ancient pond,” the waters from which could polish pearls and make them extraordinarily effulgent.2 Later, in a fifteenth-century text, Gleanings of the Uncanny from South of the Peaks (hereafter, Gleanings of the Uncanny), we read another version of the same tale, about the same king: when pearls made from the blood of a princess, who had been beheaded by the king, her father, are washed with the waters from a well in which her grief-stricken lover, a prince, had drowned himself, then the pearls become extraordinarily * Cuong T. Mai is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at Appalachian State University, Boone, North Carolina (maict@appstate.edu). A Summer Research Grant from the College of Arts and Sciences funded the initiation of this project, and a generous grant from the University Research Council supported travel, field research, and archival research for its completion. The author is grateful for the instructive comments of the journal’s anonymous reviewers. 1. These are the final words of Princess Mỵ Chậu before she is beheaded by her father King An Dương, as retold in a late seventeenth-/early eighteenth-century chronicle of Vietnamese history composed in 6–8 verse and written in the Nôm script, entitled Chronicles of the Celestial South (Thiên nam ngữ lục 天南語錄, by anonymous). I have consulted two Quốc Ngữ editions, the 1958 edition by Nguyễn Lương Ngọc and Đinh Gia Khánh (p. 97) and the 2001 edition by Nguyễn Thị Lâm & Nguyễn Ngọc San (lines 1089–1090). On this text, see also Huỳnh Sanh Thông (1985, pp. 77–80), who translates “Thiên Nam” in the title as “Heaven’s South,” which is technically more accurate than “Celestial South,” but in my opinion, is less mellifluous. On the tale of King An Dương in Chronicles of the Celestial South, see also Lê Văn Hảo 1966, pp. 99–104, 108–111. 2. An Nam chí lược, Annan zhi lüe 安南志略. A work (originally) in 20 volumes (juan 卷) by Lê Tắc, who completed it in c. 1335 while living in Hubei as an exile under the Yuan Dynasty. Kathleen Baldanza (2016, p. 28) provides an analysis of this work and notes that it is, “the earliest extant work on Dai Viet by a Vietnamese author.” In this essay I rely on the Chinese text provided in Lê Tắc 2009, which also contains a modern Vietnamese translation. See also Cadière & Pelliot 1904, pp. 624–625; Gaspardone 1934, pp. 11, 27; Trần Văn Giáp 1962, vol. 1, pp. 34–39; 1990, vol. 1, pp. 318–321; Taylor 1983, pp. 350–351. 220 Cuong T. Mai beautiful.3 It is in this later fifteenth-century version that we find the princess being accused of betraying her father, the king, who then executes her. But before the beheading, the princess declares her innocence and utters an invocation, praying that if she is indeed innocent then may her body turn into jade and her blood into pearls, which is precisely what happens. Anyone familiar with premodern Vietnamese history, culture, or literature will recognize the king in the story as King An Dương, ruler of Âu Lạc, and the tragic lovers as his daughter, Princess Mỵ Châu and Prince Zhongshi 仲始 (Trọng Thuỷ), the son of Zhao Tuo 趙佗 (Triệu Đà), ruler of the rival kingdom of Nanyue (Nam Việt).4 When these two versions of the tale of the rise and fall of King An Dương are juxtaposed in this way, the elaborate plot and vibrant details of the latest and longest version of the tale gain special salience. What is a magical royal pond in the earlier version found in the Brief Gazetteer of Annam, in the later Gleanings of the Uncanny, turns into a well in which Prince Zhongshi had drowned himself. The pearls come from oysters that had consumed the blood that had flowed into the sea from the corpse of the beheaded princess. Thus, in this later version of the story, it is no longer that the waters of the “ancient pond” are inherently special, but that the brightness of the pearls washed with waters from the suicide well achieve their effulgence from the symbolic joining of tragic lovers separated by death. In other words, by the fifteenth century, what was once simply a story about the rise and fall of King An Dương, has become a multi-threaded story with additional protagonists and conflicts, concluding with an episode featuring tragic lovers forever separated by deaths arising from political circumstances which lied beyond their control. What I have stated above, for the most part, is not controversial. Indeed, the story cycle is well known. Nevertheless, by juxtaposing the two versions, I highlight the task of this essay: to reorient our approach to the different versions of the narrative of King An Dương’s rise and fall, thereby to produce a new analysis which will let us glimpse the broader cultural, literary, and religious situation of fifteenth-century Đại Việt. This new analysis will 3. Lĩnh Nam chích quái 嶺南摭怪, a fourteenth-century compilation of stories traditionally attributed to Trần Thế Pháp, but expanded over many subsequent centuries. A list of manuscript recensions and their reference numbers are provided in Taylor 2018. A useful comparative table listing manuscript versions, their reference numbers, and contents is provided in Trần Nghĩa 1997, vol 1., pp. 150–151 as well as Dai 1991, pp. 257–278. Trần Nghĩa compares manuscripts A.33, A.1200, A.1300, A.1752, A.2107, A.2914, Vhv. 1266, Vhv.1473, A. 1516. In this essay I consult manuscript A.33, which consists of 2 volumes (22 stories), and is reproduced in modern typeset in Chen Yiyuan et al. 2011, vol. 1, pp. 1–66. I have also consulted the modern typeset editions of A.2107 and VHv.1473 found in Chen Yiyuan et al. 2011, vol. 1, pp. 67–142 and 143–224. See also Gaspardone 1934, pp. 128–130; Đinh Gia Khánh et al. 1978, pp. 336–341; Taylor 1983, pp. 355–357; Trần Văn Giáp 1990, vol. 1, pp. 186–192; Lin 1996, pp. 58–59; Nguyễn Đăng Na 2001, pp. 30–31, 47–48; Dror 2007, pp. 21–30; Ren 2010, pp. 79–99; Engelbert 2011; Kelley 2012, pp. 89–92; 2015a, 2015b. Moreover, I have consulted and benefited from the translation of Gleanings of the Uncanny provided by Liam C. Kelley on the website, Viet Texts (https://sites. google.com/a/hawaii.edu/viet-texts/), accessed October 1, 2021. Nevertheless, at several points I provide different renderings due to differences in interpretation. 4. Chinese names will be written in Pinyin throughout the essay, and corresponding Quốc Ngữ transcription will be provided only on the first occurrence. Body of Jade, Pearls of Blood 221 require that scholars read the different versions against each other, rather than ignoring contradictions and lacunae to generate a unified narrative, or rather than uncritically reading the different versions as if they were transparent windows into a presumed third-century bce reality.5 The critical and close reading of primary sources, in the original language and each situated within its own historical context, will let us see inconsistencies and contradictions in the different versions as they developed over time, as well as more clearly see later elaborations and additions. This methodological reorientation will allow us to begin exploring the religious imagination of fifteenth-century Đại Việt, the time and place in which, as I will argue, the production of the final and most complex version of the King An Dương story was situated. For example, by examining the evolution of the different versions of the King An Dương story I will show how the fifteenth-century version relates to a similar fourteenth-century tale of a different king, Triệu Việt of the sixth century ce. I will bracket the vexing problems surrounding the issue of the historicity of the figure of “King An Dương,” his supposed fortress “Loa Thành” and his kingdom “Âu Lạc.” 6 For the purposes of this essay, I shall consider the historicity of “King An Dương” to be an open question, until further textual or archaeological evidence can be found.7 First, as Keith W. Taylor has rightly noted, the traditional dates for King An Dương’s reign (257–208 bce), based on Ngô Sĩ Liên’s Comprehensive Book of Đại Việt Chronicles, are highly 5. Consider, for example, Lü Shipeng’s (1964, pp. 13–17) description of purported interactions between ancient Sichuan and the Red River region based on uncritical readings and comparison of the fourth-century ce Gazetteer on the Land South of (Mount) Hua (Huayang guozhi 華陽國志) and the fifteenth-century ce Comprehensive Book of Đại Việt Chronicles (Đại Việt sử ký toàn thư 大越史記全書). 6. The earliest extant use of the term Ou Luo in relation to the Red River region is found relatively late, in the fifth-century Record of Guangzhou. Liam C. Kelley (2013, pp. 139 and 143) has argued, however, that this usage in the Record of Guangzhou is ambiguous and that the name Âu Lạc (as the name of a kingdom) is a medieval Vietnamese invention, first used in the fifteenth-century Comprehensive Book. I agree and would point out that the uses of the term Ou Luo changed over time, from an exonym for a tribe, to a toponym of an area somewhere in present-day Guangxi/ northern Vietnam, to the name of a kingdom, the latter invented in the fifteenth century, as Kelley notes. Unfortunately, much of prior scholarship has elided these historical semantic shifts. For example, when the term Ou Luo 甌駱 appears in early texts that refer to Qin- and Han-period events, modern sinologists commonly transliterate it as Âu Lạc, the presumed kingdom of King An Dương. However, if we examine the uses of the term Ou Luo in various ancient sources, such as the Historical Records (Shiji 史記), the History of the Han (Han Shu 漢書), and the Huainanzi (淮南子), we can see the referents for the name Ou Luo changing through time, from the name of certain peoples/tribes of ancient Zhejiang and Guangxi, to a kind of tribal confederacy in Guizhou and the Red River region, and eventually, a distinct kingdom of a semi-mythical king who supposedly ruled ancient northern Vietnam. For example, four references in the biography of Zhao Tuo in the Shiji clearly indicate that Ou and Luo refer to two distinct groups, not one. See Watson 1993, pp. 209, 210, 216, 217; Nienhauser et al. 2020, pp. 6, 8, 19, 20. See also Taylor 1983, pp. 15–18, and on the mention of the Western Ou in the Huainanzi, see O’Harrow 1979, p. 145. In short, sinologists who transliterate Ou Luo as Âu Lạc when reading ancient Chinese texts are following a medieval Vietnamese reading of the fifth-century Record of Guangzhou, and thus, are anachronistically imposing that reading back onto Qin- and Han-period sources. For more, on the semantic changes in the term Ou Luo, see Mai 2022. 7. By contrast, for the standard view on the historicity of King An Dương in contemporary Vietnamese historiography see Vũ Duy Mền et al. 2013, especially Chapter III of vol. 1. 222 Cuong T. Mai doubtful.8 Second, Sima Qian’s Historical Records (Shiji 史記) says that Zhao Tuo did not claim the title “Martial King of Nanyue” (Nam Việt Võ Vương, Nanyue Wuwang 南越武王) and annex Guilin, Nanhai, and Xiang Commanderies until c. 204 bce (Brindley 2015, p. 93). And he did not make Minyue (Mân Việt), Western Ou, and Luo submit as subordinate states until about 180 bce, after the death of Empress Dowager Lü (r. 195–180 bce). Therefore, King An Dương’s supposed defeat at the hands of Zhao Tuo could not have occurred earlier than 204 bce.9 More likely, if at all, it occurred c. 180 bce.10 Further, the description of Zhao Tuo’s aggression towards Minyue, Western Ou, and Luo found in Sima Qian’s Historical Records mentions neither the figure “King An Dương” nor a military expedition, as one might expect. Rather, the text states that Minyue, Western Ou, and Luo were intimidated and bribed into dependency (shu 屬).11 Sima Qian writes, …thereupon [Zhao] Tuo took for himself the honored title of Martial Emperor of Nanyue, then sent troops to attack Changsha border settlements. After defeating several districts, he left. The Empress Gao sent General Zao, Marquis of Longlü, to go and attack him. He encountered heat and humidity and his soldiers in great numbers succumbed to pestilence. The troops could not cross the mountain ridges. About a year later the Empress Gao passed, and the troops were withdrawn. Because of this, [Zhao] Tuo had his troops [show their] might at the borders, and he used wealth to bribe the Minyue, the Western Ou, and the Luo, and coerce them into dependency. …於是佗乃自尊號為南越武帝，發兵攻長沙邊邑，敗數縣而去焉。高后遣將軍隆 慮侯灶往擊之。會暑溼，士卒大疫，兵不能踰嶺。歲餘，高后崩，即罷兵。佗因此 以兵威邊，財物賂遺閩越、西甌、駱，役屬焉。12 8. See Taylor 1983, p. 25, note 113. According to Ngô Sĩ Liên, Giáp Thìn nguyên niên 甲辰元年, Chu Noãn Vương ngũ thập bát niên 周赧王五十八年 - Qúy Tỵ ngũ thập niên 癸巳五十年, Tần Nhị Thế Hồ Hợi nhị niên 秦二世胡亥二年, which corresponds to 257–208 bce. For the Chinese text, see Sun Xiao 2015, vol. 1, pp. 43 and 48, and for the Vietnamese translation see Ngô Sĩ Liên 1993, vol. 1, pp. 135, 139. Ngô Sĩ Liên probably calculated the date of the beginning of King An Dương’s reign based on the story of Mount Tản Viên, which says that the final generation (eighteenth) of Hùng Kings was contemporaneous with the reign of King Nan of the Zhou (r. 314–256 bce). This account is discussed below. 9. It is possible that c. 204 bce could be the date of the defeat of King An Dương, if Xiang Commandery at the time encompassed the Red River region. However, the question of the geographic extent of Xiang during the Qin remains unresolved in French and Chinese scholarship, as Yufen Chang has shown. Chang elucidates how the debate remains divided into two camps: those who hold Xiang was limited to the Guangxi area (following Maspero) and those who hold Xiang extended to the Red River region (following Aurousseau). See Lü 1964, pp. 23–27; Nienhauser et al. 2020, p. 2, note 7; Chang 2021; Korolkov 2022, pp. 97–98. Also, note that Stephen O’Harrow has argued that the Nanyue Kingdom never directly controlled the Red River region. See O’Harrow 1979, pp. 146–147. 10. See Lü 1964, p. 31; Taylor 1983, pp. 23–27. 11. See Brindley 2015, p. 93. 12. See Shiji, vol. 113. For a full translation of this account, see Watson 1993, pp. 207–217, and Nienhauser et al. 2020, pp. 1–28. Also, a similar passage in the History of the Han basically repeats the same information. See Han Shu, vol. 95. Here, we should note that Watson translates the end of the passage as, “…Minyue, Western Ou, and Luoluo…” By contrast, Nienhauser reads the end of the passage as, “…Min Yüe, Hsi Ou, and Lo…” And further, Nienhauser says that Luo/Lo 駱, “very likely refers to the kingdom of Au Lac in the Red River delta.” See Nienhauser et al. 2020, Body of Jade, Pearls of Blood 223 As I will discuss in detail later, the earliest description of the defeat of King An Dương in the extant textual corpus appears some five hundred years after the alleged historical incident, in the late third-/early fourth-century text, Accounts of Nhật Nam (Nhật Nam truyện, Rinan zhuan 日南傳). Yet, even in this text, neither the name of the kingdom of King An Dương nor his Spiral Citadel (Loa Thành 螺城) are mentioned. In fact, the earliest reference to the name Âu Lạc (Ou Luo 甌駱) is found in a brief passage in the fifth-century Record of Guangzhou (Guangzhou ji 廣州記), which states, …Later, a son of the King of Shu led troops and attacked the Lạc 駱 marquises. He called himself King An Dương and ruled at Phong Khê District. Later, Commander Tuo, King of Nanyue, attacked and defeated King An Dương. He sent two emissaries to administer the two commanderies of Jiaozhi and Jiuzhen, which were [precisely] Ou Luo 甌駱. …後蜀王子將兵討駱侯，自稱為安陽王，治封溪縣，後南越王尉佗攻破安陽王， 令二使典主交趾，九真二郡，即甌駱也。13 This passage from the Record of Guangzhou is problematic and, in my opinion, is less credible than an earlier text, the Jiaozhou Outer Region Record, which dates from the late third/early fourth century ce. In fact, the passage cited above from the Record of Guangzhou is probably a misreading of the Jiaozhou Outer Region Record, which states, The King of Yue sent two emissaries to administer the people of the two commanderies of Jiaozhi and Jiuzhen. Later, the Han sent the WaveQuelling General, Lu Bode, to attack the King of Yue. General Lu arrived at Hepu and the King of Yue sent two emissaries, who presented three hundred cattle, a thousand goblets of liquor, and the household registers of the people of the two commanderies, and then paid respects to General Lu. He then had both emissaries serve as Grand Protectors (太守) of Jiaozhi and Jiuzhen. The Lạc Generals continued to rule the people, as before. Jiaozhi Commandery and Province were the original jurisdictions at this place. The name of the province is Jiao. …越王令二使者典主交趾、九真二郡民，後漢遣伏波將軍路博德討越王，路將軍 到合浦，越王令二使者，齎牛百頭，酒千鍾，及二郡民戶口簿，詣路將軍，乃拜二使 者為交趾、九真太守，諸雒將主民如故。交趾郡及州本治於此也。州名為交州。14 p. 6 note 34. Similarly, Korolkov takes the end of the passage to refer to Ou Luo. See Korolkov 2022, p. 176. 13. The Record of Guangzhou is not extant. This excerpt is quoted in Investigating Obscurities in the Historical Records (Shiji suoyin 史記索隱) by Sima Zhen 司馬貞 (679–732). See Chen Jinghe 1952, pp. 89–90; Rao 1969, p. 41; Kelley 2012, p. 108. Liam C. Kelley has rightly noted that the terms Jiaozhi and Jiuzhen used in the Record of Guangzhou are anachronistic. See Kelley 2013, p. 139, note 40. 14. Jiaozhou Outer Region Record (Giao Châu ngoại vực ký, Jiaozhou waiyu ji 交州外域記). This excerpt is found in the sixth-century Annotated Classic of Waterways (Shuijing zhu 水經注) by Li Daoyuan 酈道元 (d. 527). I have consulted the collated, modern typeset edition by Chen Qiaoyi 陳橋驛 (1999, pp. 642–643). On the Shuijing zhu, see also Nylan 2010; Huesemann 2015; Lycas 2018; Felt 2021. Moreover, Liam C. Kelley has argued that the Jiaozhou Outer Region Record is the main source of the medieval invention of the Hùng Kings tradition. See Kelley 2012, pp. 106–107; 2013, pp. 136–137, 146–148. 224 Cuong T. Mai We should note that this passage does not say specifically that Jiaozhi and Jiuzhen were won by conquering “King An Dương,” nor is it clear that the first reference to “King of Yue” (越王) unambiguously refers to Zhao Tuo (as the author of the Record of Guangzhou apparently presumes).15 Further, we can note that the second reference to sending two emissaries to Jiaozhi and Jiuzhen occurred during the Han, in 111 bce, by which time Zhao Tuo had long been dead (d. 138 bce). In this case, the second reference to “King of Yue” (when “General Lu arrived to Hepu”) is surely pointing to the final king of Nanyue, Zhao Jiande. As I will discuss in detail below, the other passage from the Jiaozhou Outer Region Record, which does mention Zhao Tuo’s defeat of “King An Dương,” neither mentions the location nor the name of his kingdom, nor his citadel. Hence, it is possible that the passage above from the fifth-century Record of Guangzhou, which claims that Zhao Tuo defeated “King An Dương” then sent two emissaries to govern Jiaozhi and Jiuzhen, might be a misreading of the late third-/early fourth-century Jiaozhou Outer Region Record. Of course, we cannot rule out the possibility of a historical ruler of a polity located somewhere in the Guangxi/Red River region who resisted the Nanyue Kingdom, and who would be identified by posterity as “King An Dương,” and who would then, even later, be associated with actual remnants of an ancient citadel located in the Red River region.16 Yet, using only extant pre-fourteenth-century sources, presently we cannot determine with any degree of certainty who “King An Dương” was, where he ruled, the name of his kingdom, whether he invaded the ancient Red River region, and when he may have been defeated by the Nanyue Kingdom.17 For this reason, I refer to him as semi-mythical. In any case, further clarification of these issues will require additional textual or archaeological data.18 15. Perhaps, it refers to Zhao Jiande, which would make sense, because the subsequent sentence refers to the events of 111 bce, which involved not Zhao Tuo, but Zhao Jiande. Nevertheless, most scholars would read this as an implicit reference to Zhao Tuo. For example, see Nguyễn Phương 1976, pp. 54–61; Taylor 1983, pp. 25–26. 16. According to Nam Kim, archaeological study of the three-layered ramparted area, covering some 600 hectares, and situated northeast of modern Hanoi, clearly points towards the existence of some type of urban center that was established by a centralized, complex, pre-Sinitic polity which existed between 500 and 100 bce. Whether this fortress complex correlates to the “Cổ Loa” associated with the figure of King An Dương and his kingdom of Âu Lạc, remains controversial. Nam Kim writes, “Although traditions hold that An Duong Vuong overthrew the Van Lang Kingdom, and that his Au Lac polity constructed Co Loa and even its fortifications, this claim may never be fully substantiated.” See Kim 2015, p. 152. Thus, according to Kim, at best, we can only conclude that, “a highly centralized and powerful sociopolitical organization was responsible for founding the Co Loa capital site, and that this occurred well before the Red River Valley’s absorption into the Han Empire,” Kim 2015, p. 228; Kim et al. 2010, p. 1025. See also Korolkov 2022, pp. 176–177. 17. Liam C. Kelley and Hong Hai Dinh (2021) have noted how the term Lạc (駱 or 雒) has been used to refer to an imagined Lạc Việt/Luoyue (駱越, 雒越) ethnic group, which could serve as the supposed ancestors of the Vietnamese, or alternately, the Zhuang people. Kelley and Dinh have underscored how the term began as an exonym, that is, a term used by the Han Chinese to refer to “a multiethnic population that shared certain cultural and social practices” (2021, p. 93), and was transformed in modern times into an autonym for ideological and nationalist purposes. 18. For more on the problem of the historicity of King An Dương, see Maspero 1916; Durand 1954; Lü 1964, pp. 9–19; Chen 1970; Rao 1970; Yamamoto 1970; O’Harrow 1979, pp. 148–150; Taylor 1983, pp. 19–23; Nguyễn Quang Ngọc & Vũ Văn Quân 2010, pp. 192–197; Kelley 2015b, Body of Jade, Pearls of Blood 225 The remainder of this essay will not focus on the historical “King An Dương,” but rather, the “King An Dương” of the Vietnamese medieval imagination.19 For example, as I will show, it is only in the fifteenth-century version of the story that we find Mỵ Châu depicted as a martyr to loyalty and filial piety, a victim of a husband’s betrayal and a father’s false accusation, and ultimately, an unjust death. As I will argue, the appearance in the fifteenth century of this more elaborate version of the King An Dương story is not mere coincidence. Rather, it indicates a significant historical development in the moral imagination of the elite writing class: the emergence in late fifteenth-century Đại Việt of a Neo-Confucian discourse of Heaven. 2. The Evolution of the King An Dương Story Below, the analysis of all the extant versions of the King An Dương story will show that by the fourth century a relatively stable narrative tradition had developed. It consisted of a basic sequence of episodes: a prince of Shu — future King An Dương — invades an unnamed kingdom, fends off Zhao Tuo with a magic crossbow created by a divine man named Cao Thông, is undone by a licentious and traitorous daughter, and then manages to escape by going into the sea. Five additional details appear in two fourteenth-century sources: the prince’s name is Phán; the invaded kingdom is named Văn Lang; the invasion occurred around the time of the end of the Zhou Dynasty; the divine crossbow has a magical trigger; and the escape into the sea was made possible by a special rhinoceros horn. I will then use this basic textual history to investigate later narrative elaborations that emerged in the fifteenth century. The longest version of the King An Dương story, briefly introduced above, appears in the fifteenth century, in two extant versions, one found in Gleanings of the Uncanny and the other in Ngô Sĩ Liên’s Comprehensive Book of Đại Việt Chronicles.20 The two versions are very similar, though Ngô pp. 88–92. In the 1960s, the issue of the historicity of King An Dương was revived anew with the appearance of Lã Văn Lô’s Vietnamese translation of a supposedly Tày language original text, entitled, “Nine Lords Compete to Become King.” The text seemed to confirm that King An Dương was indeed the leader of a third-century bce confederation of nine Mường lords who ruled a region called Nam Cương (located in present-day Cao Bằng Province). The Tày original was reportedly transcribed from an oral source by a certain Lê Đình Sự, who composed a prose version that was rewritten into verse, the latter of which was the basis of Lã Văn Lô’s translation and which was ultimately lost. Liam C. Kelley has noted that the circumstances of the appearance of the purported translation and the mysterious lack of a Tày original source make the text’s “validity as a document for historical research” highly questionable. See Kelley 2013, pp. 137–139. Keith W. Taylor (1983, pp. 19–20) has also noted that the text is of “doubtful authenticity.” See also Lê Văn Hảo 1966, pp. 69–71; Nguyễn Quang Ngọc & Vũ Văn Quân 2010, p. 196. 19. More precisely, I will consider the memory of King An Dương only up to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. On the cult of King An Dương during the early nineteenth century, see Langlet 1990, pp. 248, 254–255, 261–262. And on King An Dương as the City God of Cổ Loa and the veneration of Mỵ Châu at various sites in North Vietnam, see Lê Văn Hảo 1966, pp. 52–54, 60, 81. 20. Comprehensive Book of Đại Việt Chronicles (Đại Việt sử ký toàn thư 大越史記全書, hereafter Comprehensive Book), a multi-volume work completed in 1479 by Ngô Sĩ Liên, who consulted various prior works, including histories by Lê Văn Hưu and Phan Phu Tiên. It was expanded through the centuries by scholars such as Vũ Quỳnh, Phạm Công Trứ and Lê Hi. In this essay I rely on the standard modern Vietnamese four-volume translation completed in 1993, based on 226 Cuong T. Mai Sĩ Liên shortens the narrative, most notably, by excising the spirit battle that precedes the building of Spiral Citadel. Below, I break down the narrative found in Gleanings of the Uncanny. (A full translation and analysis will be provided in the next section.) This final and most complex version can be divided into seven main narrative episodes: A) Rejected marriage proposal B) Prince of Shu invades C) Building Spiral Citadel D) Zhongshi’s subterfuge E) Zhao Tuo invades F) Mỵ Châu’s testimony G) Golden Turtle’s escort This breakdown immediately raises several noteworthy points. First, episodes A, C, F, and G (rejected marriage proposal, building Spiral Citadel, Mỵ Châu’s testimony, and Golden Turtle’s escort) are not found in any versions dating before the fifteenth century. Second, episode A, which describes a rejected marriage proposal from Shu, only appears in the fifteenth-century version and not in any known older versions of the story. The premise of a rejected marriage proposal serving as the root cause of enmity between Shu and the Red River region is probably echoing a mention of this very incident in a different fourteenth-century story, that of the Tản Viên mountain deity, found in the Compendium on Mystic Numina of the Viet Realm.21 the 1697 (Chính Hoà) edition. See Ngô Sĩ Liên 1993. I will also provide Chinese texts based on the typeset edition in Sun Xiao 2015. To my knowledge there is not yet a single monograph study of the Comprehensive Book. I have consulted a variety of secondary literature in trying to understand Ngô Sĩ Liên’s intellectual commitments and historiographical approach, including Taylor 1983, pp. 357–359; Wolters 2001; Yu 2006, and the essays in Phan Đại Doãn 1998. See also Cadière & Pelliot 1904, pp. 627–628; Gaspardone 1934, pp. 51–58; Đinh Gia Khánh et al. 1978, pp. 321–329; Trần Văn Giáp 1990, vol. 1, pp. 64–72. 21. The Tản Viên story will be discussed in more detail below. Compendium on Mystic Numina of the Viet Realm, Việt điện u linh tập 越甸幽靈集, is a compilation of stories traditionally attributed to Lý Tế Xuyên, published in the early fourteenth century (1329), and containing excerpts from earlier sources. This compilation has undergone numerous revisions and expansions over the centuries (from its putatively original 27 stories), with significant supplements provided by Nguyễn Văn Chất (NVC) and Ngô Giáp Đậu (NGD) and editing by Cao Huy Diệu, Lê Hữu Hỷ, and others. At present there are two basic versions of the Compendium on Mystic Numina, “long” and “short,” with the latter having significantly abbreviated narratives. The “long” versions can be found in manuscripts, A.751 (27+3 by NVC+5 by NGD), total 35 stories; A.2879 (27+3 by NVC+3 by NGD), total 33 stories; and VHv. 1285a (27+3 by NVC+6 by NGD), total 36 stories. The “short” versions can be found in manuscripts, A. 47 (28 + 4 by NVC) total 32 stories; A. 1919 (28+4 by NVC) total 32; VHv. 1285b (24+3 by NVC+6) total 33. For this essay I rely on a collated “long” version, working from the modern typeset text entitled, Việt điện u linh tập toàn biên (Complete Edition of the Compendium on Mystic Numina of the Viet Realm), found in Chan Hing-ho et al. 1992, series 2, vol. 1, which is a collation of the manuscripts A.751, A.2879, VHv.1285a. For translations of select passages from the Tản Viên story in this essay I will provide precise citations to this modern typeset edition. For more on the historical context of this compilation, see also Gaspardone 1934, pp. 126–128; Taylor 1983, pp. 352–354; 1986a; 1986b; Trần Văn Giáp 1990, vol. 1, pp. 180–186; Dror 2007, pp. 14–21; Ren 2010, pp. 20–39. Also, the common translation of the title of this text is “Departed Spirts of the Viet Realm.” I prefer to translate the compound u linh 幽靈 in the title as “mystic numina.” While u linh, in some contexts, may refer specifically to “departed spirits,” meaning roughly “the souls of dead humans,” here the compound as used in the title and the body of the text should be understood more generically. This is clear because the text deals with not just spirits of dead humans, but also Body of Jade, Pearls of Blood 227 However, the account of the rejected marriage proposal in the Tản Viên story contradicts the fifteenth-century King An Dương story because in the former it is a character named Phán who is rejected and in the latter it is an ancestor of Phán. In fact, in the fifteenth-century King An Dương story, Phán is said to hold a grudge against the kingdom of Văn Lang precisely because the rejected betrothal had happened to his forbear. This contradiction in attributing the cause of the enmity between Shu and Văn Lang raises important questions: why did the fifteenth-century version of the King An Dương story keep this reference to a rebuffed marriage proposal only to explicitly reject that it was Phán who proposed the marriage? That is, why borrow the failed marriage theme found in the Tản Viên story if its very premise is rejected outright? What narrative role does the rebuffed marriage proposal play in the fifteenth-century King An Dương story? Why did it not appear in earlier versions? I will address these questions later. For now, it will suffice to note that the motif of enmity rooted in a rejected marriage proposal provides an excellent pretext for a fifteenth-century invention, namely, episode C, the spirit battle which precedes the building of Spiral Citadel (Cổ Loa). Similarly, I will show that narrative episodes C, F, and G (building Spiral Citadel, Mỵ Châu’s testimony, and Golden Turtle’s escort) are also most likely 14th–15th-century elaborations. Thus, I will address these narrative episodes later in the essay, when I show that they were most likely created in the fifteenth century, inspired by fourteenth-century sources. Here, in this initial part of the analysis, I want to examine the simplest and oldest narrative structure, which is comprised of episodes B, D, and E (prince of Shu invades, Zhongshi’s subterfuge, and Zhao Tuo invades). The most basic and earliest (extant) version of the King An Dương story can be traced to the late third-/early fourth-century text, Accounts of Nhật Nam: Commander Tuo, King of Nanyue, attacked [King] An Dương. King An Dương had a divine man [named] Cao Thông, [who] made for King An Dương a divine crossbow, [which] in one shot could kill 10,000 men and in three shots could kill 30,000 men. Tuo withdrew and sent Crown Prince Shi to submit to [King] An Dương. [King] An Dương did not know that [Cao] Thông was a divine person. He did not treat [Cao Thông] in accords spirits of the waters, earth, and mountains, which are decidedly not the spirits of deceased humans (though they may take human shape in visions and dreams to communicate with humans, but this is an altogether separate issue). Moreover, u 幽, meaning dark, mysterious, unfathomable, occult or hidden, is here a quality attributed to linh 靈, numinous potency. Here u invokes a range of related conceptual dichotomies, such as visible/invisible and dark/light, which are found throughout the text, and in zhiquai, chuanqi literature more broadly. For a discussion of such terms in the Chinese context, see Kao 1985, pp. 7–8; DeWoskin & Crump 1996, p. 62; Campany 1996, pp. 347; 2012, pp. 14–15. Similarly, linh can sometimes refer to the spirits of deceased humans (e.g., linh hồn 靈魂), but more generally, it typically refers not to a thing or an essence, but rather, a power or efficacy, that is, a feature or a characteristic of a phenomenon which stands outside of the ordinary (i.e., odd, strange, or uncanny [quái, dị]). Thus, a mountain, tree, river, a stone, or even a strange indentation in the earth that resembles a footprint, can possess linh, as can the soul of a chaste wife who had committed suicide or the soul of a courageous general killed in battle. For linh/ling 靈, I follow some scholars of Chinese religions who use the term “numina,” which has the added benefit of being relatively uncommon in English usage and therefore less likely to invoke unintended cultural and conceptual associations. In short, the compound u linh in the title of the text refers broadly to the “mystic numina,” or the mysterious efficacy, of all kinds of spirits of the Viet realm, not just that of dead humans. 228 Cuong T. Mai with the principles of the Way, and [thus] Cao left. Shi’s appearance was upright and handsome and King An Dương’s daughter, Mỵ Châu, took a liking to his looks and consorted with him. Shi and Mỵ Châu entered the storage and surreptitiously cut and broke the divine crossbow. Then [Shi] left and went back to report it to Tuo. Tuo was exceedingly amazed. King An Dương’s cross bow was broken and his army defeated. [They] fled into the sea and were routed. 南越王尉佗攻安陽。安陽王有神人。高通為安陽王治神弩一張，一發萬人死，三 發殺三萬人。佗退，遣太子始降安陽。安陽不知通神人，遇無道理，通去。始有姿 容端美，安陽王女眉珠悅其貌而通之。始與珠入庫盜鋸截神弩，亡歸報佗。佗出 其非意。安陽王弩折兵挫，浮海奔竄。22 In this, the shortest extant account of the rise and fall of King An Dương, we see a brief, annalistic narrative. Though there is mention of episodes D and E (Zhongshi’s subterfuge, Zhao Tuo invades), there is no mention of episode B (prince of Shu invades). In this version, the story focuses on how King An Dương lost his magic weapon, the divine crossbow (thần nỏ 神弩), made by his advisor Cao Thông, a divine man (thần nhân 神人), through the subterfuge of Zhao Tuo and his son Zhongshi. Interestingly, blame is placed also on King An Dương’s daughter, Mỵ Châu, who it is said, “took a liking to his looks and consorted with him” (悅其貌而通之). The combination of the words duyệt/yue 悅 (enjoyment, pleasure) and thông/tong 通 (penetrate) lends the description an illicit, lascivious tone and a marked negative connotation regarding Mỵ Châu’s moral standing. In fact, Zhongshi and Mỵ Châu together entered the storage and “surreptitiously cut and broke the divine crossbow.” Finally, of all the extant accounts, this one has the tersest description of King An Dương’s final fate. The text states only that, “King An Dương’s cross bow was broken and his army defeated. [They] fled into the sea and were routed.” Another late third-/early fourth-century text, Jiaozhou Outer Region Record, contains an account of King An Dương which shares the basic narrative structure found in the Accounts of Nhật Nam, but provides many more details. In the past, at a time before Jiaozhi had commanderies and districts, the land had Lạc fields. The fields followed the rise and fall of water currents and the people cultivated food in these fields. Thus, they were called the Lạc People. They established Lạc Kings and Lạc Marquises to serve as rulers in the commanderies and districts. When the districts became populous, they established Lạc Generals, who [wore] bronze seals and green ribbons.23 Later, a prince of Shu lead 30,000 troops to attack the Lạc Kings and Lạc Marquises, and to suppress the Lạc Generals. The prince 22. This excerpt from the lost Nhật Nam truyện (Rinan zhuan 日南傳) can be found in the Imperially-perused Encyclopedia of the Taiping Era (Taiping yulan 太平御覽), 2000, vol. 3, juan 348, p. 1090; Rao 1969, pp. 42, 49. 23. For a discussion of this passage, see Appendix B in Taylor 1983, pp. 10–12, 306–308. See also Maspero 1916, 1918; Durand 1954; Gaspardone 1955, and more recently Kelley 2015a, pp. 167–168; 2013, p. 137; 2012, pp. 105–109; Kelley & Hong Hai Dinh 2021, p. 94. Also, Yufen Chang provides a translation of the first part of this passage, as well as a critique of Keith W. Taylor’s analysis of the narrative in his History of the Vietnamese (2013), see Chang 2022, pp. 49–50. See also Lê Văn Hảo 1966, pp. 16–17; Rao 1969, pp. 41–42; Kelley 2012, pp. 106–107. Body of Jade, Pearls of Blood 229 of Shu was then called King An Dương. Later, Commander Tuo, King of Nanyue, raised a multitude [of troops] to attack King An Dương. King An Dương had a divine man named Cao Thông, who descended and served as an assistant, and who made for King An Dương a divine crossbow. One shot could kill three hundred men. The King of Nanyue knew he could not do battle and thus he encamped at Vũ Ninh District, [which, according to the Record of Taikang of the Jin, belongs in Jiaozhou.]24 The Yue sent the Crown Prince named Shi to surrender to King An Dương. [Shi] was named a minister and served [King An Dương]. King An Dương did not realize that Cao Thông was a divine person and did not treat him [in accord] with the Way, so Cao Thông left. He said to the king, “One who keeps this crossbow will rule all under heaven; one who cannot keep this crossbow will lose all under heaven.” Cao Thông then left. King An Dương had a daughter named Mỵ Châu. She saw that Shi was proper and upright, and Mỵ Châu and Shi consorted with each other. Shi asked Mỵ Châu to bring her father’s crossbow so he could see it. He glimpsed the crossbow then stole it in order to saw and break it. He then fled back to report it to the King of Nanyue. Nanyue advanced troops and attacked. King An Dương shot his crossbow; the crossbow broke and he subsequently was defeated. King An Dương went down to a boat to escape by way of the sea. Presently, at Bình Đạo District, the palace citadel of a later king [still] appears at its previous location. 交趾昔未有郡縣之時，土地有雒田，其田從潮水上下，民墾食其田，因名為雒民， 設雒王、雒侯，主諸郡縣。縣多為雒將，雒將銅印青綬。後蜀王子將兵三萬來討雒 王、雒侯，服諸雒將，蜀王子因稱為安陽王。後南越王尉佗舉衆攻安陽王，安陽王 有神人名臯通，下輔佐，為安陽王治神弩一張，一發殺三百人，南越王知不可戰，却 軍住武寧縣。按《晉太康記》，縣屬交趾。越遣太子名始，降服安陽王，稱臣事之。 安陽王不知通神人，遇之無道，通便去，語王曰：能持此弩王天下，不能持此弩者亡 天下。通去，安陽王有女名曰媚珠，見始端正，珠與始交通，始問珠，令取父弩視 之，始見弩，便盜以鋸截弩訖，便逃歸報南越王。南越進兵攻之，安陽王發弩，弩 折遂敗。安陽王下船逕出于海，今平道縣後王宮城見有故處。25 In this version we find the first appearance of episode B (prince of Shu invades), which explains the backstory of King An Dương. This introductory episode identifies him as the prince of Shu who had defeated the rulers of the Lạc people. Moreover, episode B serves to definitively locate the story in Jiaozhi (as does the final detail about the citadel of a later king situated in Bình Đạo District and the detail about Zhao Tuo encamping at Vũ Ninh District).26 In fact, this is the earliest known textual reference which locates 24. On the Taikang ji 太康記, see Chittick 2003, p. 64. 25. See Chen Qiaoyi 1999, pp. 642–643. 26. Bình Đạo District 平道縣 was a part of Phong Khê during the Han Dynasty and was located in Xương Quốc District during the Southern Qi Dynasty (479–502) (平道漢封溪縣地南齊置昌國縣), according to the Old History of the Tang (Jiu Tangshu 舊唐書, 1975, vol. 41, p. 1570). Phong Khê is in present-day Bắc Ninh Province. On Bình Đạo, see also Holmgren 1980, pp. 44, 150. According to the nineteenth-century Complete Edition of the Treatise on Đại Việt Geography (Đại Việt địa dư toàn biên 大越地輿全編) by Nguyễn Văn Siêu (1799–1872), the name Bình Đạo replaced Xương Quốc during the Sui Dynasty (12th year of the Kaihuang era, 593 ce) and this custom continued into the Tang Dynasty. See Đại Việt địa dư toàn biên, 1997, pp. 33, 91. However, the name Bình Đạo seems to have been in use prior to the Sui, even during the Southern Qi Dynasty (ibid., pp. 33, 90). Moreover, the name Bình Đạo is also found in an extract from the fifth-century Gazetteer of Nanyue, a work of the Liu Song Dynasty (420–479). See also Nguyễn Quang Ngọc & Vũ Văn Quân 2010, pp. 132–134, 239–240. 230 Cuong T. Mai King An Dương in ancient Jiaozhi. Also, here we find again episodes D and E (Zhongshi’s subterfuge and Zhao Tuo invades), which fundamentally works to maintain the same narrative structure (i.e., rise and fall of a king) found in the Accounts of Nhật Nam. Nevertheless, the added details now found in episodes D and E (Zhongshi’s subterfuge and Zhao Tuo invades) cumulatively change the tone of the narrative. In this version King An Dương is no longer merely a victim of subterfuge. Rather his negligence makes him partly culpable for the kingdom’s downfall. For example, in this version we see for the first time his advisor Cao Thông warning him about losing his kingdom if he were to lose the divine crossbow. Of course, this statement serves as a foreshadow. But also, it is an especially damning detail in light of another, new detail we find in this version: the fact that Zhongshi is made a minister (thần, chen 臣) to serve King An Dương. In the laconic version of the Accounts of Nhật Nam, there is no mention of Zhongshi’s role at court. Moreover, here Mỵ Châu’s guilt is still maintained, for in this version she is also depicted as illicitly “consorting” (giao thông, jiaotong 交通) with Zhongshi, outside of a proper marriage, upon seeing (being fooled by?) his “proper and upright” demeanor. Nevertheless, the detail about Zhongshi serving as minister explains how he gained access to the inner court, and perhaps even to Mỵ Châu. Both details implicate King An Dương as a negligent ruler. This tone of complicity becomes more stark in light of the Accounts of Nhật Nam version, where King An Dương is depicted as being merely unaware, not necessarily negligent: he did not know (bắt chi, buzhi 不知) that Cao Thông was a divine man. By contrast, to neglect safeguarding the divine crossbow, after Cao Thông’s explicit warning, and to allow the son of one’s enemy to serve in official capacity at court, amount to nothing less than negligence. Still, this version of the story in the Jiaozhou Outer Region Record does not fundamentally diverge from the narrative structure found in the Accounts of Nhật Nam. It merely adds episode B (prince of Shu invades), which explains how King An Dương arrived as a conqueror in the ancient Red River region, roughly at the same time as that of Zhao Tuo’s ascendancy in the north. Moreover, equally important to our analysis is the fact that certain details cannot be found in this, one of two earliest extant versions: there is no reference to a rejected marriage proposal as the pretext for Shu’s attack. And, there is no mention of a royal citadel, nor the mention of King An Dương’s kingdom. Moreover, as in the Accounts of Nhật Nam version, here King An Dương escapes out to sea after his defeat. However, there is no mention of a magical rhinoceros horn that can part waters, no mention of a golden turtle who escorts him into the waters, and no mention of his ultimate fate. Indeed, there is no need for a divine turtle because Cao Thông is the inventor of the divine crossbow. Finally, in these two earliest versions from the late third and early fourth century, Mỵ Châu does not die. Her end is not mentioned in either version. The reader only knows that she had engaged in an illicit affair with an enemy of her father, and that she and her lover were not married. Her only role in the story is to explain how Zhongshi exploited her weakness as a woman in order to gain access to state secrets. Body of Jade, Pearls of Blood 231 Further narrative developments of the King An Dương story can be seen in the fifth-century Gazetteer of Nanyue (Nanyue zhi 南越志), composed by Shen Huaiyuan 沈懷遠 during the Liu Song Dynasty (420–479). Here we read, The land of Jiaozhi is extremely fertile. In the past there were rulers called Hùng Kings who had assistants called Hùng Marquises. Later, the King of Shu ordered thirty thousand troops to attack the Hùng King, who was destroyed. The Shu [King] then [named] his son, King An Dương [and had him] govern Jiaozhi. The territory of that kingdom is in present-day Bình Đạo District. His citadel had nine layers, was nine miles in circumference, and was fully populated with nobility and commoners. [When] Commander Tuo was at Panyu he sent troops to attack it. King [An Dương] had a divine crossbow, which with one shot could kill ten thousand Yue troops. Zhao Tuo then [sought] peace with [King An Dương] and had his son Shi serve as a hostage. King An Dương had his daughter become the wife [of Shi]. Shi then got a hold of the crossbow and destroyed it. The Yue troops then arrived, killed King An Dương, and took his territory. 交趾之地最為膏腴。舊有君長曰雄王，其佐曰雄侯。後蜀王將兵三萬討雄王，滅 之。蜀以其子為安陽王，治交趾。其國地，在今平道縣。其城九重，周九里，士庶 蕃阜。尉佗在番禺，遣兵攻之。王有神弩，一發殺越軍萬人，趙佗乃與之和，仍以 其子始為質。安陽王以媚珠妻之，子始得弩毀之。越兵至乃殺安陽王，兼其地。27 This fifth-century narrative duplicates the general plot of the rise and fall of King An Dương found in the Jiaozhou Outer Region Record. However, we also see several key narrative innovations. In this version, it is the King of Shu, not a prince of Shu, who defeats the final Hùng King (Hùng vương, Xiongwang 雄王).28 And it is the prince who is named King An Dương, by his father, and then is allowed to rule over the conquered territory. In all earlier and later versions, it is a prince of Shu who invades and establishes 27. This passage is quoted in the Old History of The Tang (Jiu Tangshu) composed by Liu Xu 劉昫 (887–946), (1975, vol. 41, p. 1751). Also, this passage is repeated nearly verbatim in the tenthcentury Treatise on the World of the Taiping Era. See Taiping huanyu ji 太平寰宇記, 2007, vol. 170; Lê Văn Hảo 1966, p. 18. A slightly different reading is found in the Extensive Records of the Taiping Era (Taiping guang ji 太平廣記), see Lê Văn Hảo 1966, pp. 17–18; Rao 1969, p. 44; Kelley 2012, pp. 10, 109. 28. Note here the name for the rulers of the polity conquered by King An Dương is not Lạc (as in the earlier Jiaozhou Outer Region Record) but Hùng. This is the first appearance of the name Hùng in the extant historical record (Huệ Thiên 2004, p. 122). For a review and evaluation of the scholarly debates concerning the names Lạc 雒 and Hùng 雄, see Nguyễn Phương 1976, pp. 54–61; Taylor 1983, pp. 306–308. On the theory that Hùng is a scribal error for Lạc, see Maspero 1918, p. 7, and for counter arguments to Maspero, see Gaspardone 1955. Huệ Thiên provides an overview of Dào Duy Anh’s position on the debate, which largely agrees with that of Maspero, and a synopsis and refutation of Trần Quốc Vượng’s theory, which affirms the historicity of the Hùng name (Huệ Thiên 2004, pp. 113–127). Most recently, Kelley follows Maspero but argues that the shift from Lạc 雒 to Hùng 雄 was not an error, but a deliberate renaming, evidence for which can be found in the fifth-century Nanyue zhi and which in context clearly suggests the intended connotation of “strong” (hùng, xiong 雄). Moreover, according to Kelley, this distinction is continued in the account of the Hùng Kings and the Văn Lang Kingdom found in Gleanings of the Uncanny, which uses both terms Lạc and Hùng (Kelley 2012, pp. 112–113). I would add that this simultaneous reference to both Lạc and Hùng is found also in the Tản Viên story found in the Compendium on Mystic Numina, which I discuss below. 232 Cuong T. Mai himself as King An Dương. Second, we find for the first time a description of the citadel: it has nine layers, is nine miles in circumference, and is fully populated.29 However, the citadel is not precisely described as snail-shaped, nor does it have a name (i.e., not Loa Thành, nor Kelü, nor Tư Long, nor Qủy Long, nor Kunlun). Nevertheless, the territory of the kingdom is said to have been located in Bình Đạo District, a detail also found in the Jiaozhou Outer Region Record. Moreover, for the first time, Mỵ Châu is shown being given in marriage, presumably to reciprocate Zhao Tuo’s gesture of peace-making. And thus, Mỵ Châu is not described as a licentious unmarried young woman who is desirous of the good looks of Zhongshi. Further, and most significantly, in this fifth-century narrative, King An Dương does not escape the Nanyue troops; he is killed. This detail contradicts the stories found in earlier sources, such as the Account of Nhật Nam and the Jiaozhou Outer Region Record, both of which say that King An Dương escaped by way of the sea after his defeat. Indeed, no later extant version says that King An Dương is killed. Finally, we should note that the figure of Cao Thông, the divine man who makes the divine crossbow, is not mentioned, nor is there any mention of a magical trigger mechanism, nor is the prince of Shu identified by name as Phán. In sum, of the four most important narrative innovations found in the fifth-century Gazetteer of Nanyue — the marriage alliance, the multi-layered citadel, the King of Shu’s victory over the last Hùng King, and the death of King An Dương — only the last element does not appear in later narratives. However, the marriage alliance and the layered citadel are not mentioned in a subsequent tenth-century version of the story, nor in two fourteenthcentury versions, all of which we will discuss shortly, but only in the final, and most complex fifteenth-century version. Further, it is not clear that these two details found in the final fifteenth-century version are directly inspired by this fifth-century narrative. Thus, the version of the King An Dương story found in the fifth-century Gazetteer of Nanyue probably had the least influence on the Vietnamese imagination. By contrast, a late tenth-century comprehensive geography, the Treatise on the World of the Taiping Era (Taiping huanyu ji 太平寰宇記), contains a version of the King An Dương story which introduces two important innovations that would come to have lasting impacts on the Vietnamese versions of the narrative. The story reads thus, …Later the son of the King of Shu commanded troops and attacked them. Thus, he became King An Dương and ruled Jiaozhi. Commander Tuo raised troops and attacked, but King An Dương had a divine man named Cao Thông, who assisted him and made a crossbow that in one shot could kill ten thousand Yue troops, and in three shots could kill thirty thousand persons. Tuo then understood the reason so he withdrew, encamped, and rested his troops by returning to Vũ Ninh. He then sent his second son Shi 29. This is the earliest extant reference to King An Dương’s citadel. Note, however, that here it is unnamed. The earliest extant reference to the name Ancient Spiral (Cổ Loa) is found in the two fifteenth-century texts, Gleanings of the Uncanny and the Comprehensive Book. See also Trần Quốc Vượng 1974, p. 406. Body of Jade, Pearls of Blood 233 to serve as a hostage and in order to solicit good relations.30 Later, King An Dương treated Cao Thông without generosity. Cao Thông then abandoned him. King An Dương’s daughter was named Mỵ Châu. She noticed Shi’s charms and good looks, then had private [relations] with him. Shi later coaxed Mỵ Châu, asking to see the divine crossbow, begging to gaze upon its wonder. Mỵ Châu then took him, and thus he broke its trigger mechanism. Thereupon, he quickly went to report it to Tuo. Tuo then again raised his military for a surprise attack. When the troops arrived, King An Dương, just as before, shot his crossbow, but the crossbow was defective and so the multitudes were defeated and subsequently destroyed. King An Dương held in his mouth31 an engraved, fresh rhinoceros [horn]32 and walked into the water, and the waters parted for him. …後蜀王子將兵討之，因為安陽王治交趾。尉佗興軍攻之。安陽王有神人曰皋通 佐之造弩一張一放殺越軍萬人三放殺三萬人。佗知其故便卻壘息卒還戍武寜。乃 遣其次子始為質，請通好焉。後安陽王遇皋通不厚。皋通去之。安陽王之女曰媚珠 見始丰姿閒美遂私焉。始後誘媚珠求看神弓請觀其妙。媚珠與之因毀其機，即馳 使報佗。佗復興師襲之。軍至安陽王又如初，故放弩，弩散衆皆潰崩，遂破之。安 陽御生文犀入水走，水為之開。33 Here we see two new details which do not appear in any other extant sources: the trigger mechanism as the special implement which made the crossbow efficacious, and King An Dương’s possession of the engraved rhinoceros horn, which allowed him to escape into the sea. The latter is probably a reference to the “heaven-penetrating rhinoceros horn” (tongtian xijiao 通天犀角), a magical device well-known in Daoist lore, as can be seen in a description in Ge Hong’s fourth-century text, The Master who Embraces Simplicity. Ge Hong 葛洪 (283–343 ce) writes, If you get an authentic heaven-penetrating rhinoceros horn of about three inches (cun 寸) or more, and carve a fish on it, then clamp it in your mouth and enter water, the water will always make an opening [suitable for] a person, about three square feet (chi 尺). You will be able to breath in water. 30. This is the only version which identifies Zhongshi as a second son and not as the crown prince. 31. Reading 御 as 銜. See the reference to the Baopuzi below. 32. Here, we can understand the term shengxi (生犀) in two ways. First, during the Song, the term shengxi can refer to the “fresh” horn taken from a living rhinoceros, which is differentiated from a rhino’s horn that has been “broken off ” (tuixi 退犀) or shed. (Although, actually, rhinoceros horns are not like deer antlers, and so are not shed.) Or, secondly, the term shengxi can mean “raw rhinoceros horn,” which is differentiated from that which is cooked (zhengshu 蒸煮). This latter meaning is found especially in medical texts, such as the Materia Medica (Bencao gangmu 本草 綱目). For example, citing Tao Hongjing (456–536), the text says, “For human medicine, only the male rhinoceros [horn] that is raw is best. Pieces of rhinoceros [horn], including utensils, that have been subjected to cooking should not be used” (人藥惟雄犀生者為佳。 若犀片及見[現]成器物 皆被蒸煮，不堪用) (Zhang & Zheng 2019, vol. 4, p. 3296). Similarly, the Song-period Authentic Explanations of Pediatric Pharmacopia and Symptoms (Xiao’er yaozheng zhenjue 小兒藥證真 訣) by Qian Yi (1032–1113) says, “Raw rhinoceros [horn] powder dispels poisonous pneuma and relieves internal heat. Raw rhinoceros [horn], including any containers, that have undergone cooking, should not be used. Raw is best” (生犀散，消毒氣， 解內熱。生犀凡盛物者皆經蒸煮，不 堪用，須生者為佳) (Xiao’er yaozheng zhenjue, 1985, p. 139). In the passage above from the tale of King An Dương, both senses of the term shengxi can apply. However, it seems the first sense, which I render as “fresh rhinoceros horn,” is more likely, since there is no medical context implied. 33. Written by Yue Shi 樂史 (930–1007). See Taiping huanyu ji, 2007, vol. 170; Lê Văn Hảo 1966, p. 18. 234 Cuong T. Mai 得真通天犀角三寸以上，刻以為魚，而銜之以入水，水常為人開，方三尺，可得炁 息水中。34 Inserting these two magical devices into the narrative ingeniously answers three otherwise unresolved questions implied in earlier versions of the story. First, what exactly was special about the “divine crossbow”? Second, how could King An Dương not know his crossbow was “broken” as he went into battle? And third, how did King An Dương escape into the sea? The magical trigger mechanism answers the first two questions and the special rhino horn answers the third. Moreover, introducing the magical trigger (and its surreptitious impairment by Zhongshi) into the narrative strongly makes the point that the crossbow in fact could be made ineffective without appearing to be “broken.” Thus, King An Dương is deliberately depicted as unknowingly shooting his defective crossbow, “just as before” (安陽王又如 初，故放弩). In sum, the two magical devices inserted into the narrative not only put into relief supernatural dimensions formerly only implied, they also fill in crucial narrative lacunae. In fact, these two magical devices explain so effectively how King An Dương could lose his kingdom but manage to escape with his life that they would be retained in all later versions. For the next stage of development in the King An Dương story, we have two extant sources, both dating from the fourteenth century, the Brief Gazetteer of Annam by Lê Tắc and the Brief History of Viet (Việt sử lược 越史略) by an anonymous author. We will examine the full text found in the Brief Gazetteer of Annam first: The citadel of King Việt35 is by custom called Kelü Citadel. It has an ancient pond. The king each year selects pearls and uses this water 34. See the Baopuzi neipian 抱朴子内篇 (2011, p. 573). My translation of the measure words, cun and zhi, are approximations. 35. The earliest appearance of this name for a citadel (used in a Vietnamese context), to my knowledge, is in the seventh-century History of the Sui, in the biography of Liu Fang, where it says, “During the Renshou reign era, Lý Phật Tử, a rustic person of Jiaozhou, was causing disorder. He occupied the former citadel of King Việt, and sent the son of his brother Đại Quyền to hold Long Biên Citadel and auxiliary commander Lý Phổ Đỉnh to hold Ô Diên Citadel” (仁壽中，會交州俚人 李佛子作亂，據越王故城，遣其兄子大權據龍編城，其別帥李普鼎據烏延城) (Sui Shu, 1973, vol. 53, p. 1357). From context, the name “King Việt” must refer to King Triệu Việt, the enemy of Lý Phật Tử, whom the latter had vanquished c. 569/71 (Taylor 1983, p. 155). Lê Tắc knew about this incident because he echoes this precise passage from the History of the Sui in his Brief Gazetteer of Annam (Lê Tắc 2009, p. 111). Thus, in the passage above, it is clear that Lê Tắc believes that the citadel that Lý Phật Tử had occupied had formerly been held by King Việt, and that this very citadel had been built by King An Dương. See Taylor 1983, pp. 153 note 60, 161; Nguyễn Quang Ngọc & Vũ Văn Quân 2010, pp. 213, 251–252. Also, Trần Quốc Vượng notes a similar reference in the Brief History of Viet by anonymous (Trần Quốc Vượng 1974, p. 406; 2005, p. 32). In summary, then, it was probably Lê Tắc who linked the name “King Việt’s Citadel” to King An Dương’s supposed fortress. This linkage continues into the sixteenth century, as attested in two texts, Sources for a Gazetteer of Annam (An Nam chí nguyên 安南志源), attributed to Cao Hùng Trưng 高雄徵, and Book of Viet Peaks (Việt Kiệu Thư 越嶠書, 1540) by Lý Văn Phượng. The passage in Sources for a Gazetteer of Annam states, “King Việt’s Citadel was at Đông Ngạn District. It was named Spiral Citadel because it was winding in shape, like a snail. Its establishment began with King An Dương. It wound around nine times, was also called Kelü Citadel, and in ancient times was built by King An Dương. [King] An Dương’s capital was based in Việt land. Later people called it the ‘Citadel of King Việt.’ In the middle of the citadel was the palace of King An Dương and its ancient remnants still exist. According to Liu Xu, ‘Jiaozhi is precisely the kingdom of An Dương.’” (越王城在東岸縣。 Body of Jade, Pearls of Blood 235 [from the pond] to wash the pearls, [then] their colors become effulgent. The Jiaozhou Outer Region Record says: in the past, before there were commanderies and districts, the Lạc fields followed the rise and fall of water currents. Those who cultivated these fields were Lạc people, those who united the people were Lạc kings, and those who assisted [them] were Lạc generals, [who wore] bronze seals and green sashes. The King of Shu once sent his son with generals and troops numbering 30,000 to subdue the Lạc, and thus the land was seized. He called himself King An Dương. Then King Zhao Tuo raised troops to attack [King An Dương]. There was a divine person named Cao Thông who descended and assisted King An Dương. He made a divine crossbow which in one shot killed 10,000 men. Zhao Tuo, realizing that he was no match, encamped at Vũ Ninh District. He sent Crown Prince Shi to feign surrender as a stratagem. Later, Cao Thông left. He said to the king, “One who is able to keep the crossbow will flourish, if not he will perish.” King An Dương had a daughter named Mỵ Châu. She saw Crown Prince Shi and took a liking to him. Subsequently, they consorted with each other. Mỵ Châu took the crossbow and showed it. [Shi] secretly changed the crossbow trigger. Zhao Tuo advanced the troops and King An Dương was defeated. He took a parting-waters rhinoceros [horn] and entered the sea. Zhao Tuo took control of the territory. Presently, Bình Địa District has existing remnants of the King An Dương palace citadel. 越王城，俗名可縷城，有古池。國王每歲采珠，用此水洗珠，色鮮麗。《交州外域 記》：昔未有郡縣時，雒田隨潮水上下，墾其田者為雒民，統其民者為雒王，副之 者為雒將。皆銅印青绶。蜀王嘗遣子，將兵三萬降諸雒，因據其地，自稱安陽王。 又名螺城。以其屈曲形如螺也。其制始自安陽王。環九曲重。又名可縷城。古安陽王所築也。安陽所都本越 地。故後人稱為越王城。城中有安陽王宮。故址猶存。劉昭云。交趾即安陽王國是也). For the Chinese text, see Gaspardone 1932, p. 135. See also Trần Văn Giáp 1962, vol. 1, pp. 49–52. Đông Ngạn District 東岸縣 (also called Đông Ngàn), correlates to present-day Từ Sơn prefecture, in Bắc Ninh Province, which was formerly a part of Xứ Kinh Bắc, on which see Phạm Thị Thùy Vinh 2003, pp. 218–221, and on the historical importance of Từ Sơn, see Phạm Thị Thùy Vinh 2003, pp. 227–228. Here, Cao Hùng Trưng, apparently unaware of Lê Tắc’s rationale for calling King An Dương’s fortress “King Việt’s Citadel,” provides a dubious explanation: the named derived from the fact that it was built on “Việt land.” Moreover, there is a separate tradition of the “Palace of the Lạc King” (雒王宮) attested in Sources for a Gazetteer of Annam. The relevant passage states, “The Lạc King’s Citadel is in Tam Đái Subprefecture. The Old Gazetteer says that in the past before there were prefectures and districts… [rulership] was passed down through eighteen generations. Then it was ended by the King of Shu. Presently, the former remains of the Lạc Palace still exist” 雒王宮。在三帶州。 舊志云昔未有郡縣時⋯傳世十八。為蜀王所滅。今雒宮故址猶存 (Gaspardone 1932, p. 136). Thus, both passages from Sources for a Gazetteer of Annam suggests that by the sixteenth century there were two landmarks associated with King An Dương, one in Bình Đạo District and the other in Tam Đái Subprefecture in Sơn Tây Province (as Kelley has noted, 2013, p. 148). However, the latter site is not referred to as King An Dương’s citadel. Rather, it is said to have been the place where King An Dương ended the eighteen generations of Lạc rule. It should be noted that there has long been controversy around the authorship and dating of Sources for a Gazetteer of Annam, or more precisely, its different parts (i.e., preface, summary, and core three-volumes), not to mention uncertainty around its very title. These issues are too complex to resolve at this stage and are not entirely relevant for my purposes. Nguyễn Thanh Tùng (2021) has evaluated the arguments of Gaspardone (1932), Zhang Xiumin (1992) and Cheng Sijia (2020), and has forwarded his own intriguing analysis. Nguyễn argues that while the extant text may have been compiled by Cao Hùng Trưng, the preface and summary are by the Ming official, Su Jun 蘇𣿰 (1542–1599), and the main three-volume part of the text dates between 1418–1461 and can serve as a reliable historical source for that period. A Vietnamese translation of the Chinese text has been published, along with a translation of Gaspardone’s article from the French, and Zhang Xiumin’s article from the Chinese, see Hoa Bằng 2017. 236 Cuong T. Mai 而王趙佗舉兵襲之。有神人名臯通，下為安陽王輔佐，治神弩，一發殺萬人。趙佗 知不可敵，因住武寧縣，遣太子始詐降，以圖之。後臯通去，語王曰：“能持予弩 則興，否則亡。”安陽王有女名媚珠，見太子始，悅之，遂為相通。媚珠取弩視之， 陰易弩機。趙佗進兵，安陽王敗，持避水犀入海。趙佗奄有其地。今平地縣有安 陽王宮城迹存。36 In compiling a gazetteer (zhi 志), the author Lê Tắc takes a preexisting story about King An Dương and anchors it to a specific location, the ancient city of Kelü, remnants of which apparently could still be found in Bình Địa District (probably an error for Bình Đạo District, mentioned in earlier sources).37 It is in Lê Tắc’s version that we learn for the first time of a magical well that has waters which can make pearls effulgent. This detail about the well and the pearls, however, is not related to any event in the narrative. Yet, Lê Tắc mentions it without elaboration, perhaps assuming that his readers would already know about Kelü and its magical well. This brief geographical prelude about Kelü and its well is appropriate for the gazetteer genre, but it plays no role in the plot. Lê Tắc then quotes from the Jiaozhou Outer Region Record, which was analyzed above. Like the source text, Lê Tắc’s version provides a brief overview of the Lạc people and how they were conquered by a prince of Shu, who attacked them with 30,000 troops. Also, like in the source text, it is Mỵ Châu’s weakness for Zhongshi’s good looks and her illicit affair with him which lead to the kingdom’s downfall. Indeed, Lê Tắc’s narrative, for the most part, follows the plot of the source text. It contains all three episodes B, D, and E (prince of Shu invades, Zhongshi’s subterfuge, and Zhao Tuo invades). Nevertheless, some of Lê Tắc’s details slightly differ, and he adds completely new details as well. For example, Cao Thông is mentioned, but there is no indication that he was mistreated by King An Dương. Rather, there is only a reference to Cao Thông’s warning about the importance of keeping the divine crossbow (which is not a new detail). Also, Lê Tắc says that the divine crossbow can kill 10,000 men in one shot. But the Jiaozhou Outer Region Record says it can kill 300 men in one shot, while the Accounts of Nhật Nam 36. See Lê Tắc 2009, pp. 62–63 for the Vietnamese translation, and for the Chinese text, see Lê Tắc 2009, pp. 353–354. See also Lê Văn Hảo 1966, pp. 21–22. 37. Some scholars have argued that since the name Cổ Loa does not appear in extant sources until the fifteenth century, it may be based on some older, non-Sinitic, vernacular name. For example, Đào Duy Anh has argued that the name Cổ Loa originally did not mean “ancient spiral.” Rather, it is derived from “Kẻ Loa,” a non-Sinitic, vernacular Vietnamese compound created through the common practice of using the term “Kẻ” (people, denizens) in a toponym (e.g., Kẻ Chợ, Kẻ Vẽ, Kẻ Mọc, Kẻ Trài, Kẻ Hạ, etc). Thus, according to Đào Duy Anh, “Cổ Loa” is a transcription of “Kẻ Loa,” which would mean something like “the (place of the) denizens of Loa (Citadel)” (Đào Duy Anh 1957, pp. 47–51). However, this theory, if correct, still does not explain how the “Loa” in “Kẻ Loa” remained unchanged in “Cổ Loa,” but became “Lũ” (縷) in “Khả Lũ” (可縷), rather than becoming “Khả Loa” (可螺). By contrast, Trần Quốc Vượng notes that another vernacular name for Cổ Loa that was still in use among village elders in the mid-twentieth century was “Chạ Chủ” (alternately, “Kẻ Chủ”) which means “village or town of Chủ.” Trần Quốc Vượng argues that “Chạ Chủ,” like “Khả Lũ,” is ultimately a Sino-Vietnamese transcription of the root sound “Klủ.” However, Trần Quốc Vượng does not tell us the meaning or provenance of the hypothetical word “Klủ” (Trần Quốc Vượng 1969, pp. 71–72; 1974). See also Lê Văn Hảo 1966, pp. 63–65. Body of Jade, Pearls of Blood 237 says it can kill 10,000 in one shot and 30,000 in three shots. Moreover, in Lê Tắc’s version, Zhongshi is sent by Zhao Tuo to feign surrender, but Zhongshi does not serve as a minister in the court of King An Dương. The most significant new details which Lê Tắc adds to the narrative are the crossbow trigger (弩機) and the parting-waters rhinoceros horn (避水犀), which clearly are borrowed from the story found in the late tenth century, Treatise on the World of the Taiping Era, discussed above. The two earlier third-/fourth-century narratives merely stated that the king and his troops had “fled into the sea and were routed” (浮海奔竄) or that the king had “went down to a boat to escape by way of the sea” (下船逕出于海). These more ambiguous endings do not presume to inform us of the ultimate end of King An Dương. Another version of the King An Dương story, also dated to the fourteenth century, can be found in the Brief History of Viet (Việt sử lược). This version seems also to rely on the Jiaozhou Outer Region Record. Thus, it includes all three episodes B, D, and E (prince of Shu invades, Zhongshi’s subterfuge, and Zhao Tuo invades). However, its prelude to the story is more extensive because it uses the style of the Chinese historical chronicles to situate the King An Dương story within the framework of dynastic cycles. In the past, when the Yellow Emperor had established the myriad kingdoms, Jiaozhi was far off beyond the Hundred Yue, so it could not be subordinated. Along the borders were the Western and Southern Ou, and there were fifteen tribal areas: Giao Chỉ, Việt Thường Thị, Vũ Ninh, Quân Ninh, Gia Ninh, Ninh Hải, Lục Hải, Thang Tuyền, Tân Xương, Bình Văn, Văn Lang, Củu Chân, Nhật Nam, Hoài Hoan, and Cửu Đức. None of these are in the Tribute of Yu. At the time of King Cheng of the Zhou, the Việt Thường Thị first came to make tribute of a white pheasant. The Spring and Autumn [Annals] calls these “forsaken lands.” The Daiji calls these [people] the “Marked Foreheads.” At the time of King Zhuang of the Zhou, in Gia Ninh, there was an extraordinary person who was able to use occult methods to subdue these tribes. He entitled himself Hùng King and had a capital at Văn Lang and it was named the Văn Lang Kingdom.38 They had simple customs and [used] knotted ropes to set standards. Through eighteen generations they were called Hùng Kings. Gou Jian of the Yue once sent an emissary with a pronouncement, but the Hùng King rejected it. At the end of the Zhou, [the Hùng King] was succeeded and replaced by the son of the King of Shu named Phán. Phán built a citadel at Việt Thường, entitled [himself] King An Dương, and ceased intercourse with the Zhou. At the end of the Qin, Zhao Tuo took Yulin, Nanhai, and Xiang Commandary. He established a capital at Pan Yu and called his kingdom Yue. He entitled himself the Martial Emperor. At that time King An Dương had a divine man named Cao Lỗ. He was able to build a willow crossbow that with one shot released ten [arrows] and [he also] instructed troops numbering ten 38. Keith W. Taylor has noted that this is the earliest appearance of the name of the kingdom of the Hùng Kings in the extant corpus (Taylor 1983, pp. 306–308, 310). Maspero has argued that “Văn Lang” is an error for Yelang 夜郎, the name of an ancient polity contemporaneous with the Nanyue Kingdom, located in present-day Guizhou province (Maspero 1918, p. 2). See also Nguyễn Phương 1976, p. 6, note 23; Kelley 2012, p. 113. 238 Cuong T. Mai thousand.39 The Martial Emperor found out about it and sent his son Shi as a hostage to solicit good relations. Later the king treated Cao Lỗ badly and Cao Lỗ left. The king’s daughter, Mỵ Châu, with Shi had repeated private [relations]. Shi coaxed Mỵ Châu and begged her to see the divine crossbow, then he destroyed its trigger. He quickly sent a messenger to report it to the Martial Emperor. The Martial Emperor raised troops and attacked. When the troops arrived, the king was just as before, [but] the crossbow was defective and the mass [of troops] was completely routed. The Martial Emperor went in pursuit to destroy him. The King held in his mouth a fresh rhinoceros [horn] and entered the waters, which opened up. The kingdom then belonged to Zhao Tuo. 昔黄帝既建萬國，以交趾逺在百粤之表，莫能統屬，遂界於西南隅，其部落十有五 焉，曰交趾、越裳氏、武寧、軍寧、嘉寧、寧海、陸海、湯泉、新昌、平文、文郎、九真、 日南、懐驩、九德，皆禹貢之所不及。至周成王時，越裳氏始獻白雉，《春秋》謂之 闕地，《戴記》謂之雕題。至周莊王時，嘉寧部有異人焉，能以幻術服諸部落，自 稱雄王，都於文郎，號文郎國。以淳質爲俗，結繩爲政，傳十八世，皆稱雄王。越 勾踐嘗遣使来諭，雄王拒之。周末，爲蜀王子泮所逐而代之。泮築城於越裳，號安 陽王，竟不與周通。秦末趙佗據欝林、南海、象郡以稱王，都番禺，國號越，自稱武 皇。時安陽王有神人曰臯魯，能造栁弩，一張十放，教軍萬人。武皇知之，乃遣其子 始為質，請通好焉。後王遇臯魯稍薄，臯魯去之。王女媚珠又與始私焉，始誘媚珠 求看神弩，因毁其機。馳使報武皇，武皇復興兵攻之，軍至，王又如初，弩折，衆皆 潰散，武皇遂破之。王銜生犀入水，水為之開，國遂屬趙。40 The fourteenth-century Brief History of Viet purports to be a historical chronicle. Thus, it situates the King An Dương story within a broader timeline, though much abbreviated, that starts with the Yellow Emperor then proceeds to brief references to the Zhou and the Qin. The narrative temporally locates the beginning of the King An Dương story at the end of the Zhou and its conclusion with the ascendancy of Zhao Tuo, while situating the events geographically in the area of Việt Thường. Similar to the narratives found in the fourteenth-century Brief Gazetteer and the third-/fourth-century Jiaozhou Outer Region Record, we find all three episodes B, D, and E (prince of Shu invades, Zhongshi’s subterfuge, and Zhao Tuo invades). Still, we find important differences between the two fourteenth-century sources. For example, the Brief History of Viet locates King An Dương’s citadel not in Bình Địa District, nor in Bình Đạo District, but in Việt Thường.41 39. Yamamoto 1970, p. 89 suggests that this is a reference to a “willow catapult.” 40. Brief History of Viet (Việt sử lược 越史略), by anonymous, completed during the Trần Dynasty, c. 1377, in three volumes (juan 卷). For translations of this passage into modern Vietnamese, see Nguyễn Gia Tường 1993, pp. 25–26; Trần Quốc Vượng 2005, pp. 18–19. For the Chinese text of this passage, based on manuscript VHv.1521, see Trần Quốc Vượng 2005, pp. 229–230. For another modern typeset edition of the Brief History of Viet in Chinese (Yueshi lüe), see vol. 97 of the Complete Compendium of Collectanea - New Compilation, Congshu jicheng - xinbian 叢書 集成 - 新編, 1983–1986, p. 497. On the suggestion that the Brief History of Viet is a condensation of Lê Văn Hưu’s Historical Chronicle of Đại Việt (Đại Việt sử ký) of 1272, see Taylor 1983, pp. 351–352. Keith W. Taylor has argued that the Việt Sử Lược might be an edited version of Hồ Tông Thốc’s (1324–1404) Việt Sử Cương Mục (see Taylor 1986c, pp. 50–51). For a discussion of the first part of this passage, see Appendix C in Taylor 1983, pp. 309–311. This version is also briefly discussed in Yamamoto 1970, pp. 72–73. See also Trần Văn Giáp 1962, vol. 1, pp. 29–34; 1990, vol. 1, pp. 177–180; Đinh Gia Khánh et al. 1978, pp. 119–122; Ungar 1986, pp. 178–179. 41. The location and identity of the Việt Thường 越裳 polity are controversial issues. The earliest mention appears in a Han-period work, The Great Tradition of the Venerated Documents, which Body of Jade, Pearls of Blood 239 Also, unlike the Brief Gazetteer of Annam, there is no mention of a well, nor magical waters. Moreover, in this version Cao Thông is called Cao Lỗ.42 And though Cao Lỗ is depicted as being treated badly by King An Dương, he gives no warning to King An Dương with regards to the possession of the crossbow, as we find in both the Jiaozhou Outer Region Record and the Brief Gazetteer of Annam. Also, in this narrative, Zhongshi is not made a minister (as in the Jiaozhou Outer Region Record). Rather, Zhongshi is a political hostage sent as a solicitation for peace. These latter differences, the lack of a warning from Cao Lỗ and Zhongshi’s position as a political hostage (and not a court minister) seem to make King An Dương less culpable for the loss of his divine crossbow’s magical efficacy. He appears more like an unwitting victim of treachery. As in all versions discussed so far, Mỵ Châu is described as the traitorous daughter whose illicit sexual affair with an enemy initiates the kingdom’s downfall. mentions a tribute of a white pheasant to the Zhou court from the Việt Thường state, and which says that it was located south of Jiaozhi (交趾之南有越裳国). See Shangshu dazhuan 尚書大傳, 1937, vol. 4, p. 56. Similarly, the History of the Later Han, a fifth-century work, repeats this information (交趾之南有越裳國). See Hou Hanshu 後漢書, 1965, vol. 86, p. 2835. Lê Thành Khôi, following Legge, has also noted that there is no mention of the Việt Thường in either the Classic of Documents nor the Historical Chronicles of Sima Qian (Lê Thành Khôi 1955, p. 86). Because the name Jiaozhi had been used since the Han to refer to the Red River region, tradition since then has identified Việt Thường as approximately in the area of Hà Tĩnh and Nghệ An. Thus, for example, the Old History of the Tang, a tenth-century work, says that the Việt Thường state was around Cửu Ðức 九德 (i.e., Hà Tĩnh). See Jiu Tangshu 舊唐書, 1975, vol. 41, p. 1755. Another reason the location of Việt Thường is difficult to identify is because “south of Jiaozhi” would have different meanings, depending on the varying meanings of “Jiaozhi” overtime, as Li Tana (2011, pp. 48–49) has noted, as well as Chen Jinghe (1952). In any case, presently, I think we cannot precisely identify the location of Việt Thường during the second millennium bce. Though, some scholars, such as Đào Duy Anh, have argued that Việt Thường, during Zhou times, was not in the Red River region (Đào Duy Anh 1957, pp. 200–219). For our purposes it will suffice to note that by the Han, Việt Thường was believed to have been located south of Jiaozhi. And by the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, especially during the early Lê, the name Việt Thường gained a broader meaning. That is, it was used more generically to refer to the imagined Việt ancestral lands. For example, Ngô Sĩ Liên introduces his account of the Hồng Bàng clan by noting that, “Yu [the Great] divided the Nine Provinces and the Hundred Yue constituted the Yang Province region, to which Jiaozhi belonged. During the time of [King] Cheng of Zhou, [it] was first called Việt Thường. The name Việt is from this” (禹別九州百粵為楊州域，交趾屬焉。成周時，始稱越裳。越之名於此云). See Ngô Sĩ Liên 1993, vol. 1, p. 131; Sun Xiao 2015, vol. 1, p. 39. 42. At least by the twelfth century ce the name Cao Lỗ must have been a well-known alternative for Cao Thông. According to a tale extracted from the twelfth-century ce work of Đỗ Thiện and extant in the fourteenth-century Compendium on Mystic Numina of the Viet Realm, Cao Lỗ is the name of a spirit supposedly encountered in a dream by the ninth-century general, Gao Pian at Vũ Ninh. In this tale, Cao Lỗ gives Gao Pian a revelation in a dream, claiming to have served as an assistant to King An Dương. He was wrongly accused by Lạc lords and officials, then killed. Cao Lỗ then says that after death he was awarded the position of regional “Governor General” (đô thống tướng quân 都統將軍) by the Thearch on High. This tale suggests that by at least the twelth century there was a “benevolent deity” (phúc thần 福神) cult dedicated to Cao Lỗ in Vũ Ninh, including a tradition of tales which tried to legitimate this cult through linking a “revelation” about Cao Lỗ’s posthumous deification to an authoritative receiver, the renown general Gao Pian. Of course, in the absence of further historical evidence, there is little basis for considering this dream revelation as a historical event of the ninth century, nor the content of the revelation as historical information about the third century bce. For the Chinese text of the Cao Lỗ story in the Compendium on Mystic Numina, see Chan Hing-ho et al. 1992, series 2, vol. 1, pp. 199–201. For a translation of this account, see Dutton et al. 2012, pp. 13–14; Ostrowski & Zottoli 1999, pp. 57–59. See also Kelley 2015b, pp. 89–90; Taylor 1983, pp. 253, 316–317; 1999. 240 Cuong T. Mai In summary, the above analysis shows that by the fourth century a common narrative tradition consisting of a basic series of events had developed: a prince of Shu invades an unnamed kingdom, then uses a magic crossbow created by a divine man named Cao Thông to fend off Zhao Tuo, but is betrayed by a licentious daughter, and manages to escape by way of the sea. By the fourteenth century, two important sources add five additional details: the prince of Shu is named Phán; the invaded kingdom is named Văn Lang; the invasion occurred near the end of the Zhou Dynasty; the divine crossbow has a magical trigger; and the sea escape was made possible by a special rhinoceros horn. Thus, in anticipation of post-fourteenth-century narrative developments, here we should note the episodes and narrative details that have not appeared in the six versions examined so far. There has been no mention of a rejected marriage proposal, no reference to a spirit battle preceding the building of a citadel shaped like a spiral, no mention of the name Âu Lạc (except for the fifth-century Guangzhou ji), no marriage between Zhongshi and Mỵ Châu,43 no scattered goose feathers which would doom the fate of King An Dương, no protestation of innocence on the part of Mỵ Châu before her beheading, no reference to her blood turning into pearls, no lovelorn prince committing suicide by jumping into a well, no reference to a patron golden turtle, nor his magic claw. Indeed, in none of the versions we have investigated thus far does Mỵ Châu die a martyr’s death. These are narrative details, episodes, and sub-plots which only appear in the fifteenth-century version of the King An Dương story, to which we now turn. 3. A Fifteenth-Century Reinvention The longest and most elaborate version of the King An Dương story must have been completed by 1479. This terminus ad quem is the year in which Ngô Sĩ Liên completed the fifteen-volume Comprehensive Book of Đại Việt Chronicles, which contains this very story in its first volume. Ngô Sĩ Liên’s work purports to chart the history of Đại Việt, beginning with a primordial past rooted in the time of Thần Nông (Shennong 神農) extending to c. 1428, when Lê Lợi ascended the throne. The story of King An Dương is thus but a brief interlude in a broader story of the rise and fall of dynasties extending over some four thousand years. Yet, more than any narrative in the Comprehensive Book, the story of King An Dương has the most fantastic details and most elaborate plot. It seems that Ngô Sĩ Liên could not help but insert this story in his chronicle, though his commentary to the story expresses skepticism. Ngô Sĩ Liên begins his comments to the story with a question, “Is the account of Golden Turtle trustworthy?” (金龜之説信乎).44 If we note that Ngô Sĩ Liên’s version of the story of King An Dương begins with the destruction of the Văn Lang Kingdom and concludes with the 43. As I noted above, an exception to this is the marriage between Mỵ Châu and Zhongshi depicted in the Nanyue zhi, which however, as I will show, is not the inspiration for the depiction of the marriage found in the fifteenth-century version found in Gleanings of the Uncanny. 44. See Sun Xiao 2015, vol. 1, p. 47. Body of Jade, Pearls of Blood 241 destruction of King An Dương’s own Âu Lạc Kingdom by the northern Nanyue Kingdom of Zhao Tuo, then we can identify Ngô Sĩ Liên’s main reason for including this story despite apparent reservations: it conveniently fills in a stark temporal lacuna in his chronicle of consecutive ancient kingdoms. This particular fifteenth-century version of the King An Dương story, more than any versions discussed thus far, helps Ngô Sĩ Liên achieve his task of producing a “comprehensive book” (toàn thư, quanshu 全書). The story’s unique content, style, and structure, compared to other narratives in the Comprehensive Book, support the long-held belief that Ngô Sĩ Liên did not compose this particular story himself. Indeed, Ngô Sĩ Liên must have consulted some version of Gleanings of the Uncanny, as many scholars have noted.45 Yet, since Gleanings of the Uncanny was apparently begun in the fourteenth century and was continuously updated and enlarged over time, the question remains: which version of Gleanings of the Uncanny did Ngô Sĩ Liên consult?46 Since at least the early sixteenth century, Gleanings of the Uncanny has been attributed to a certain Trần Thế Pháp, of whom very little else is known, besides the presumption that he lived during the fourteenth century.47 Certainly, as we have seen, some narrative traditions about King An Dương existed during the fourteenth century. Yet, the fifteenth-century version of the King An Dương story in Gleanings of the Uncanny differs radically in many ways from the earlier versions discussed above. As I will show, certain details and assumptions in the narrative suggest that the version of the King An Dương story in Gleanings of the Uncanny, which Ngô Sĩ Liên had consulted, most likely originated in the fifteenth century, that is, after the time of Trần Thế Pháp. My analysis reveals a Neo-Confucian discourse of Heaven interwoven into the story, in addition to motifs and themes borrowed from another fourteenth-century story, that of the sixth-century King Triệu Việt, which is found in the Compendium on Mystic Numina of the Viet Realm. All of this points towards a time range of composition which starts with the beginning of the Ming occupation in 1407 and ends with 1479, when the Comprehensive Book was completed. Before analyzing the story in closer detail, below I provide a full translation of the fifteenth-century version found in Gleanings of the Uncanny. (The section headings included below are not found in the source text, but are added to reflect my analysis of the narrative structure of the story; they correlate to the list of episodes mentioned at the beginning of this essay.)48 45. See Gaspardone 1934, p. 129; Đào Duy Anh 1957, p. 12. And on the marvelous and uncanny in the Comprehensive Book, see Đinh Gia Khánh et al. 1978, pp. 323–324. 46. As Liam C. Kelley has remarked, “we cannot say for certain what the Arrayed Tales looked like in the fifteenth century…” (Kelley 2015a, p. 162). 47. Trần Thế Pháp was identified as the compiler of Gleanings of the Uncanny at least by the early sixteenth century, as seen in a reference in Đặng Minh Khiêm’s compilation, Thoát Hiên’s Poetic Collection of Odes on History (Thoát Hiên vịnh sử thi tập 脫軒詠史詩集). See Gaspardone 1934, p. 109; Dai 1991, p. 257; Ren 2010, p. 80; Đặng Minh Khiêm 2016, p. 35. Also, Dai Kelai notes that neither Vũ Qùynh nor Kiều Phú mention Trần Thế Pháp, though later Phan Huy Chú (1782–1840) did cite Trần Thế Pháp, as did Lê Qúy Đôn (1726–1784), see Dai 1991, p. 259. 48. For the Chinese text, see Appendix A. A full translation of this story is provided by Liam C. Kelley on the website Viet Text (https://sites.google.com/a/hawaii.edu/viet-texts/lncqlt/lncqlt-2), 242 Cuong T. Mai A) Rejected marriage proposal King An Dương of the Âu Lạc49 Kingdom was a man of Ba Shu with the surname Shu and given name Phán. A predecessor sought to marry Mỵ Nương, a daughter of a Hùng King, but the betrothal was rejected by the Hùng King. Thus, [Phán] became resentful. B) Prince of Shu invades Phán set out to accomplish his former plans and so he raised an army, attacked the Hùng King, and destroyed the Văn Lang Kingdom. He changed the name to Âu Lạc then [ruled] it as a king. C) Building Spiral Citadel He built walls in the land of Việt Thường. But as the walls were built, they would collapse. He then set up an altar and performed abstention rites, propitiating a multitude of spirits. On the seventh day of the third month he saw an old man coming from the East going up to the city gates. [The old man] sighed and said, “When will you finish building these walls?” The king was delighted and welcomed [the old man] into the court and honored him with ceremony. Then [the king] inquired, saying, “When these walls are built up they would just collapse again. Why is it that [even with] toiling effort it cannot be accomplished?” The old man said, “The Clear River Emissary will come and will build it with the king and it will be accomplished.” Having finished speaking, he bid farewell and left. The next day the king went through the East Gate to watch, when suddenly he saw Golden Turtle coming from the east. It stood on the water and was able to understand and produce human language. It called itself Clear River Emissary and said that it clearly understood the hidden and manifest activities of Heaven and Earth, and of ghosts and gods. With delight, the king said, “This is what the old man was telling me.” He then took Golden Turtle and welcomed it into the city, and had it sit high [on a place of honor] in court. Then he inquired as to why the walls could not be completed. Golden Turtle said, “The pneuma of the mountain essence is that of the sons of the former ruler who [want] to avenge the kingdom. Moreover, there is a white chicken which is a thousand years old, and which has transformed into a demonic essence [yêu tinh, yaojing 妖精]. It is hidden in Seven-Planets Mountain.50 [Moreover], in the mountain are ghosts. They are musicians of a former dynasty that had been buried there and have transformed into ghosts. On the side [of the mountain] is a hostel for boarding travelers. The hostel-keeper is named Ngộ Không and he has a daughter and a white chicken, which is the remnant pneuma of a demonic essence. Everyone who travels to the hostel and boards there accessed October 1, 2021. I have benefited from this translation, but I do not follow it verbatim. Also, a French translation can be found in Dumoutier 1887, pp. 35–40. 49. Reading Lạc 駱 for Hạc 貉. 50. Thất Diệu Sơn 七曜山, in present-day Yên Phong district, Bắc Ninh Province. The entry on Thất Diệu Mountain in the Classified Accounts of Mẫn Hiên (Mẫn Hiên thuyết loại 敏軒說類), attributed to the nineteenth-century scholar, Cao Bá Quát (高伯适, 1809–1854), says that it has seven peaks. For the Quốc Ngữ translation of this text, and questions regarding the authorship of its three main sections, see Mẫn Hiên thuyết loại, 2004, pp. 5–18, 92–93. See also Nguyễn Duy Hinh 2003, pp. 664–666. Body of Jade, Pearls of Blood 243 is harmed when the demonic essence takes on myriad forms. Those who have died are numerous. Now the white rooster has married the daughter of the hostel-keeper. If you kill the rooster you can suppress the demonic essence. It will certainly concentrate its occult pneuma and transform into a demon, then become an owl. It will hold a document in its beak and fly up a sandalwood tree to present a memorial to the Thearch on High, wishing to do harm to the city walls. I will bite [the owl and make it] drop the document, then you should quickly grab it. Then, the city walls can be completed.” 51 Golden Turtle had the king [disguised] as a traveler. He stayed at the hostel and Golden Turtle was perched right atop the lintel of the gate. Ngộ Không said, “This hostel has a demonic essence and at night it would always kill people. Now it is not yet evening so you Sir should quickly go and not board [here].” The king laughed and said, “Death and life is up to fate, what can ghosts and goblins do? I’m not afraid.” Thus, he stayed and boarded there. At night the demonic essence came and from outside shouted, “Who is here? Uninvited [guest], open the door!” Golden Turtle said, “The door is shut! What will you do?” The demon spewed fire and transformed into myriad shapes. It used strange and myriad techniques in order to cause alarm and fright, but in the end it could not enter. When it was time for the rooster to crow, the demonic essence left and dispersed. Golden Turtle and the king chased after it to grab it, going all the way to Seven-Planets Mountain. The stored-up demonic essence was nearly depleted, so the king returned to the hostel. The next day, the hostel-keeper had a person go collect the corpse of the boarder. He saw the king happily laughing and talking. So, he quickly came forth with polite greetings, saying, “Sir, that you are safely here must mean you are a sagely person!” He begged for a divine medicine which could rescue people. The king said, “Kill your white chicken and sacrifice it, then the demonic essence will be completely wiped out.” Ngộ Không followed him, killed the white chicken and his daughter keeled over and died. Then [the king] ordered excavations on Seven-Planets Mountain and ancient musical instruments were found, as were skeletons. They were burnt into ash, then flung into the river current. That day, as evening approached, the king and Golden Turtle climbed Việt Thường 51. Đào Duy Anh (1957, p. 18) has noted the similarity with the story of the turtle and the crumbling city walls which appears in the Imperially-perused Encyclopedia of the Taiping Era (Taiping yulan 太平御覽). The story is extracted from a fourth-century text, Gazetteer on the Land South of (Mount) Hua (Huayang guozhi 華陽國志), which says, “In the twelfth year of the reign of King Hui of the Qin, Zhang Yi and Sima Cuo vanquished Shu and captured it. Yi built a wall for the citadel but in the end it would crumble and collapse. Later there was a giant turtle that came out of a crevice and crawled around and around. Then based on where the turtle had crawled, walls were built and it was completed” (華陽國志曰秦惠王十二年張儀司馬錯破蜀克之。儀因築城城終頺壞。後有一大龜 從硎而出。周行旋走。乃依龜行所築之乃成). For the Chinese text see Taiping yulan, 2000, vol. 4, juan 931. See also Dai 1991, p. 265; Lin 1996, pp. 188–189, 265. And on turtles in Vietnamese mythology, see Lê Văn Hảo 1966, pp. 71–78. On the Huayang guo zhi, see Chittick 2003; Farmer 2015; Felt 2021, pp. 13, 109. Dai Kelai has noted that a version of this story also appears in the Soushen ji (Dai 1991, p. 265). And a translation of the Soushen ji story can be found in DeWoskin & Crump 1996, p. 155. If the crumbling walls and turtle story is the source of the crumbling walls motif in the “Golden Turtle” story of Gleanings of the Uncanny, it would also explain the inspiration for the crumbling walls motif found in the story of Lý Thái Tổ’s building of his citadel. However, as I explain below, the source of the Golden Turtle character is most likely Yellow Dragon from the King Triệu Việt story of the Compendium on Mystic Numina. 244 Cuong T. Mai mountain and they saw that the demonic essence had turned into an owl with six feet. It held a document in its beak and flew atop a sandalwood tree. Golden Turtle then became a colored mouse [took on the shape of a mouse?], chased after [the owl], and bit its foot. The document fell to the ground and the king quickly grabbed it. The document had already been eaten halfway through by worms. From then on, the demonic essence was extinguished. The building of the city walls took half a month and was completed. The wall stretched for over a thousand zhangs. And it circled like the shape of a snail and thus was called Spiral Citadel. It was also called Ghost Dragon Citadel. Tang people called it Kunlun Citadel because it was exceedingly tall.52 Golden Turtle stayed for three years then bade farewell. The king was moved by gratitude and said, “Because of your grace the city walls could be completed. If there were to be an attack from without, how can it be defended?” Golden Turtle said, “A kingdom’s flourishing and decline, the security of the altars to soil and grain, [are matters of] Heaven’s command. [Nevertheless], humans are able to cultivate virtue and extend it. What is the use of the King cherishing [such an] aspiration?” Then [Golden Turtle] removed a claw and gave it to the king, and said, “Use this to make a crossbow trigger to shoot arrows at bandits, and there will be no sorrow.” Having spoken, [Golden Turtle] returned to the Eastern Sea. The king ordered Cao Lỗ to make a crossbow and to use the claw as a trigger, and he named it, “The Crossbow of the Divine Trigger of the Golden Turtle of Numinous Radiance.” Later King Zhao Tuo raised an army and came south to attack. He did battle with King [An Dương], who took the crossbow with the divine trigger and shot it. Tuo and [his] generals suffered a great defeat and they raced to Chu Mountain. They faced off with King [An Dương] and were not able to do battle properly, so they requested a truce. King [An Dương] agreed to cede north of the Tiểu River for Zhao Tuo to rule, while he would rule south [of the Tiểu River]. D) Zhongshi’s subterfuge Shortly, Zhao Tuo requested a betrothal. King An Dương, not suspecting [anything], had his daughter, Mỵ Châu marry Zhao Tuo’s son, Zhongshi. Zhongshi lured Mỵ Châu to surreptitiously let him see the divine-trigger crossbow. He secretly had another trigger made and switched it with the claw of Golden Turtle. He then falsely claimed that he was going home to visit his parents, saying, “We cannot forget the mutual feelings between husband and wife, but neither can we disregard closeness to parents. Now I will return home for a visit, and if the peace between the two kingdoms be lost, and the north and south be divided, and I come looking for you, what will you use to signal to me?” The princess replied, “I am but a young woman, and if we were to be separated, the feelings would 52. The use of the term Kunlun here (supposedly by Tang people) is explained by the narrator as connected to the height of the citadel walls, presumably in reference to the Kunlun Mountains. However, by the fifteenth century, the term Kunlun could also be used, more broadly, to refer to dark-skinned peoples of southeast China, Southeast Asia, or even African slaves owned by Arab traders. For an overview of these shifting meanings of the term Kunlun in fiction and nonfiction from the early medieval period to the Song Dynasty, see Wilensky 2002. See also Wyatt 2010. Body of Jade, Pearls of Blood 245 be difficult to endure. I have a goose down brocade tunic that I always drape on myself. Wherever I go I will place three feathers at crossroads to serve as markers, so that you can rescue me.” E) Zhao Tuo invades Zhongshi took the trigger and returned home. Zhao Tuo was extremely pleased to get it. He raised an army and attacked King An Dương, who was confident in his divine crossbow and so was nonchalantly playing chess. He laughed and said, “Does Zhao Tuo not fear the divine-trigger crossbow?” Zhao Tuo and his generals advanced closer and King An Dương raised his crossbow, but the divine trigger was already gone. Thus, the king himself fled. The king placed Mỵ Châu on a horse and with [her] behind, [they] fled south. Zhongshi recognized the goose feathers and gave chase. Coming to the end of the road at the seashore, there was no boat to cross over. The king called out, “Heaven has abandoned me! Where is the Clear River Emissary? Quickly come and save me!” Golden Turtle arose from the water and said, “The one on horseback behind you is the bandit!” F) Mỵ Châu’s testimony The king unsheathed his sword to behead Mỵ Châu. [But] Mỵ Châu made a supplication, “I am but a young woman, and if I had a traitorous heart that wanted to harm my father, then after death may [I] be reduced to dust. [But] if my chaste heart is loyal and filial, and if I had been deceived by another person, then after death may I transform into pearls and jade, so as to cleanse [e.g., make snow-like] this disgrace.” Mỵ Châu died by the seashore and her blood flowed into the waters. The oysters swallowed it and were transformed into bright pearls. G) Golden Turtle’s escort The king held a seven-cun, decorated rhino [horn], and Golden Turtle parted the waters, drew the king into the sea and disappeared. According to tradition, this place was at Dạ Mountain, Cao Xá village, in Diễn Châu prefecture. When Zhao Tuo arrived to that place, there was nothing to be seen but Mỵ Châu. Zhongshi embraced Mỵ Châu’s corpse and returned and buried it at Spiral Citadel. It had turned into jade. After her death Zhongshi’s grief was unending. At the place where she had bathed and washed, he would imagine her shape and form. He then threw himself into a well and died. Later, people who got a bright pearl from the Eastern Sea would take this well water to wash it and make it even brighter and purer. Thus, to avoid the name “Mỵ Châu,” they called bright pearls, Great Gem and Lesser Gem. The above shows that the fifteenth-century version of the King An Dương story is a significant expansion of the fourteenth-century narratives we have discussed so far. Onto the basic structure of episodes B, D, and E (prince of Shu invades, Zhongshi’s subterfuge, Zhao Tuo invades) are added episodes A, C, F, and G, (rejected marriage proposal, building Spiral Citadel, Mỵ Châu’s testimony, and Golden Turtle’s escort). 246 Cuong T. Mai Episode A, which features the motif of rejected marriage proposal, seems to have been borrowed from the story of the Tản Viên mountain deity, which appears in both the Compendium on Mystic Numina and Gleanings of the Uncanny.53 In the story of the Tản Viên deity, a marriage proposal from King Phán was rejected because the Hùng King’s Grand Minister and a Lạc marquis did not trust a marriage alliance with Shu, an enemy state, especially in the context of (what perhaps may have been some kind of cultural memory, real or imagined, of) matrilocal customs in which the groom lives with his bride’s family (for some duration, if not permanently). In any case, the introduction of an outsider into the royal court poses a threat. In the Tản Viên story, the rejection of King Phán is the pretext for the subsequent marriage contest between Mountain Essence and Water Essence for the hand of the daughter of the Hùng King, named Mỵ Nương.54 The relevant passages from the two sources read: Phán, King of Shu, sent an emissary to request marriage. The Hùng King was about to agree to it, [but] a Grand Minister and Lạc marquis would not allow it. They said, “He wants to spy on our kingdom.” 蜀王泮遣使求婚。雄王將許之。大臣雒侯不可。曰彼覘我國耳 。55 During the time of King Nan of the Zhou (314–256 bce) the eighteenthgeneration descendent of the Hùng King ruled56 from the capital [at] Việt Trì in Phong Province. [It] was called Văn Lang. He had a daughter named Mỵ Nương [the twenty-seventh generation descendent of Thần Nông/Shen Nong] who was beautiful in appearance. He heard that the King of Shu, Phán, requested to marry her, but he did not agree. He wanted to choose a good son-in-law. 周赧王時，雄王十八世孫至都峰州之越池，號文郎國。有女名媚娘（神農二十七世 孫女），美貌，聞蜀王泮求婚不許，欲擇佳婿。57 53. Interestingly, Ngô Sĩ Liên mentions the marriage proposal from Shu in his version of the tale of Mountain Essence and Water Essence, but he explicitly states that it was not Phán, but an ancestor of Phán. Ngô Sĩ Liên writes, “At the time of the waning of the dynasty, the king had a daughter named Mỵ Nương, who was beautiful and gorgeous. The King of Shu heard about her. He paid a call to the king and made a marriage proposal. The king wanted to agree to it, but a Hùng marquis stopped him and said, ‘They have designs on us and are using the marriage as a pretext,’…Tản Viên is the highest mountain in our [land] of Viet, and its numinous response is the most clearly verifiable. Mỵ Nương’s betrothal to the Mountain Essence greatly angered the King of Shu and he implored his descendants to surely vanquish Văng Lang and annex the kingdom. It was the descendent Phán who had the bravery and cunning to attack and seize it” (時屬季世，王有 女曰媚娘，美而艶。蜀王聞之，詣王求為婚。王欲從之，雄侯止之曰，彼欲圖我，以婚姻為由耳… 傘圓乃我 越巔山，其靈應最為顯驗。媚娘既嫁山精，蜀王憤怒，囑其子孫，必滅文郎而併其國。至孫蜀泮，有勇略，乃 攻取之). For the Chinese text, see Sun Xiao 2015, vol. 1, p. 42 and for the Vietnamese translation see Ngô Sĩ Liên 1993, vol. 1, p. 134. See also Yamamoto 1970, pp. 75, 87. 54. On the possible origin of “Mỵ Nương” as a Tai word, see Kelley 2015a, p. 172. See also Lê Hữu Mục 1960, pp. 78–81. 55. For the Chinese text, see Chan Hing-ho et al. 1992, series 2, vol. 1, p. 207; Lê Hữu Mục 1960, p. 192. For an English translation of the entire tale from the Compendium on Mystic Numina, see Dutton et al. 2012, pp. 19–20; Ostrowski & Zottoli 1999, pp. 75–77. 56. Reading 至 as 制. 57. For the Chinese text of A.33 from Gleanings of the Uncanny, see Chen Yiyuan et al. 2011, vol. 1, p. 52. Compare to A.2107, in Chen Yiyuan et al. 2011, vol. 1, pp. 84–85 and VHv.1473, in Body of Jade, Pearls of Blood 247 Why would the author of the fifteenth-century King An Dương story borrow this motif of rejected marriage proposal (presumably taken) from the Tản Viên story, only to contradict the story, that is, by identifying the proposer as an ancestor of Phán, rather than King Phán himself? We can surmise that the author of the Gleanings of the Uncanny version of the King An Dương story apparently thought that the marriage proposal must have occurred before King An Dương’s ascension, that is, at the beginning of the reign of the final generation of Hùng Kings, not at its end, because the events of the Tản Viên story had to have preceded the final fall of the Hùng Kings to King An Dương, but still took place during the time of that final generation. If this is correct, then the Tản Viên story must have been too well known to have been dismissed outright. But, it could not be accepted without modification. More importantly, from a narrative perspective, the rejected marriage proposal motif was deemed so effective it could not be discarded. First, it effectively foreshadows the later troubles between Âu Lạc and Nanyue. Second, this motif provides a crucial narrative pretext for the supposedly long-held enmity between Shu and Văn Lang. This is crucial because it provides the background for the subsequent episode which describes the spirit battle initiated by the building of Spiral Citadel. The walls of the new citadel continually collapse due to the interference of resentful and demonic spirits, which are rooted in the ancestral land of Văn Lang, and which King An Dương would ultimately have to vanquish. Thus, the failed marriage proposal between Shu and Văn Lang was added to the beginning of the fifteenth-century King An Dương story as pretext for the subsequent spirit battle and introduction of the Golden Turtle character. But, contrary to the two versions of the Tản Viên story cited above, the proposer could not be Phán, that is, King An Dương. After all, if Phán were to be identified as the person from Shu who wanted to spy on Văn Lang through a marriage alliance, then later as King An Dương, Phán would have known to reject Zhao Tuo’s offer of a marriage alliance, which of course, would undercut the premise of Zhongshi’s subterfuge. 4. Spirit Battle The next episode, which centers around a battle over the building of Spiral Citadel, is a significant expansion of the King An Dương story. It invokes a core trope of the popular religious imagination, introduces new characters and new dramatic conflicts, while adding a metaphysical and moral dimension not found in earlier versions of the King An Dương story. First, we should note that the spirit battle episode serves as a pretext for introducing a completely new character, that of Golden Turtle, who comes to serve as a patron deity of King An Dương. Without the spirit battle, the Golden Turtle character would be unnecessary. This is because in all earlier Chen Yiyuan et al. 2011, vol. 1, pp. 181–182. Also, note the Chinese text of the collated edition of Gleanings of the Uncanny based on VHv.486, VHv.1473, and A.2914 found in Chan Hing-ho et al. 1992, series 2, vol. 1, pp. 71–73. 248 Cuong T. Mai versions, it was the “divine man” Cao Thông who made the divine crossbow for King An Dương. Indeed, in these earlier versions, the magic of the divine crossbow resulted from the arts of Cao Thông. In the fifteenth-century story, by contrast, Golden Turtle gives its claw to be used as a magic trigger in Cao Thông’s divine crossbow. Moreover, after losing his kingdom, King An Dương is escorted into the waters by Golden Turtle. However, in all earlier versions of the story, King An Dương either uses a boat to escape into the sea, or he uses a magic water-parting rhinoceros horn to escape into the waters. In other words, in all earlier versions, King An Dương does not need a Golden Turtle to help him escape. Thus, in terms of narrative structure, the spirit battle episode bridges the story’s prelude and connects it to the subsequent rivalry with Zhao Tuo. But even more importantly, the spirit battle serves as a pretext for the author to introduce a new central character, Golden Turtle. Finally, the detail of Golden Turtle’s magic claw provides an important clue which points towards the influence of an entirely different fourteenth-century narrative tradition, that of the sixth-century general, King Triệu Việt (Triệu Quang Phục 趙光復, d. 571 ce). However, we will take up this clue later, after our analysis of the spirit battle. The spirit battle was a well-known trope in popular religious narratives, specifically the spirit battle to claim a certain territory, and even more specifically, a spirit battle to establish a citadel. For example, we see this trope in the tale of Gao Pian’s (Cao Biền 高駢) effort at building a citadel at Đại La, where he encounters the spirit Tô Lịch. Gao Pian’s renown occult powers proved useless against the superior numinous potency (linh 靈) of a local spirit, and he eventually retreats north.58 Similarly, the tale of Lý Thái Tổ’s effort at building a citadel at Thăng Long at the beginning of his reign also uses the spirit battle trope. In this tale, workers building the city walls find it constantly crumbling, until the emperor has a propitious dream in which he is told to direct workers to build along the hoof-tracks left by a magical white horse.59 They do so, and the walls miraculously stand and no longer collapse. The episode about King An Dương’s struggle to erect Spiral Citadel is built on an especially effective narrative strategy. The narrative embeds multiple binaries, which together generate dramatic tension: – west versus east – mountain versus sea – demonic spirits of the mountain versus Golden Turtle of the sea – earth versus waters – old ruling house versus new ruling house – deceased versus living – Văn Lang versus Âu Lạc – Hùng Kings versus King An Dương 58. On the account of Gao Pian building Đại La, see Taylor 1976, pp. 153–154; 1983, pp. 252, 337; Kelley 2015b, pp. 89–91. 59. See Taylor 1976; Momoki 2010; Kelley 2015a, p. 173; Mai 2021, p. 68. Body of Jade, Pearls of Blood 249 These embedded binaries, when extracted, show us how the narrative effectively conflates a political struggle with a religious struggle, both set within a cosmic background. That is, the conflict between the old ruling house and the new ruling house — Văn Lang against Âu Lạc, the deceased Hùng King’s lingering potency against that of King An Dương’s living virtue — is set within a cosmic background of the opposition between earth and waters, the western mountains (Seven-Planets Mountain) and the Eastern Sea (Golden Turtle). Put another way, the embedded conceptual binaries work to dramatize an unstated, but unmistakable core problem at the root of the spirit battle: conquering a kingdom is one thing, and conquering its land is another. Conquering a land requires pacifying its native spirits, which are rooted, and in some cases, literally, buried in the land. Pacifying local spirits, indeed, is the very task which Golden Turtle alludes to when it told King An Dương that it had knowledge of, “the hidden and manifest activities of Heaven and Earth, and of ghosts and gods.” Consider, for example, how the spirit battle begins when King An Dương tries to build walls for a new city, only to find them continually collapsing. Suspecting the work of occult forces, King An Dương performs a series of religious rites of abstention and propitiation. He tries to break through into the world of the hidden. Golden Turtle responds to King An Dương’s entreaties, appears miraculously, then reveals to the king the true causes of the disturbances. The hidden forces that are pulling down the walls are rooted in the conquered land, and they are obstructing the new ruling house. These hidden forces, the pneuma (khí, qi 氣) of the sons of former Hùng Kings and the ghosts (qủy, gui 鬼) of the deceased musicians of the former ruling house, congregate on a mountain (to the west of the citadel). Their powers are depicted as remnant pneuma (khí) of concentrated powers, or essences (tinh, jing 精). The most powerful of these, apparently, is a thousand-yearold essence (tinh), which takes the form of a white chicken, and which is described as a “remnant pneuma of a demonic essence.” In the narrative, two battles ensue, both occurring at night, a time of darkness (âm), when shape-shifting, occult forces dominate. The first battle occurs at the hostel by the mountain side and the second in a forest.60 The first concludes with the successful suppression and extermination of local, earth-bound spirits, the malevolent pneuma of the sons of former Hùng Kings and the ghosts of the buried musicians of the former ruling house. In a fashion typical of a certain narrative trope, the bones of the demonic forces are excavated, burnt, and the ashes cast into a river. In short, the land is cleansed, and the roots of the former ruling house are finally extinguished. The second and final battle takes place in a forest, which is not a mountain, of course, but still a kind of liminal space outside of civilization. Here, the white chicken, having lost the battle of occult powers, resorts to a bureaucratic method to appeal to the ultimate cosmic authority, the Thearch on High. It attempts to shape-shift into an owl to fly up to heaven with a written 60. Moreover, this episode at the inn resembles the story in the Soushen ji concerning the demonic spirits that kill wayfarers at night at a way station. See DeWoskin & Crump 1996, p. 267. 250 Cuong T. Mai memorial, by first alighting on a sandalwood tree.61 But with the help of Golden Turtle, King An Dương manages to obstruct the communication and upturn the white chicken’s bureaucratic machinations. The written memorial crumbles into dust. Thus, this episode centered on the theme of a king building a new citadel on conquered land works as a narrative because it re-inscribes a core, culturally-shared religious assumption, which required no explication: conquering a kingdom is one thing, and conquering the land is another, for the latter requires suppressing spirits buried in the land. Moreover, the story reiterates another culturally shared religious assumption: a kingdom’s most potent defenses come from the spirits rooted in the land. These two cultural-religious assumptions about how autochthonous spirits can defend the land against invaders, indeed, are not unique to any period of Vietnamese writing. These ideas can be found as basic assumptions in the earliest extant written sources, as Keith W. Taylor has shown for the Compendium on Mystic Numina of the Viet Realm.62 Thus, the analysis offered above does little to help us date when the spirit battle episode may have been composed. Nevertheless, when we isolate the specific references to Heaven in this episode, a moral and metaphysical discursive frame emerges, one in which Heaven is consistently represented as an active cosmic force that stands above and responds to the moral deeds of all beings, high and low, indeed even spirits, ghosts, demons, and essences. For example, when the hostel-keeper, Ngộ Không, wanted to warn the king, disguised as an ordinary traveler, about the dangers of staying overnight at the hostel, King An Dương laughed and said that life and death are determined by fate (that is, Heaven’s decree) not by ghosts and goblins (死生有命，鬼魅何為。吾不足畏). Similarly, after the white chicken was killed and sacrificed, it transformed into an owl and tried to send a written memorial to the Thearch on High, in a final effort to thwart the building of the citadel walls. The attempt, though successfully obstructed by Golden Turtle and King An Dương, presumes Heaven’s highest authority. Moreover, after losing the kingdom to Zhao Tuo, fleeing with his daughter, and getting cornered at the edge of the sea, King An Dương shouts out, “Heaven has abandoned me!” (天喪子). This means, of course, that so long as he was capable of defending the kingdom, King An Dương thought that Heaven was indeed on his side. Lastly, let us consider the scene in which Golden Turtle bade farewell after helping King An Dương defeat the local spirits. King An Dương seeks one final advice: how to defend his kingdom from invaders. Golden Turtle replies, “A kingdom’s flourishing and decline, the security of the altars to soil and grain, [are matters of] Heaven’s command. [Nevertheless,] humans are able to cultivate virtue and extend it. What is the use of the King cherishing [such an] aspiration?” (國祚盛衰，社稷安危，天之運也。人能修 德以延之，王有所願，何為惜之). Thus, while the narrative of the spirit battle works on layered binary oppositions, as I have shown, and also presumes 61. Perhaps this detail is inspired by the ancient tale of the white crane (bạc hạch 白鶴) that roosted on a giant and ancient sandalwood tree. See Kelley 2015a, p. 177. 62. See Taylor 1986a, 1986b; Kelley 2006, pp. 319–322; 2015b, and for a discussion of later examples from the Ming, see Baldanza 2022. Body of Jade, Pearls of Blood 251 the cultural-religious assumption that the spirits embedded in the land have to be pacified, if the land is to be truly conquered, the narrative of the spirit battle also represents Heaven as an ultimate authority that is, paradoxically, at once beyond such worldly conflicts while also deeply responsive to it, able to determine the outcome of such conflicts. As Golden Turtle puts it to King An Dương: a kingdom’s fate is determined by the ruler’s cultivation of virtue (tu đức, xiude 修德), but only to a point. Thus, Golden Turtle concludes the advice with a rhetorical question, “What is the use of the King cherishing [such an] aspiration?” To rephrase Golden Turtle’s parting advice: you must cultivate virtue, but in the end, it is up to Heaven’s command (e.g., tian zhi yun 天之運). This then is the moral paradox that is embedded in the exchange between King An Dương and Golden Turtle: one should always be virtuous, to garner Heaven’s favor, but in the end, it is up to the higher authority of Heaven and not human action. Moreover, this paradox poses a threat to Heaven’s moral authority. In the first place, a certain fatalism can arise: why do good when ultimately Heaven decides? Secondly, why do good if one’s virtue might go unrewarded, perhaps even come under condemnation? How does Heaven respond to injustice in the world? More than any version of the story of King An Dương we have analyzed thus far, it is this fifteenth-century version found in Gleanings of the Uncanny wherein the figure of Heaven plays a prominent role in framing moral conflicts embedded in the many, intertwined subplots of the narrative. 5. From Tragic Love to Cosmic Injustice (oan, yuan 冤) We now turn to the next major expansion of the narrative, episode F (Mỵ Châu’s testimony), which follows episode D (Zhongshi’s subterfuge). Clearly, both episodes are intertwined and cannot be separated, and will be analyzed together below. In this analysis, I want to emphasize how episode F (Mỵ Châu’s testimony), as a completely new addition to the fifteenth-century version, introduces new themes, tensions, and moral conflicts not seen in earlier versions. In my reading, episode F emphasizes the betrayal of Mỵ Châu, the injustice of her beheading by her father, and the miracles of her body turning into jade and her blood turning into pearls. I see this episode as implicitly raising an entirely new religious question not seen in earlier versions of the King An Dương story: how does a just Heaven respond to a virtuous woman who has been betrayed by her husband, and falsely accused and murdered by her father? This transformation of the sub-plot centered on Mỵ Châu, from its depiction as a tragedy to an injustice, I will argue in the conclusion, signals the emergence of the Neo-Confucian idea of a moral Heaven that actively responds to the virtuous actions of lowly humans, even those who are marginalized and ordinary, like Mỵ Châu, for example. Before addressing these questions, we must recognize that in all earlier versions discussed above, Mỵ Châu’s end is never mentioned. Her character disappears from the narrative after the fall of the kingdom. Mỵ Châu was never presented as a main character in the drama. Rather, she was a mere narrative prop: the licentious woman who engaged in illicit relations with the son of her 252 Cuong T. Mai father’s enemy outside of proper marriage, and who in the end, as a treasonous daughter, would cause the downfall of her father’s kingdom. As such, her relation to Zhongshi was merely sensual, her inner thoughts unimportant, and thus, her ultimate end after the fall of the kingdom not worth mentioning. By contrast, in the fifteenth-century version, Mỵ Châu is not licentious and does not have illicit relations with Zhongshi. Indeed, she is properly married to him, by official betrothal that her father had presumably accepted. This unprecedented emergence of the ethical and religious implications of the Mỵ Châu character in the fifteenth-century version is made possible by a series of narrative innovations which were borrowed directly from a different, fourteenth-century narrative tradition, that of the sixth-century general, King Triệu Việt.63 Indeed, many have noted the uncanny parallels between the tale of King An Dương and the tale of King Triệu Việt.64 In the latter tale, King Triệu Việt is given a magic claw by Yellow Dragon to place on his helmet. With it he can defeat all enemies. Later, King Triệu Việt battles his arch opponent, Lý Phật Tử, to an impasse, which is only resolved by a marriage alliance in which King Triệu Việt’s daughter, Cảo Nương is betrothed to Lý Phật Tử’s son, Nhã Lang. Once married, Nhã Lang surreptitiously absconds with the magic claw, replacing it with a replica. As a result, King Triệu Việt loses his kingdom, but manages to escape on horseback with his daughter, only to be told later by Yellow Dragon that it was the king’s own daughter, Cảo Nương, who was the traitor. It was, after all, his daughter, on the earlier behest of Nhã Lang, who dropped goose feathers to allow the enemy to 63. For an overview of the military conflict between Triệu Quang Phục (趙光復) and Lý Phật Tử, which arose after the death of Lý Bôn, based on Chinese and Vietnamese sources, see Maspero 1916, pp. 1–27; Taylor 1976, p. 180; 1983, pp. 151–155; Holmgren 1980, pp. 135–136; Ngô Sĩ Liên 1993, vol. 1, pp. 181–186. On temples dedicated to the cult of Triệu Quang Phục in Nam Định Province, see Nguyễn Văn Huyên 1938, pp. 5–6. 64. Already in the fifteenth century Ngô Sĩ Liên had remarked on the inexplicable similarity between the two stories of King An Dương and King Triệu Việt. See Sun Xiao 2015, vol. 1, pp. 47–48. Moreover, in his essay of 1514, “General Introduction to the Comprehensive Examination of the Viet Mirror” (Việt Giám Thông Khảo Tổng Luận 越鑑通考總論), Lê Tung comments on the similarity of the two stories and draws a Confucian lesson about the Way of Heaven, “The Martial Emperor Zhao sent Zhongshi to request a marriage with the daughter of King An Dương. Then he stole the turtle claw, attacked King An Dương and usurped his kingdom. Thus, the Martial Emperor Zhao’s plans were devious. Yet, the Zhao clan was vanquished by the Han. The Later Southern Martial Emperor sent Nhã Lang to request marriage with King Triệu Việt’s daughter, then stole the dragon claw. He attacked King Triệu Việt and usurped the throne. Though the Later Southern Emperor’s skills were deep indeed, the Lý clan was obliterated by the Sui. Alas, one vanquishes another’s kingdom, then another vanquishes one’s own kingdom. The Way of Heaven is brightly luminous, sufficient to serve as a clear warning!” (趙武帝 使仲始，托婚於安陽之女，乃窃其龜爪，以伐安陽王，而取其國，則趙武帝之計險矣，而趙氏尋滅於漢。後南 帝使雅郎，托娶於趙越王之女，乃窃其龍爪，以伐趙越王，而移其祚，則後南帝之術深矣，而李氏卒陷於隋。 噫滅人之國，人亦滅其國，天道昭昭，足為明戒). For the Chinese text, see Sun Xiao 2015, vol. 1, p. 16 and for the Vietnamese translation, see Ngô Sĩ Liên 1993, vol. 1, p. 120. On this text, see Gaspardone 1934, pp. 77–78; Trần Văn Giáp 1990, vol. 1, pp. 63–64, and on Lê Tung, see Cadière & Pelliot 1904, pp. 629–630, note 5; Whitmore 1995, pp. 120–121. Also, see the extensive discussion of the two stories in Appendix F of Taylor 1983, pp. 155, 316–319. Nguyễn Phương provides a convenient table comparing the two stories (Nguyễn Phương 1976, p. 37), and also comments on Ngô Sĩ Liên’s use of the King Triệu Việt story in his Comprehensive Book (1962). See also Yamamoto 1970, pp. 90–91. Moreover, Nguyễn Đăng Na has noted an alternate version of the King Triệu Việt story in Nguyễn Hàng’s sixteenth-century collection, Arrayed Accounts from the Cloudy Records of the Celestial South (Thiên Nam vân lục liệt truyện 天南雲籙列傳). See Nguyễn Đăng Na 2001, pp. 49–51. Body of Jade, Pearls of Blood 253 track their escape. King Triệu Việt beheads his daughter, then is taken into the waters by Yellow Dragon, never to be seen again. Below, I provide a full translation of the King Triệu Việt story from its fourteenth-century source, the Compendium on Mystic Numina of the Viet Realm,65 [Triệu Quang Phục]66 was originally from Chu Diên.67 He served as [Lý] Bôn’s General of the Left. Chu Diên had a large marsh that was wide and deep all around, and its extent could not be fathomed. Upon Lý Bôn’s death, [Triệu Quang Phục] gathered the remaining troops, numbering 20,000 men, [whom] he commanded and directed. They hid within the marshes. By night they plundered the encampments and by day disappeared in the marshes. [Chen] Baxian sent scouts to reconnoiter, then he discovered that it was [Triệu Quang Phục]. He had troops go on the attack, but in the end [Triệu Quang Phục] could not be captured. The public recognized him as “The Night Marsh King.” [Triệu Quang Phục] resided in the marsh for a year. [One] night [Triệu Quang Phục] saw Yellow Dragon. [It] removed a claw, gave it [to him], and said, “Take this and install it on top of (your) helmet. When the enemy bandits notice it, they will, on their own, submit out of awe.” Due to events at Jiankang, [Chen] Baxian was ordered to return north. He left behind his general Dương Sàn to retain control and serve in his stead. After [Triệu Quang Phục] received the divine claw, his stratagems were extraordinary. Whomever he battled was defeated. Moreover, because [Chen] Baxian had been called back north, [Triệu Quang Phục] lead an attack on Dương Sàn. Though Dương Sàn fought back, upon seeing the helmet, he was vanquished and died. Quang Phục then captured Long Biên Citadel, took control of Lộc Loa and Vũ Ninh,68 and entitled himself “King of Nam Việt”… 65. There are only two extant sources for the King Triệu Việt story, Ngô Sĩ Liên’s Comprehensive Book, and the Compendium on Mystic Numina. Nguyễn Phương (1962) has argued that Ngô Sĩ Liên relied too heavily on the Compendium on Mystic Numina to describe King Triệu Việt. According to Nguyễn Phương, Ngô Sĩ Liên was so pressed to fill in the twenty-three years between the death of Lý Bí and the ascendance of Lý Phật Tử (i.e., 548–571) that he resorted to “fiction” (tiểu thuyết). Indeed, Ngô Sĩ Liên says that he had no earlier sources for King Triệu Việt or King Đào Lang (aka Lý Thiên Bảo). He writes, “The old chronicle did not mention King Triệu Việt, nor King Đào Lang. Now, [using] unofficial histories and other books, [I] have begun to include the position and title of King Việt, appending as supplement, [information on] King Đào Lang” (按舊史不載趙越王，桃 郎王，今野史及他書，始載越王位號，附桃郎王以補之). See Sun Xiao 2015, vol. 1, p. 90. Indeed, to my knowledge, we do not have any other extant sources for King Triệu Việt earlier than the story of Yellow Dragon in the Compendium on Mystic Numina. 66. The typeset versions of this story, based on the Việt điện u linh tập toàn biên (A.751, VHv.1285a, A.2879), mistakenly identify this person as Lý Phật Tử, which is an obvious error. See Chan Hing-ho et al.1992, series 2, vol. 1, pp. 175–180; Chen Yiyuan et al. 2011, vol. 2, pp. 59–61. It should be Triệu Quang Phục, as the remainder of the story makes clear. Lê Hữu Mục’s typeset version provides corrections for this error (Lê Hữu Mục 1960, pp. 221–218). 67. Chu Diên was the site of the first battle between Lý Bôn and Chen Baxian in 545, notes Keith W. Taylor. For a discussion of the problem of locating Chu Diên over the centuries, see Appendix H in Taylor 1983, pp. 136, 324–326; 1976, p. 163. 68. Lộc Loa 祿螺 and Vũ Ninh, in present-day Bắc Ninh Province. Lộc Loa has traditionally been understood to refer to Cổ Loa. The earliest known reference that identifies “King Việt’s citadel” as Cỗ Loa is in Lê Tắc’s Brief Gazeteer of Annam. See note 35 above. 254 Cuong T. Mai …The Southern Emperor Lý had insufficient troops so he had to retreat. Suspecting that King Việt possessed some occult arts, [the Southern Emperor Lý] appealed for peace. King Việt considered the Southern Emperor as a member of [Lý] Bôn’s clan. Thus, he divided the kingdom and created a border at Quân Thần Province, so that they could share rulership. The Southern Emperor occupied Ô Diên.69 He sent his son Nhã Lang to forward a marriage proposal to King Việt. King Việt then betrothed his daughter Cảo Nương. [The two] developed intimate feelings for each other. [Their union was like] the harmony of the lute and zither. Nhã Lang then surreptitiously queried Cảo Nương, “The two kingdoms in the past were enemies [but] are now [bound] by marriage. It is a union formed by celestial predestination, a propitious encounter [caused by] marvelous fate. Last year the two kingdoms battled, and [your] father’s military apparatus was divine and miraculous! [He was able to] surpass my father’s [General] of the Right. I cannot fathom what miraculous arts could lead to [such] marvelous stratagems!” Cảo Nương was of the women’s world of “needle and thread,” so how could she comprehend the world of struggle and strife? Thus, forthwith she secretly took King Việt’s dragon-claw helmet, showed it and explained, “My father the King has been able to defeat enemies by relying on this.” Nhã Lang surreptitiously plotted to switch the claw. He said to Cảo Nương, “I have long been the royal son-in-law, [but] I pine for my parents. How can I long possess the private feelings of the conjugal bed, and yet neglect the sweetness of [attending to parents] day and night? I want to return to them temporarily and pay my respects and only then will I have attained my utmost aspiration. However, the road is distant and the journey arduous. Indeed, it is not that one can start off in the morning and arrive by evening. How sorrowful, thus, that there are frequent separations but few reunions! After I return to my kingdom, if there should be any unexpected changes, and should you follow your father, fleeing towards whatever direction, you must use goose feathers as communication, so I can search for you.” Nhã Lang returned and relayed the situation to the Southern Emperor. The Southern Emperor was greatly pleased and thereupon led his troops directly into [King] Việt’s territory. It was as if they were walking into a deserted land. King Việt did not yet understand [the situation]. He personally took up the helmet, took up defenses, and awaited the Southern Emperor. Having lost the divine mechanism to the Southern Emperor, and with the martial spirit wavering, King Việt himself realized that he would be no match. He took his daughter and fled south. He wanted to pick a strategic location in which to take shelter. [But] enemy troops followed after his tracks. Just as he arrived at a provincial township to take a rest, his assistants reported, “The Southern Emperor and his troops have arrived.” Frightened, King [Việt] shouted, “Will the Divine Monarch Yellow Dragon not help me?” Suddenly, he saw Yellow Dragon pointing and saying, “It is none other than precisely the King’s own daughter Cảo Nương who has been dropping feathers to lead the way. She is the great evil bandit! Why tarry and not kill her?” The king looked back, took a knife and beheaded her. [She] fell into the water [and floated] away. 69. See Taylor 1983, p. 153. Body of Jade, Pearls of Blood 255 The king then directed his horse and hastened to Lesser Nha Harbor. [But] the road was blocked so he had to turn around. He headed east and arrived at Greater Nha Harbor. He sighed, and said, “It’s over for me.” Suddenly, he saw Yellow Dragon. It parted the waters, made a path, and drew the king into the waters. Then [all] returned to as it was before. When the Southern Emperor and his troops arrived, no one could tell where [King Việt] had gone. So, the [Southern Emperor] lead his troops back to Việt.70 The above translation of the King Triệu Việt story helps us see many remarkable parallels with the King An Dương story. Specifically, it helps us see the textual inspiration for the fifteenth-century version of the Mỵ Châu character, which is, in fact, based on the fourteenth-century representation of Cảo Nương, she who was betrayed by her husband, convinced to drop goose feathers to leave a trail, and unjustly beheaded by her father, King Triệu Việt. Moreover, now we can see more clearly how the analysis of the six prefifteenth-century versions of the King An Dương story discussed above can shed light on the textual inspirations for the fourteenth-century King Triệu Việt story. For example, it is clear that the characters of Nhã Lang and Cảo Nương were based on the characters of Zhongshi and Mỵ Châu found in earlier versions of the King An Dương story. Moreover, the magic helmet of King Triệu Việt was based on the divine crossbow of King An Dương. In both stories, the son of an enemy gains entree into the inner court in order to destroy a magic weapon. Whereas in previous King An Dương stories the relationship with the princess was illicit, in the King Triệu Việt version it is by marriage. The character of Yellow Dragon was a fourteenth-century innovation, introduced in the King Triệu Việt story. It was used as a plot device to explain the origins of the magic helmet. On the other hand, the Golden Turtle character was a fifteenth-century invention based directly on the fourteenth-century character, Yellow Dragon. As I noted above, the character of Golden Turtle was unnecessary in the pre-fifteenth-century versions of the King An Dương story because it was Cao Thông’s occult arts which made the crossbow divine. It is the fifteenth-century version of the King An Dương Story, found in Gleanings of the Uncanny, which borrowed the character of Yellow Dragon and substituted it with Golden Turtle. The claw of Yellow Dragon (龍爪), patron deity of King Triệu Việt, became the claw of Golden Turtle (龜爪), patron deity of King An Dương. It should be noted, nevertheless, that the original inspiration for the claw of Yellow Dragon was in fact the divine crossbow’s trigger (機), a detail which was introduced in the version found in the late tenth-century Treatise on the World of the Taiping Era, then borrowed into the fourteenthcentury Brief Gazetteer of Annam version of the King An Dương story. In both stories of King Triệu Việt and King An Dương, the defeated king escapes into the sea. One king is assisted by Yellow Dragon and the other is aided by Golden Turtle. This final episode G (Golden Turtle’s escort) in the fifteenth-century King An Dương story is also clearly derived from the King Triệu Việt story, since in earlier pre-fifteenth-century versions, King 70. For the Chinese text see Appendix B. 256 Cuong T. Mai An Dương escapes either with a boat (Accounts of Nhật Nam) or by means of a magical water-parting rhinoceros horn (e.g., Treatise on the World of the Taiping Era, Brief Gazetteer of Annam, and Brief History of Việt). Nevertheless, again, the original inspiration for the motif of the defeated king escaping by way of the sea found in the King Triệu Việt story comes from earlier (pre-fifteeenth-century) versions of the King An Dương story. Finally, another innovation found in the fourteenth-century King Triệu Việt story, which was borrowed by the fifteenth-century King An Dương story, is the detail about Cảo Nương dropping goose feathers to make a trail. Mỵ Châu does no such thing in any earlier versions of the King An Dương story. Nevertheless, the fifteenth-century version of Mỵ Châu does exactly that. And it is precisely for this, and the loss of the claw-trigger, that she is accused of treason by her father. In the King Triệu Việt story, Yellow Dragon directs the king’s ire towards Cảo Nương, saying, “She is the great evil bandit! Why tarry and not kill her?” In the King An Dương story it is Golden Turtle who says about Mỵ Châu, “The one on horseback behind you is the bandit!” In both versions, the daughter dies at the hands of the father for the crime of treason. In sum, we can use the following diagram (fig. 1) to understand the direction of influence of the different stories and their textual versions: Fig. 1 — Direction of textual development and borrowing. Body of Jade, Pearls of Blood 257 How can we be sure of the direction of influence charted above? For example, perhaps, the fourteenth-century King Triệu Việt story borrowed the character of Yellow Dragon, the motif of goose feathers, and the theme of the beheaded treasonous daughter from the King An Dương story found in Gleanings of the Uncanny? After all, some parts of Gleanings of the Uncanny do date from the fourteenth century, which is precisely when the King Triệu Việt story was probably composed. Put another way, perhaps the direction of influence was not from E to G, as charted above, but the opposite, from G to E.71 We can be sure that the Golden Turtle character is based on Yellow Dragon, and not the reverse, because, as I have shown above, the Golden Turtle character is not only not needed in the King An Dương story, it actually conflicts with certain older elements of the story, such as King An Dương escaping into the sea by using a rhino’s horn. That both elements — the rhino horn and Golden Turtle — persist in the fifteenth-century version shows that the Golden Turtle character was inspired by an external tradition and interpolated into the pre-existing fourteenth-century King An Dương story. By contrast, the Yellow Dragon character plays a crucial role in the King Triệu Việt story as the bestower of the magic claw.72 Similarly, the goose feathers motif most likely originated with the King Triệu Việt story and not the King An Dương story, because in all the older versions of the King An Dương story, Zhongshi and Mỵ Châu disappear from the narrative after the fall of the kingdom. Their relationship, such as it was, was always depicted as illicit, sensual, based on subterfuge, and not based on love nor marriage, as in the case of Nhã Lang and Cảo Nương. For the latter two lovers, the goose feathers symbolize their husband and wife bond, which in the story is compared to the “harmony of the lute and zither.” Indeed, the motif of the goose feathers point towards the tragic element, which is found only in the relationship between Nhã Lang and Cảo Nương, and not in any of the older representations of the Zhongshi-Mỵ Châu relationship. The goose feathers, then, represent Cảo Nương’s tragic end in the same way that the claw-helmet represents King Triệu Việt’s tragic fate. That is, the centrality of the goose feather symbolism indicates that the story is not just about a king losing a kingdom, but it is also about an injustice committed against a faithful wife and a loyal daughter. Cảo Nương is depicted as innocent, a mere woman whose only experience is that of the domestic life of the woman’s quarters, not the striving and conflict of war and politics characteristic of the realm of men. She did not hesitate to show the claw-helmet because she could not have fathomed that her beloved husband would betray her and her father. Moreover, Cảo Nương is clearly not motivated merely by sensual pleasure (duyệt/yue 悅), like Mỵ Châu, she who consorted (thông/tong 通) with a young man to whom she was not married. Unlike the morally compromised Mỵ Châu (of the 71. For example, Nguyễn Phương (1962, p. 11) has argued precisely this point. 72. As mentioned above, Yellow Dragon’s magic claw is based on the magic trigger of King An Dương’s crossbow, a motif found first in the late tenth-century Taiping huanyu ji. 258 Cuong T. Mai earlier fourteenth-century versions), Cảo Nương is truly a tragic figure. The goose feathers, then, is an especially powerful tragic symbol; it symbolizes both love and betrayal. The goose feathers were supposed to unite the lovers, but in the end they led to her death. The goose feathers represent their eternal love but also, tragically, their eternal separation. Such a complex and powerful literary symbol could not have originated within the earlier King An Dương stories, where Mỵ Châu and Zhongshi were undeveloped characters, their inner feelings never explored nor expressed. It is indeed only in the fifteenth-century version of the King An Dương story where we find the tragic lovers Nhã Lang and Cảo Nương transposed into Zhongshi and Mỵ Châu. As mentioned above, Mỵ Châu in the earlier King An Dương stories was an unrealized character, a two-dimensional prop used to represent the stock character of the treasonous, licentious woman who causes the downfall of a kingdom. It is in the fifteenth-century version where we find both characters, Zhongshi and Mỵ Châu, more fully developed, their inner voices and inner conflicts expressed through speech and action, their tragic love also represented by goose feathers. Zhongshi, for example, seems at first like a one-dimensional villain. But by the end of the tale — he embraces her corpse, regrets her death, is haunted by her memory, then commits suicide — Zhongshi is transformed into a more rounded character, someone whom we can imagine as being wracked by inner conflicts. At first, Zhongshi expresses inner turmoil to manipulate and deceive Mỵ Châu. Having exchanged the magic trigger with a replica, Zhongshi wanted to return and report this to his father King Zhao Tuo. He said to Mỵ Châu, “We cannot forget the mutual feelings between husband and wife, but neither can we disregard closeness to parents.” It is clear from context that here Zhongshi was deceiving Mỵ Châu when he invoked the classic Confucian contradiction arising when filial piety for one’s parents conflicts with love for one’s spouse. The tragedy is doubled because there are two layers of deception. Mỵ Châu takes Zhongshi to be sincere, when in fact he is contriving this moral conflict to manipulate her feelings and to cover his betrayal. Foreseeing an escape attempt by Mỵ Châu and her father, he asks for markers to track her. He feigns concern for their reunion, but clearly his real purpose is to thwart any escape. Thus, overall, in the fifteenth-century version, the character of Zhongshi is humanized. He is portrayed as being capable of good, evil, and regret. But to what narrative purpose? There are two reasons. First, Zhongshi is humanized so that he can be shown as being responsible for his own tragic fate. The more evil his actions, the more they weigh down on him when he witnesses their consequences — hence, his final resort to suicide. Second, in being humanized in this way, Zhongshi’s dastardly actions and duplicitous words are shown to be all his doing. This all the more absolves Mỵ Châu of any blame, and also underscores the deep injustice of the betrayal she endures and the false accusation which besmirches her innocence.73 73. Reflection and debate on the moral character of Zhongshi/Trọng Thủy came to the fore when the story of King An Dương became a popular subject in modern folk opera in the early 1960s. Body of Jade, Pearls of Blood 259 Mỵ Châu’s unblemished innocence in the face of the extremely bad treatment shown to her by her husband and father transforms what was once a tale about tragic love into a tale about cosmic injustice. Her innocence adds a metaphysical dimension to the narrative; this kind of extreme injustice inflicted on the innocent implicates Heaven. For example, it is only in the fifteenth-century version wherein the character of Mỵ Châu has a voice to express her inner thoughts, which happens twice.74 First, she responds to Zhongshi’s request to leave some mark so that he can find her. She confesses her feminine weakness and says, “I am but a woman, and if we were to be separated, the feelings would be difficult to endure. I have a goose down brocade tunic that I always drape on myself. Wherever I go I will place three feathers at crossroads to serve as markers, so that you can save me.” The second and final time she speaks, Mỵ Châu utters a prayer (祝) before her beheading. The scene is tragic and miraculous: The king unsheathed his sword to behead Mỵ Châu. [But] Mỵ Châu made a supplication, “I am but a young woman, and if I had a traitorous heart that wanted to harm my father, then after death may [I] be reduced to dust. [But] if my chaste heart is loyal and filial, and if I had been deceived by another person, then after death may I transform into pearls and jade, so as to cleanse this disgrace.” Mỵ Châu died by the seashore and her blood flowed into the waters. The oysters swallowed it and were transformed into bright pearls. Here, Mỵ Châu proclaims her innocence in the form of two linked conditionals. If (you 有) A, then (ze 則) B; if (ru 如) X, then (ze 則) Y. Without mentioning the word Heaven, she is invoking Heaven’s judgement. She seems to say, if I am guilty may I be justly punished, but if I am innocent may a sign from Heaven appear. She issues a prayer (chú/chúc 祝), not a mere statement. 6. Heaven Redeems the Virtuous Woman Who is Unjustly Executed To properly understand the rhetorical construction, the prayer which invites Heaven’s judgement, and the religious logic of the miracle which subsequently occurs, we have to analyze this episode as an example of what Keith N. Knapp has identified as “correlative Confucianism” (Knapp 2005). Broadly speaking, in the Chinese context, the term “correlative Confucianism” can be applied to a variety of cultural products, from biographies, miracle tales, carved tableaux, theoretical treatises, and educational primers, to “morality books” (shanshu 善書) and “precious scrolls” (baojuan 寶卷). Though vastly different in genre, See Song Bân 1961, and Lê Văn Hảo 1966, pp. 123–125. In such modern renditions, the motif of tragic love was emphasized. For example, in defending his play about the tragic lovers, Song Bân notes several oral traditions among the populace (nhân dân) in the contemporary Cổ Loa region that saw Trộng Thuỷ as guilty of betraying the love of Mỵ Châu and not worthy of sympathy. One local oral tradition even has it that Trộng Thuỷ did not die by suicide but was drowned by the avenging spirit of Mỵ Châu. 74. By contrast, Cảo Nương has no voice, does not defend herself, and has no miracle which accompanies her beheading. 260 Cuong T. Mai such cultural products had the common function of propagating the principle of “the resonance between Heaven and people” (tianren ganying 天人感應) (Knapp 2005, p. 83). Such cultural products, initially produced by and for an elite in early medieval China and subsequently for popular consumption by late imperial times, commonly expressed the idea that, “the moral universe is deeply concerned with the actions of people and will send down miracles to reward the virtuous and disasters to chastise the immoral” (Knapp 2005, p. 111). Thus, as Knapp has noted, this principle lead to the claim that, “Because people have the essence of Heaven and Earth within them, each person has the potential to be heavenly — that is, to do good” (Knapp 2008, pp. 49–50). In short, moral actions based on Confucian virtues, in certain circumstances, could lead to miraculous responses from Heaven. Of particular interest to us is the flourishing of narratives which told of ordinary men, women, and children who exemplified Confucian virtues and who could thus serve as exemplars for use as religious inspiration and moral instruction. Indeed, tales of filial sons and daughters, loyal ministers, and chaste widows were compiled into anthologies. And many of these served as, “tools of persuasion through which a Confucian view of the ideal parent-child relationship was propagated” (Knapp 2005, p. 7). Though such Confucian heroes and heroines often were shown displaying incredible moral heroism and extreme acts of virtue, they were more relatable than, for example, hoary figures like the Duke of Zhou, Confucius, Mencius, or Zhu Xi. Moreover, as Knapp has shown, while these tales were widely circulated already during the Han Dynasty, they became increasingly popular during the early medieval period, as well as increasingly incorporating “supernatural elements.” For example, heroes and heroines who showed dedication in “reverent caring” (yang 養) for elderly parents and those who engaged in acts of sincere and extreme mourning often elicited miracles from Heaven, including, for example, celestial portents, materialization of divine medicine, assurances of longevity and abundant progeny, safety from natural calamity, escape from bandits, protection from ferocious animals, and much more. In these tales, some miracles occur while the protagonist is alive, in others, miracles are posthumous. Interestingly, a preponderance of tales of posthumous miracles tends to be those of filial and chaste women, as Knapp has shown, particularly for early medieval narratives (c. 220–589). Knapp has noted that, indeed, sons and daughters had to exemplify the same values, but the latter had to go to “greater extremes.” Moreover, in many cases women had to die before they received a miracle from Heaven, when in similar cases, men did not (Knapp 2005, p. 7). Consider, for example, the well-known case of Cao E (d. 143 ce). She went to search for the body of her drowned father. Then after seventeen days of fruitless searching, she finally threw herself into the river. After five days her body arose from the waters, embracing the corpse of her father.75 75. See Knapp 2005, p. 175; Epstein 2019, pp. 156, 173. Also, Felt notes two stories in the Huayang guo zhi of women throwing themselves into rivers to search for their drowned husband/ father (Felt 2021, p. 80). Body of Jade, Pearls of Blood 261 Another illustrative example is seen in a case from the Jin Dynasty (266–420 ce). In the story of the wife from Shan (陜婦), from History of the Jin (compiled during the Tang Dynasty), a young widow cares for her husband’s aunt with great reverence and diligence. But when the aunt dies of illness, the widow is falsely accused of murder by the aunt’s daughter. The story continues, [After she was executed] … a flock of birds alighted on her corpse and cried out pitifully, making a sorrowful sound. Though it was the height of summer and cruelly [hot], for ten days, the corpse did not decay and neither insects nor animals despoiled it. In the area a year passed without rain. [Liu] Yao sent Hu Yan to serve as Grand Protector. He realized an injustice [yuan 冤] had been done and he had the daughter beheaded. He had offerings sacrificed at the tomb and conferred a posthumous title [upon the widow], “Filial and Fiercely Chaste Wife.” That day there was a great rain. 時有群鳥悲鳴尸上，其聲甚哀，盛夏暴尸十日，不腐，亦不為蟲獸所敗，其境乃經 歲不雨。曜遣呼延謨為太守，既知其冤，乃斬此女，設少牢以祭其墓，謚曰孝烈 貞婦，其日大雨。76 Overall, why was it more common in such tales for women to be depicted as dying due to extreme acts of virtue? Knapp suggests that this was due to women not being considered as contributors to the patriline. The authors of these moralizing stories seem to assume, as a matter of course, that virtuous sons should try their best to remain alive, but virtuous daughters were, “expendable and thus can be used to teach emphatic moral lessons” (Knapp 2005, p. 178). Into the late imperial era, from the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) onwards, these accounts of virtuous women began to proliferate and became increasingly gruesome, filled with stories of suicide, bodily mutilation, and self-inflicted violence, as many scholars have shown.77 One of the most well-known tales was the account of the “filial wife of Donghai” (東海孝婦), which can be found in the fourth-century zhiguai collection compiled by Gan Bao (d. 336) entitled, A Record of Inquest into the Divine (Soushen ji 搜神記).78 Set in the Han Dynasty, the tale is about 76. This excerpt is taken from the History of the Jin (Jin Shu 晉書), by Fang Xuanling 房玄齡 (579–648), 1974, vol. 96, “Accounts of Exemplary Women” (列女傳). For a brief discussion of this biography, see Mou 2002, p. 102. 77. See Yu 2012. For this essay I want to focus on Chinese tales from the early medieval to medieval period, which would have more likely impacted fifteenth-century Đại Việt. 78. On the Soushen ji, see Kao 1985, pp. 7–8; DeWoskin & Crump 1996, pp. xxviii–xxxvi; Campany 1996, pp. 55–59, 146–150. On Gan Bao, see DeWoskin & Crump 1996, pp. xxiii–xxviii; Ao 2015, pp. 71–77. On Gan Bao’s influence on Gleanings of the Uncanny, see the extensive comparative study by Lin 1996. See also Kelley 2012, p. 95. This story would come to inspire the famous Yuan Dynasty drama “Injustice to Dou E” (Dou E yuan 竇娥冤) by Guan Hanqing (c. 1245– 1322). The main character, filial widow Dou E, is falsely accused of murder and is condemned to be executed. But, before her death she pleads her case to Heaven, announces her innocence, and predicts three miracles: her blood will flow upwards, snow will fall in midsummer to cover her corpse, and a drought will strike for three years. Ao Yumin has rightly noted that compared to earlier versions, in Gan Bao’s rendition, “the filial woman is now the main character, rather than a minor one or a foil” (Ao 2015, p. 75), and the main theme is indeed “injustice” (yuan 冤). See also Guan 1972; West & Idema 2010, pp. 1–80. 262 Cuong T. Mai a young widow of Donghai, named Qing, who was reverent and diligent in her care for an elderly mother-in-law. Feeling sorry for the daughter-inlaw, the elderly woman pressed her to remarry, but to no avail. Finally, the mother-in-law hanged herself, to free the young widow of the burden of caring for her. But the sister-in-law went to local officials and charged the young widow with murder. After torture and interrogation, the young widow made a false confession, and was condemned to be executed. However, at the site of her execution, just as Qing was to be killed, …There was a cart carrying ten bamboo poles on which hung fivecolored streamers. She swore an oath to those assembled, saying, “If [I] Qing am guilty, I wish to be killed. And let my blood flow down. [But], if [I] Qing am wrongly executed, may my blood flow contrariwise.” No sooner had she been executed when her blood, green-yellow, flowed up the bamboo streamer poles, all the way to the tips, along the streamers, then dripped downwards. 青將死，車載十丈竹竿，以懸五幡，立誓於眾曰：青若有罪，願殺，血當順下；青 若枉死，血當逆流。既行刑已，其血青黃，緣幡竹而上，極標，又緣幡而下雲。79 In the story it is also said that after her execution the region suffered three years of drought, until the virtuous official, Yü Gong 于公, convinced the local Grand Protector (taishou 太守) of the young widow’s innocence. The Grand Protector then went to her grave and made sacrificial offerings. Forthwith, “the heavens immediately sent rain and that year’s crops were abundant.” 80 Note the structure of the young widow’s oath before her unjust execution: if (ruo 若) A, then B; if (ruo 若) X, then Y.81 Since she was innocent, her blood turned green-yellow and flowed upwards, and a long drought ensued. About this story, Knapp has rightly noted that it is similar to other stories where filial widows who reverently care for parents-in-law are falsely accused and unjustly executed. Knapp notes, “That they are then unjustly accused and executed adds insult to injury, since they should be rewarded rather than punished for their virtuous behavior. Heaven redresses the wrong by supplying miracles that verify the widow’s innocence” (Knapp 2005, p. 174). Agreeing with Knapp, I would add that in such tales Heaven does not have to be explicitly invoked. It is very much implied, and yet unmistakable. 79. See the translation of this story in DeWoskin & Crump 1996, p. 135. For alternate translations of this story, see Kao 1985, pp. 76–77; Ao 2015, p. 73. Also, perhaps not coincidentally, this story appears in the Weishan yinzhi, vol. 1., biography #7, “Yu Gong disputes a criminal case” (于公爭獄). Moreover, compare to the story “The Unjust Death of Shanyü Bo,” also in the Soushen ji, see DeWoskin & Crump 1996, pp. 101–102. In this story the blood of the executed man, an innocent clerk wrongly accused, also goes contrariwise up a pennant. 80. See DeWoskin & Crump 1996, p. 135; Ao 2015, p. 73. 81. This execution scene in the narrative appears to reflect the broader “Chinese judicial continuum” that has been identified by Paul R. Katz (2009). Katz has explored the importance of religious rituals in the making of oaths and covenants within the broader legal culture of traditional China. For example, the young widow’s oath appears to be a kind of “dramatic speech act” which invokes divine punishment in ritualized declarations of innocence by those falsely accused (Katz 2009, pp. 62, 72–73). Body of Jade, Pearls of Blood 263 In both stories, that of the wife of Shan and the widow of Donghai, we see a miracle related to the body which only Heaven can produce: a corpse that does not putrefy in the summer heat, blood that flows upwards.82 In addition, in both stories we see Heaven causing drought, until the wrongful deaths are righted with proper ritual oblations and public recognition of the innocence of the wronged souls. In the latter story, it is especially noteworthy that the young widow of Donghai pronounces an “oath to those assembled” (立誓於眾曰), setting out the precise conditions for the public miracles that will verify her innocence. Implicitly invoking Heaven, she demands that the miracles should happen precisely as she predicts for all to see: the blood shall flow upwards rather then down. That Heaven indeed does send these miracles, the reader must assume, is because Heaven was outraged, moved by this miscarriage of justice that had befallen an innocent, chaste, and filial widow. Now we can see Mỵ Châu’s beheading in new light. This episode in the fifteenth-century King An Dương story displays a discourse of “correlative Confucianism,” which indeed is based on the principle that humans, “can stimulate (gan 感) the moral universe with their virtuous acts” (Yu 2012, p. 466). We can now see the narrative function of the Zhongshi character in the fifteenth-century version of the King An Dương story. Zhongshi’s guilt is especially emphasized in order to underscore Mỵ Châu’s innocence. Like in the stories of the wife from Shan and the widow of Donghai, where the innocence and virtue of the protagonists are affirmed at the outset, in the fifteenth-century story of King An Dương, Mỵ Châu is depicted as lawfully wedded, not engaged in an illicit affair. She is pure and naive; she does not suspect the nefarious intentions behind the request to see the divine crossbow, nor the intentions behind the request for trail markers. She willingly and innocently gives up her goose feathers. She saw them as a chance for reunion; but Zhongshi saw them as a trap for the destruction of Âu Lạc. Moreover, the innocence and virtue of the three female protagonists do not lead to deserved approbation, but rather, tragically, to unjust deaths. Interestingly, the widow of Donghai also proclaims an “oath” (shi 誓), which sets out the conditions for the miracles which would clear her name. Likewise, Mỵ Châu proclaims a prayer (zhu 祝), consisting of two linked conditionals: if A then B; if X then Y. Indeed, she was betrayed and thus her body turned into jade. And indeed, she was filial and not treasonous, so her blood turned into pearls. She was innocent of two false accusations and therefore she demanded precisely two miracles. These, surely, are Heaven-sent miracles that will, as Mỵ Châu 82. For comparison, consider other stories in the Soushen ji in which miracles of body and blood also occur, but there is no vow and therefore Heaven is not being invoked implicitly. See, for example, the story “Blood Turned to Jade,” in DeWoskin & Crump 1996, p. 126. In this very brief notice, barely a narrative, a certain Chang Hong was killed and the blood that he had shed, after three years, turned into jade. Also, consider the brief entry on the mermen of the Southern Sea, whose tears turn into pearls, in DeWoskin & Crump 1996, p. 150. Thus, when a vow is explicitly uttered before the manifestation of a miracle, we can assume that Heaven is being invoked implicitly by the protagonist. 264 Cuong T. Mai puts it, “cleanse this disgrace,” or more literally, “make snow-like this disgrace” (雪此仇耻).83 Thus, in all three stories, the bodies of the women manifest the redemptive miracle: a body that does not decay in the hot sun, blood that flows upwards, and for Mỵ Châu, a body that turns into incorruptible jade and blood that turns into white pearls. These are bodies, transformed, that publicly expose the truth of a private virtue. Clearly, all three tales use the discourse of “correlative Confucianism” to show that Heaven surely responds to injustice (oan, yuan 冤) committed against a faithful wife and loyal daughter. Thus, though the first two stories were written in Literary Sinitic in early medieval China for a Chinese audience, and the third was composed also in Literary Sinitic, but for a medieval Vietnamese readership, the moral message was the same: though evil and injustice do exist, they are an affront to Heaven, and Heaven will surely redress such wrongs, if not in life, then in death. 7. The Emerging Neo-Confucian Discourse of Heaven in Fifteenth-Century Đại Việt Furthermore, we must situate this sub-plot depicting Heaven’s redemption of Mỵ Châu’s unjust execution within the longer narrative arc of King An Dương’s also tragic, but not unjust, loss of his kingdom. This larger plot with King An Dương at the center, as I have shown, is replete with strategic references to Heaven. It is seen in a narrative strategy that sets the rise and fall of King An Dương’s kingdom within a background of nested dichotomies. The spirit battle, as we have seen, was set against a moral metaphysics in which Heaven was depicted as the highest, final authority, an authority which transcended the conflicts between earth and waters, old rulers and new kingdom, Văn Lang and Âu Lạc, white chicken and Golden Turtle. When King An Dương was warned about the demonic spirit at the night hostel, he merely laughed and defiantly replied that it is (Heavenly appointed) fate which determines life and death, not ghosts nor goblins. When the white chicken was almost defeated, its last resort was to transform into an owl to send a written memorial to the Thearch on High. Before bidding farewell, Golden Turtle reminded King An Dương that though the ruler can extend his reign through cultivating virtue, ultimately, Heaven decides. And lastly, when King An Dương was chased to the edge of the sea, he shouted, “Heaven has abandoned me!” Thus, the role of Heaven in the story is central, not ancillary, and the concept of Heaven as a universal moral authority is deliberately woven into the full arc of the narrative at strategic points. 83. The King An Dương story found in Phạm Quỳnh’s manuscript copy of Gleanings of the Uncanny is more explicit in its reference to Heaven. The text says, “Mỵ Châu looked up to Heaven and prayed” (媚珠仰天祝曰), which Lê Hữu Mục translates as “Mỵ Châu ngửa mặt lên mà cầu xin” (Lê Hữu Mục 1960, p. 74). Another recension (A.2914) has similar language. It says, “Mỵ Châu, before dying, looked up and prayed” (媚珠臨死仰祝曰). Other recensions simply say, “Mỵ Châu prayed” (媚珠祝曰), such as A.1516 (Mã Lân dật sử 馬麟逸史), A.2107, and A.1442 (Thiên Nam vân lục 天南雲錄). Body of Jade, Pearls of Blood 265 The longest and most complex version of the King An Dương story is clearly a significant expansion of the older core narrative. This expansion involved not just adding more details. It also entailed adding an emerging Vietnamese Neo-Confucian discourse of Heaven. This is particularly evident because, of all the pre-fifteenth-century versions analyzed above, none mention Heaven. Moreover, the fourteenth-century King Triệu Việt story, which was a major inspiration for the fifteenth-century narrative expansion, also does not invoke Heaven. Yet, clearly, the latest version takes two plots, one focused on the father and the other focused on the daughter, and expands them, intertwines them, while letting each be driven by different moral questions that explicitly invoke Heaven’s cosmic response to moral deeds of all beings, both high and low. First, King An Dương’s tragedy elicits the question: if in the end Heaven decides all, to what extent is one’s destiny in one’s own hands? Second, Mỵ Châu’s tragic death raises the question: what kind of moral cosmos would allow the innocent and virtuous to suffer false accusations, even unto death? Both moral questions, I argue, reflect a Neo-Confucian discourse on Heaven that emerged in the extant Vietnamese literary corpus composed in Literary Sinitic only beginning with the Ming occupation in the fifteenth century, a time precisely when Neo-Confucianism was first introduced into Vietnam and just beginning to take hold among the elite during the early Lê Dynasty, specifically, during the reign of Lê Thánh Tông (r. 1460–1497). Indeed, to attribute all the complex innovations found in the fifteenth-century version of the King An Dương story to mere coincidence or mere literary elaboration would be, in my view, to miss the ideological and political implications behind the new narrative framing. Of course, fifteenth-century thinkers in Đại Việt would not have made a distinction between Classical and Neo-Confucianism, which is after all, a modern one. Nevertheless, the Classical/Neo-Confucianism distinction, as a second-order generalization, does map onto key changes in the elite Confucian tradition, and thus does have analytical value in scholarly inquiry.84 Moreover, in this essay, and in a previous work, I try to avoid the essentialism and reification inherent in invoking the -ism of the category of “Neo-Confucianism” (or any other -ism) by theoretically grounding my analysis in terms such as repertoires, assemblages of discourses and practices, discursive frames, discursive voice, social domains, and positionality (Mai 2021, pp. 34–37). In China, “correlative Confucianism,” from the Han Dynasty onwards, became a part of the vast and diverse Confucian repertoire, variously invoked 84. It would take us too far afield to do justice to this important but complex issue. See Mai 2021, pp. 10–17 and notes 24, 25, 26 for a discussion of Neo-Confucianism in fifteenth-century Đại Việt, including a brief overview and evaluation of debates around the very category of “NeoConfucianism.” On defining Confucianism in Vietnam, see the now classic article by Liam C. Kelley (2006). See also relevant chapters from the recent Oxford Handbook of Confucianism, edited by Jennifer Oldstone-Moore, 2023, particularly contributions by Richey, pp. 3–19; Whitmore, pp. 325–337; Hon, pp. 153–163; Lee, pp. 177–190. 266 Cuong T. Mai for different reasons and at different times, by different writers and cultural producers. Nevertheless, it should be noted that “correlative Confucianism” was a particular Confucian form of the more generic correspondence cosmology, which was widely shared in medieval Chinese religious culture, and thus could be found in Buddhist and Daoist forms as well.85 For example, by the Song Dynasty this generic correspondence cosmology served as the conceptual basis for the Buddhist or Daoist varieties of morality books (shanshu), which used the correspondence cosmology to propagate Buddhist or Daoist values, religious goals, and assertions of ritual power.86 By contrast, subsequent Neo-Confucian versions of these morality books, based on a reworking of “correlative Confucianism,” would only begin to proliferate and compete during the late Ming, as can be seen especially in the life and works of Yuan Huang 袁黃 (1533–1606), and others.87 These works of the late Ming were practice-oriented ritual manuals, composed to be put into practice with the purpose of changing a person’s fate, and often promising worldly gains such as exam success, wealth, as well as generations of male descendants (Mai 2019). Thus, during the early Ming, the Neo-Confucian version of “correlative Confucianism” had not yet been extensively propagated through practical moral ledgers and morality books. Rather, I would argue, as the early Ming made Neo-Confucianism the foundation of the exam curriculum, earlier forms of “correlative Confucianism” were being repackaged and propagated in the form of anthologies and study guides. Such compilations, though they did not have the same explicit goals of worldly success as the practice-oriented morality books of the later Ming, still had a deep impact on the spread of early Ming Neo-Confucianism as both an elite exam curriculum and exegetical tradition, and a more widely accessible popular religious culture that articulated the cosmic implications of individual moral self-cultivation.88 One such text, which can be considered as a specific Neo-Confucian reframing of a generic “correlative Confucianism,” was the “Hidden Blessings of Doing Good” (Vi thiện âm chất, Weishan yinzhi 為善陰), which was a ten-volume (juan 卷) anthology of biographical extracts taken from a wide variety of textual sources and compiled by the Yongle Emperor (Zhu Di, r. 1402–1424).89 During the early fifteenth century, this compilation was widely distributed throughout China, even in Korea and Vietnam. The biographies briefly recount the lives of one hundred and sixty-five virtuous persons, mostly officials but also some commoners, mostly men but also a few women. An overriding concern in this compilation is the depiction 85. See, for example, Henderson 1984; Teiser 1996; Campany 1996, pp. 257–259; Sharf 2002. 86. See Sakai 1960; Bell 1992, 1996a, 1996b; Goossaert 2012. 87. See Brokaw 1987, 1991, 1996, 2005. 88. See Sakai 1970; de Bary 1970; McLaren 1998; Bol 2008. 89. This text was a compilation of 165 biographies extracted from various sources, to be used as a text for moral teaching. It was widely distributed in China, Korea, and Vietnam. See the translation of the Yongle Emperor’s hortatory preface to the text, and an extensive discussion in Mai 2021, pp. 13–15. See also Tsai 2001, p. 144; Oh 2013. And on the Yongle Emperor’s political agenda of propagating filial piety, see Tsai 2001, p. 145; Yin 2004; Epstein 2019, pp. 69–70. Body of Jade, Pearls of Blood 267 of virtuous officials, especially those who are just and compassionate in government administration. Such officials manifest justice by diligently and perspicaciously identifying and punishing the guilty, and showing compassion for widows, orphans, the poor, the falsely accused, and victims of criminals and bandits. They are shown to be especially beloved by the people. Moreover, these officials attain all manners of rewards, both worldly and celestial, including getting promoted as a local guardian deity by the Thearch on High after death, receiving veneration while alive through “living shrines,” having many male descendants, and so on. A number of the stories do seem to reflect an ethos of “correlative Confucianism,” especially cases in which a person performs a good deed and Heaven, spirits, and even animals, are stimulated (cảm, gan 感) to respond (ứng, ying 應) with various forms of magical assistance or recompense. Many such stories have achieved wide circulation, such as the story of Sunshu Ao killing a two-headed snake, or Yang Bao saving a siskin and subsequently getting recompensed by a spirit.90 Interestingly, the Yongle emperor’s appended comments to each of the accounts sometimes are longer than the stories themselves and they provide a glimpse into an early fifteenth-century view of the moral cosmos. For example, the comments to the story of Sunshu Ao is especially illustrative. According to the story, when Sunshu Ao was a child, he saw a two-headed snake. Believing that a two-headed snake is an omen of calamity and that anyone who sees it would surely die, Sunshu Ao killed it and buried it, so that no one else would be harmed. Later, he cried to his mother because he thought he would soon die, since he had seen a two-headed snake. However, his mother assured him, and said, Do not worry. You will not die. I have heard that those who have Hidden Merit will certainly be manifestly recompensed. Virtue wins myriad blessings and humaneness dispels myriad disasters. Heaven’s place is high [above], but it hears even the lowly. 無憂汝不死矣。吾聞之有陰德者必有陽報。德勝百祥仁除百禍天之處高而聽卑。91 Sunshu Ao is, of course, a well-known figure in Chinese history, and here the Yongle Emperor repeats the story almost verbatim from the source text, Accounts of Exemplary Women.92 The reference to a Heaven far above, responding to the deeds of the lowliest of people below especially resonates with the moral ethos of “correlative Confucianism.” Moreover, a short passage from the Yongle Emperor’s commentary to this story of Sunshu Ao is also illustrative, 90. The story “Yang Bao rescues a siskin” (楊寶救雀) appears in the Weishan yinzhi, 1997, juan 1, biography #13. For a Ming period retelling of the story, see Feng 2012, pp. 116–133. 91. The story “Shu Ao buries a snake” (叔敖埋蛇) appears in the Weishan yinzhi, 1997, juan 1, biography #4. 92. The story of Shu Ao appears also in the Han-period compilation, Accounts of Exemplary Women (Lienü zhuan 列女傳) by Liu Xiang (79–8 bce). For a discussion and translation of the biography of Sunshu Ao’s mother, see Kinney 2014, pp. 50–51. 268 Cuong T. Mai Out of one thought arose sincerity in caring for others. A good thought once generated stimulates and penetrates to Heaven. His mother understood this, but Shu Ao did not understand it, until later when his mother’s words came to fruition. Does this [not] verify, Heaven’s recompense of good people? 由其一心有愛人之誠。善念一發感通于天。其母知其然。叔敖盖不之知也。及其後 也果如其母之言。天之報施於善人者。如是其驗乎。93 If we read both the story and the Emperor’s commentary as Confucian propaganda, as apologia for a certain moral imagination that supports the status-quo, male-dominated social, gender, and political hierarchy, then we cannot overlook the urgency and persistence by which this message is being propounded: even a single thought of goodness (shannian 善念) arising in the mind of a person, no matter how lowly, is known by Heaven and will be justly recompensed.94 What indeed is the social and political conditions in which such a message requires persistent dissemination? In the early Ming it was the consolidation of the new reign of the Yongle Emperor, after three years of civil war; in fifteenth-century Đại Việt it was the occupation of the Ming, then the centralization (or “restoration,” as Whitmore puts it) of the new reign of the fourth emperor of the Lê Dynasty, Lê Thánh Tông.95 As I have argued elsewhere, premodern Vietnamese stories about marvels and the uncanny, like those found in the Compendium on Mystic Numina and Gleanings of the Uncanny, should not be viewed as mere fiction, for they can potentially reflect a broader cultural discourse on the extraordinary (e.g., dị, kỳ, quái, linh).96 If we avoid imposing the misleading binaries of history/fiction, and elite/non-elite, and attend to the shared cultural discourses embedded in these narratives, then they might be able to shed light on premodern Vietnamese religions more broadly. Specifically, we see that certain religious repertoires shared throughout the culture circulated freely and were appropriated by different writers to support different ideological, 93. See the Yongle Emperor’s commentary on the Shu Ao story, Weishan yinzhi, 1997, juan 1, biography #4. 94. This is perhaps reflective of the incipient, yet growing, cultural, social, and legal imposition of the Neo-Confucian gender hierarchy onto local Vietnamese society, as described by Nhung Tuyet Tran (Tran 2018). Moreover, there is evidence in other parts of Gleanings of the Uncanny where characters that I call “troublesome daughters” are seemingly rehabilitated into virtuous, filial daughters by an editor or author with a clear Confucian agenda. See for example, the case of Princess Tiên Dung who falls in love with an impoverished village lad [Chử Đồng Tử], very much against her father’s wishes. After she is accused of starting a rebellion against her father’s kingdom, she exclaims, “It is not my doing; it is Heaven’s bidding. Life and death reside with Heaven. How could I dare rebel against my father? [Otherwise,] I would obediently accept correction and bear the punishment of execution” (非我所為，是天所使。生死在天，何敢拒父，順受其正，任其誅戮). For the remainder of this story in Chinese (A.33), see Chen Yiyuan et al. 2011, vol. 1, p. 24. 95. As John K. Whitmore has argued, Lê Thánh Tông’s main political accomplishment was in harmonizing the entrenched Thanh Hoá oligarchy (and their descendants) with the new delta-based civil service administration (Whitmore 1968, pp. 151, 205, 227). Due to space constraint, I cannot discuss here the important Neo-Confucian elements of Lê Thánh Tông’s administrative innovations. My understanding very much relies on the pioneering work of John K. Whitmore, and others. See Woodside 1962–1963; Whitmore 1968, 1977, 1984, 1985, 1999, 2004, 2010, 2013; Ungar 1983; Kelley 2006, pp. 330–332, 355; Ong Eng Ann 2010; Tana 2010. 96. Mai 2018, 2021. Body of Jade, Pearls of Blood 269 religious, and even political aims. The writers embedded these shared religious ideas and values into different discursive frames, thereby producing textual “voices” which emphasize difference even as they deploy common religious ideas, themes, tropes, and motifs (i.e., repertoires). For example, the Buddhist karma discourse circulated in the culture and did not belong only to Buddhists. It was appropriated by non-Buddhist writers to affirm the idea of social karma, specifically “karmic affinity” (duyên), which was said to bind lovers through endless lifetimes. Writers like Nguyễn Dữ (fl. 1500s), Đoàn Thị Điểm (1705–1748), Phạm Đình Hổ (1768–1839), and others, wrote stories about human, ghostly, transcendent, and divine lovers bound by duyên, at times deploying Daoist discursive frames, at other times, Confucian ones, in order to subordinate the Buddhist aspect of the karma repertoire and foreground Daoist transcendence or Confucian patriarchal authority (Mai 2021). A similar appropriation by means of discursive reframing can be found in the fifteenth-century rewriting of the King An Dương story, I argue. The longest version found in Gleanings of the Uncanny indicate two moments of the Confucian appropriation of the old King An Dương story. First, the core story of the rise and fall of King An Dương, found in all versions, is embedded in a larger discursive frame that subordinates it to the overarching theme of Heaven’s command (tian zhi yun 天之運). Second, the recurring motif of the licentious daughter who causes the destruction of a kingdom, again found in all older versions, is embedded in an overarching discursive frame which foregrounds the importance of a morally responsive Heaven, specifically, one which redeems the unjust execution of a falsely accused woman. These two moments of the Confucian appropriation of the old King An Dương story, I think, become even more salient when we consider them in light of the long textual evolution that we have been tracking, starting with the earliest extant versions found in the late third-/early fourth-century Accounts of Nhật Nam and Jiaozhou Outer Region Record, neither of which mentions Heaven. The absence of the discourse of Heaven up to the fifteenth century is even more stark in view of the influential fourteenth-century King Triệu Việt story, which otherwise shares remarkable parallels, but also has no reference to Heaven. Moreover, the subordination of Buddhist and Daoist elements in the narrative is also clear. The name of the hostel-keeper, Ngộ Không (Wukong 悟空), or “Awakened to Emptiness,” has clear Buddhist resonance, that however, has no significance to any of the story’s different plots. Similarly, the other name of Golden Turtle, Thanh Giang Sứ (Qingjiang shi 清江使), “Clear River Emissary,” obviously refers to the turtle of the same name found in a passage in the Zhuangzi.97 And yet, this Daoist character, an emissary of the waters, is made to speak more like an emissary of Heaven, for he proclaims that it is Heaven’s command (tian zhi yun) which ultimately determines the fate of all rulers. Finally, the jade body which is the transformed corpse of Mỵ Châu has clear resonance with Daoist symbols of immortality. But in the Confucian discursive frame, Mỵ Châu’s jade body comes to represent, not the indestructible 97. Watson 2013, pp. 230–231. 270 Cuong T. Mai bodies of Daoist goddesses, but rather, her postmortem, rehabilitated reputation, which shall endure forever unblemished in social memory. Thus, in sum, when we read through the marvelous and the uncanny, rather than around them, the longest retelling of the King An Dương narrative can tell us yet another story, but a story not quite about the third century bce. Rather, it is a story about the late fifteenth century ce, a story about how literati during the early Lê Dynasty appropriated the old King An Dương narrative and transformed it from a short account of the tragic fate of a king and his daughter into a morality tale expressing two pressing philosophical issues: what is moral agency in light of Heavenly-determined fate, and how is Heaven a moral authority if there is seemingly a lack of justice in the world? These are, particularly for elite thinkers writing in Literary Sinitic for the court culture of late fifteenth-century Đại Việt, not just generic Confucian questions, but they are specifically Neo-Confucian ones. To be sure, the narrative elements and discourses highlighted above — such as the concept of a morally responsive Heaven — are not uniquely or inherently “Neo-Confucian.” After all, there is not a single characteristic, element, or essence which would allow us to identify any phenomenon as inherently “NeoConfucian.” It is, rather, the larger set of discursive and practice repertoires and the discursive frames in which they are assembled, along with the implied claim to transcendent authority, which would help us identify a phenomenon as “Neo-Confucian.” Thus, when we situate the discourse of a morally responsive Heaven in the historical and political context of late fifteenth-century Đại Việt, we see that it coheres with the larger cluster of discursive repertoires and frames which made possible the ideological and political consolidation at the center of the explicitly Neo-Confucian program of Lê Thánh Tông. 8. Conclusion In the sixteenth-century compilation of poems on historical figures entitled, Thoát Hiên’s Poetic Collection of Odes on History (Thoát Hiên vịnh sử thi tập 脫軒詠史詩集), the author, Đặng Minh Khiêm, describes King An Dương thus,98 [He] laboriously built up the walls of Tư Long [Citadel]99 to several hundred lengths, then arrogantly presumed that the divine crossbow would suppress any army. [When] the sovereign confounds himself about sturdy defenses, what then does the daughter have to do with taking lightly the weight of the kingdom? 98. Thoát Hiên is the sobriquet of Đặng Minh Khiêm, whose birth and death dates are unknown. He attained the degree of Presented Scholar (tiến sĩ) in 1487, during the reign of Lê Thánh Tông, and twice served as emissary to the Ming court between 1501 and 1509. The preface to the text is dated 1520 (fifth year of the Quang Thiệu 光紹 reign era). See Cadière & Pelliot 1904, pp. 630–631, note 7; Trần Văn Giáp 1990, vol. 2, pp. 78–80. 99. The name Tư Long Citadel (思龍城) is a variant of Qủy Long Citadel (鬼龍城), another name for Loa Thành (Spiral Citadel). See Yamamoto 1970, p. 76. Body of Jade, Pearls of Blood 271 勞築思龍百雉城 謾誇神弩屈人兵 君王自眛苞桑戒 女子何關國重輕 100 Here, Đặng Minh Khiêm invokes the great deeds of King An Dương, his building of the citadel and his vanquishing of armies with the divine crossbow.101 And yet, the poet lays the blame for the kingdom’s fall not on the daughter, Mỵ Châu, but on the sovereign (quân vương 君王) who was arrogant (mạn khoa 謾誇) and who had confounded himself (tự muội 自眛) into neglecting the kingdom’s defenses (giới 戒) and into taking lightly (khinh 輕) the weight of responsibility for the kingdom (quốc trọng 國重). Only about a century earlier, the two texts that mention the story of King An Dương depicted Mỵ Châu as the main cause for the success of Zhongshi’s subterfuge. She was depicted as licentious, taking pleasure (duyệt, yue 悅) in Zhongshi’s good looks, and consorting with him (thông, tong 通) outside of proper marriage. Nevertheless, though Mỵ Châu is not fully responsible for the loss of the kingdom, she is not wholly untainted. To Đặng Minh Khiêm, while she is no villain, she is also no heroine, nothing like, for example, Mỵ Ê or Nguyễn Tiết Phụ, both suicide-martyrs celebrated in his poetic collection.102 After all, though Mỵ Châu, like them, did willingly, unflinchingly, and even perhaps defiantly accept death, she had committed mistakes that contributed to the kingdom’s downfall. Thus, Đặng Minh Khiêm’s poem on Mỵ Châu dwells on her faults, The turtle-claw trigger was switched, but [her] mind was unaware. The goose feathers marked the road, but how foolish was [her] ruse. Though the well water that washes the pearls may abide for a thousand years, will it completely cleanse these blemishes of [her] life? 龜爪換機心未悟 鵝毛表道計何愚 濯珠井水千年在 洗盡生前此玷無 103 Interestingly, Đặng Minh Khiêm invokes the figure of Mỵ Châu in another poem, one centered on the theme of the downfall of kingdoms caused by the “disasters of women” (nữ hoạ, nühuo 女禍). In this poem, Đặng Minh Khiêm 100. See Đặng Minh Khiêm 2016, p. 46. 101. Clearly, here Đặng Minh Khiêm is invoking the trope of the last evil or incompetent ruler of a dynasty. Similarly, in his essay of 1514, Lê Tung expresses the sentiment that King An Dương lost his kingdom because he had become arrogant and complacent, “General Introduction to the Comprehensive Examination of the Viet Mirror” (Việt Giám thông khảo tổng luận 越鑑通考總論). Lê Tung writes, “King An Dương came from the west (from) Bashu. In the south he demolished the Hùng King and set up his capital at Spiral Citadel, thus safeguarding Âu Lạc. He got the crossbow with the turtle claw and repulsed the army of the Qin people. He became so accustomed to military victories that he became comfortable, relaxed, and arrogant. The army of Zhao came and attacked. The border security was broken” (安陽王西徒巴蜀，南滅雄王，都于螺城，保有甌狢。得龜爪之弩，却秦人之兵，狃於戰勝，安樂 而驕，趙兵來攻而邊疆失守). For the Chinese text, see Sun Xiao 2015, vol. 1, p. 16. Similarly, on Ngô Sĩ Liên’s depiction of the last Hùng King as immoral and dissolute, see Yamamoto 1970, p. 88. 102. On these two figures, see Đặng Minh Khiêm 2016, pp. 328–331. For a discussion of his evaluation of “loyal/chaste wives” (tiết phụ), see Đặng Minh Khiêm 2016, p. 31. 103. See Đặng Minh Khiêm 2016, p. 322. 272 Cuong T. Mai pairs Mỵ Châu with the Queen Dowager (née Jiu, Cù Thị 樛氏) of Nanyue, the wife of Zhao Yingqi (a great grandson of Zhao Tuo and heir to the throne of Nanyue). The Queen Dowager was said to have urged the Nanyue Kingdom to submit to the Han, and she was ultimately blamed by later historians for the downfall of the Nanyue Kingdom in the second century bce, due to her alleged treason and affair with Anguo Shaoji.104 Đặng Minh Khiêm writes, Mỵ Châu got intimate, and the Shu realm collapsed. [The Queen Dowager] née Jiu was moved, and the Han troops were beckoned. The loss of state and dynasty came from the disasters of women. The manifest recompense visited on the House of Zhao is clear. 媚珠結好蜀圖傾 樛氏生心速漢兵 亡國喪家由女禍 趙家陽報亦分明 105 While Mỵ Châu was innocent of betraying her husband and her father, she was not without fault (blemish 玷). And her fault basically stemmed from her sex: she was a woman subject to her passions, and this made her unknowing (vị ngộ, weiwu 未悟), foolish (ngu, yu 愚), indeed blinded by love, and thus inadvertently responsible for the downfall of the kingdom. Ultimately, then, Mỵ Châu is a tragic figure, not worthy of emulation, to be sure, but worthy of historical reflection, primarily as an object lesson in how women can cause the downfall of kingdoms.106 Yet, overall, Đặng Minh Khiêm paints a sympathetic character. His complex and nuanced representation of Mỵ Châu as a tragic lover and an ambiguous figure, one who is neither completely innocent nor completely guilty, is a sympathetic understanding that was made possible by the legitimacy of the fifteenth-century version of the King An Dương story found in both Gleanings of the Uncanny and the Comprehensive Book, for both had garnered great prestige by the late fifteenth/early sixteenth century. Yet, this is not all. Perhaps, another factor in the success of the complex representation of Mỵ Châu was the richness and compelling drama of the fifteenth-century version of the King An Dương story itself, that is, its narrative art. Some scholars have encouraged us to view particularly Gleanings of the Uncanny (or portions of it) through the literary categories of “transmission of marvels” (truyền kỳ/chuanqi 傳奇) or “record of anomaly” (chí quái/zhiguai 志怪).107 Surely, as we have seen, the fifteenth-century King An Dương story comprised complex plot lines, multiple protagonists, multiple narrative turning points, multiple conflicts and tensions, as well as many stock truyền kỳ tropes, motifs, and themes. 104. See Brindley 2015, pp. 99–100. 105. See Đặng Minh Khiêm 2016, p. 297. 106. In the poem, the word qing 傾 is especially resonant, for it evokes the stock theme of the “beauty who ruins/collapses kingdoms.” The vernacular is “nghiên nước nghiên thành,” on which, see Tale of Kiều (Huỳnh Sanh Thông 1983, p. 2). 107. See Lin 1996, pp. 271–273; Nguyen 2005; Engelbert 2011; Kelley 2012, p. 94; 2015a, 2015b. On the narrative art of the “Golden Turtle” story in particular, see Đinh Gia Khánh et al. 1978, pp. 340–341. Body of Jade, Pearls of Blood 273 Moreover, the similarity of the episode describing Mỵ Châu’s final prayer before her beheading, and the subsequent miracles, indeed has an “uncanny” resemblance to the story of the widow of Donghai, as I have shown. This story has its locus classicus in a widely circulated zhiguai compilation, A Record of Inquest into the Divine (Soushen ji), which was even cited by name in Vũ Qùynh’s forward of 1492 (Kelley 2012, p. 95; Mai 2021, pp. 14–15). Despite all this suggestive evidence, in this essay I have bracketed the question of genre and have avoided using these literary categories as interpretive and analytical frameworks. It is in the sixteenth century, with the work of Nguyễn Dữ, when we can see clear evidence of truyền kỳ composition in Vietnamese literary culture beginning to emerge, as Nam Nguyen, Hye-Jeon Kyung, and others, have convincingly shown.108 Whether we can push that back into the fifteenth century, and whether we can distinguish truyền kỳ from chí quái for the fifteenth-century Vietnamese literary scene, are still open questions. Moreover, in my view, answering these questions about the genre of the narrative or its “literary art,” while crucial for understanding literary history, is not necessary for understanding the transformations of the King An Dương story, particularly as a product of the fifteenth-century moral imagination. Rather, as I have argued, we must resist the tendency to read across the different versions of the King An Dương story, hoping to recover some original historical incident, or expecting to extract “data” out of their literary contexts to reconstruct a third-century bce reality based on a fifteenth-century ce reinvention. I have instead detected the emergence of a certain Neo-Confucian discursive frame which enabled the author to reinvent a well-known narrative about a king’s tragic loss of his kingdom, expanding the narrative while embedding it into a new moral metaphysics which underscored the cosmic implications of everyday moral deeds of All Under Heaven, from kings to princesses, from fathers to daughters. In the fourteenth-century Brief Gazetteer of Annam the story of King An Dương was framed as a retelling of the memory of ancient Kelü, the citadel of a king who possessed a magical pond, the water from which could make pearls effulgent. In the fifteenth-century version, the memory of the king’s well lingers, but it is now the magical place where two tragically separated lovers can reunite in death.109 This final miracle of water and pearl culminates a long narrative in which individual destinies, human moral actions, cosmic conflicts, tragic love, and the audacious testimony of a betrayed wife and loyal daughter all played out under the watchful and responsive gaze of the cosmic authority of Heaven. 108. See Nguyễn Đăng Na 2001; Kyung 2004; Nguyen 2005, p. 216. Also, for a typology of premodern Vietnamese fiction and narratives written in Literary Sinitic, see Ren 2010, pp. 4–5. 109. Stories about the miraculous “pearl-washing water” (洗珠水) must have reached China at some point, for as late as the eighteenth century a flagon of water from the well was a customary tribute to the Chinese imperial court. In the nineteenth-century compilation, Random Records of Great Upheavals (Tang thương ngẫu lục 桑滄偶錄), the authors Phạm Đình Hổ and Nguyễn Án tell us that it was the famed scholar-official, Nguyễn Công Hãng (阮公沆, 1680–1732), who ended this custom, presumably, because the waters proved inefficacious. On this compilation and one of its compilers, Phạm Đình Hổ 范廷琥 (1768–1839), see Mai 2021, pp. 17–18, note 60. For the relevant passage in Quốc Ngữ see, Đạm Nguyên’s translation (Phạm Đình Hổ & Nguyễn Án 1961, pp. 42–43), and for the Chinese text, see Chan Hing-ho et al. 1992, series 1, vol. 7, pp. 168–169. 274 Cuong T. Mai Appendix A Tale of Golden Turtle 甌貉國安陽王，巴蜀人也，姓蜀名泮。因先祖求雄王之女媚娘為婚，雄王不許， 怨之。泮欲成前志，舉兵攻雄王，滅文郎國，改號甌貉國而王之。築城于越裳之 地，隨築隨崩。王乃立壇齋戒，祈禱百神。三月初七日，見一老人從東方來，至城 門嘆曰：「建立此城，何辰而就。」王喜迎入殿行拜禮，問曰：「築立此城，既就 復崩，傷損功力而不能成，何也。」老人曰：「有清江使來，與王同築乃成。」言 訖辭去。翌日王出東門望之，忽見金龜從東方來，立於水上，能解作人語，自稱 清江使，明知天地陰陽鬼神之事。王喜曰：「此老人所以告我者。」遂以金龜迎 入城中，延坐殿上，問以築城不就之故。金龜曰：「此山精氣，乃前王之子，為國 報仇，並有千載白雞化為妖精，隱在七曜山，山中有鬼，乃前代樂工埋葬於此， 化為鬼。傍有一館，以宿往來人。館主名悟空，有一女並白雞一雙，是鬼精之餘 氣，凡人往來宿泊者，鬼精化千形萬狀而害之，死者甚眾。今白雄雞娶館主之 女，若殺雄雞，厭其鬼精，彼必聚陰氣化為妖，化爲鴟鴞鳥，啣書飛上旃檀之 樹，奏於上帝，乞壞其城。臣嚙墜其書，王速收之，則城可成。」金龜使王托為行 路人，寓宿館中，置金龜于門楣上。悟空曰：「此館有妖精，夜常殺人。今日未暮， 郎君速行勿宿。」王笑曰：「死生有命，鬼魅何為。吾不足畏。」乃留宿焉。夜間鬼 精從外來，呼曰：「何人在此，不速開門。」金龜叱曰：「閉門汝何為乎。」鬼放火 變現千形萬狀，詭異多方，以驚怖之，終不得入。至雞嗚時，鬼精走散。金龜會王 敬啟追躡之，至 七曜山。鬼精收藏殆盡，王乃還館。 明日，館主令人來收葬宿泊人身屍。見王欣然笑語，皆趨拜曰：「郎君 安然若此，必聖人也。」乞求其神藥以救生民。王曰：「殺爾白雞而祭之，鬼精盡 散。」悟空從之，殺白雞，而女子即倒死。乃命掘七曜山，得古樂器及骸骨，燒 散為炭，投之江流。日將晚，王與金龜登越裳山，見鬼精以為鴟鴞鳥六足，啣書 飛上旃檀樹。金龜遂化為色鼠隨其後，嚙其足，書墜 敬啟于地。王速收之，書蠹已過半矣。自此鬼精遂滅。 築城半月而就，其城延廣千丈餘，盤旋如螺形，故曰螺城，又曰鬼龍城。 唐人呼曰昆侖城，取其最高也。 金龜居三年辭歸。王感謝曰：「荷君之恩，其城已完。如有外禦，何以禦 之。」金龜曰：「國祚盛衰，社稷安危，天之運也。人能修德以延之，王有所願，何 為惜之。」乃脫其爪授王曰：「用此作弩機，向賊發箭，無憂矣。」言訖遂歸東海。 王命皋魯為弩，以爪為機，名曰：靈光金龜神機弩。 後趙王陀舉兵南侵，與王交戰。王以神機弩射之，陀軍大敗，馳于鄒 山，與王對壘，不能正戰，遂請和。王喜許小江以北，陀治之，以南王治之。（小 江即今天德江也。） 未幾，陀求婚。王不意以王女媚珠嫁陀子仲始。仲始誘媚珠竊觀神機 弩， 潛作別機換金龜爪。詐謂北歸省親，曰：「夫婦之情，不可相忘，父母之親， 不可偏廢。吾今歸省，如今兩國失和，南北隔別，我來尋汝，將用何物表我。」媚 娘曰：「妾為兒女，如遇睽離，情難勝矣。妾有鵝毛錦褥，常附於身，到處即拔毛 置三歧路以示之。庶得相救。」 仲始挾機而歸。陀得之大喜，乃舉兵攻王。王恃神機弩，圍棋自若，笑 曰：「陀不畏神機弩耶。」陀軍進迫， 王舉弩，而神機已失，乃自奔走。王置媚珠 於馬上，後與之南走。仲始認鵝毛而追之。王至海濱，途窮無舟楫可渡。王呼曰： 「天喪子。清江使何在。速來救我。」金龜湧出江上，叱曰：「在馬後者賊也。」王 乃拔劍斬媚珠。媚珠祝曰：「妾為兒女，有叛逆之心以害其父，死則為微塵。如忠 孝一節心，為人所詐，死則化為珠玉，雪此仇耻。」媚珠死于海濱，血流水上，蚌 蛤吸之，化成明珠。王持七寸文犀，金龜開水，引王入于海去。世傳演州府高舍 社夜山即其處也。 275 Body of Jade, Pearls of Blood 陀軍到此，茫然無所見，惟媚珠在焉。仲始抱媚珠屍，歸葬螺城，化為玉石。媚 珠已死，仲始惜痛不已，於沐浴處想媚珠形體，遂投井死。 後人得東海明珠，以此井水洗之愈明潔。因避媚珠名，故呼明珠為大玖、小玖 是也。 This Chinese text of A.33 is based on Chen Yiyuan et al. 2011, vol. 1, pp. 40–42. For comparison, see A.2107 (Chen Yiyuan 2011, vol. 1, pp. 92–94) and VHv.1473 (Chen Yiyuan et al. 2011, vol. 1, pp. 176–178). Appendix B Tale of King Triệu Việt 李佛子本朱鳶人，為賁左將軍。朱鳶此地有一巨澤，迴周深浚，不可以里數約度。 賁既亡，佛子乃收其散卒，得二萬人，號令指揮，潛隱澤中，夜則刼營，晝則潛伏。 伯先使人斥侯，知其為佛子也。率兵討之，竟莫能得，眾推為夜澤王。 佛子居澤中一年，夜見黃龍，脫其爪與之告曰：取此納兜鍪上，寇敵見之，自然 畏服。會建康有事召伯先還，留其將楊孱守鎭，代行事務。佛子 自得神爪之後， 謀略出奇，所戰皆勝。 又因伯先北還，遂率眾攻孱，孱拒戰，一見兜鍪便即敗死。佛子入據龍編城治祿 螺武寧二處，自號南越國王… …南帝兵少却，意越王有異術，請和。越王亦以南帝乃賁族屬，分國割界于君 臣洲共治，南帝據烏鳶，為其子雅郎求婚于越王，越王以女杲娘歸之。情好既 密，琴瑟諧。 雅郎潛問杲娘曰兩國昔為仇讐，今為婚姻，天綠作合，遭際奇緣，前年兩國交 爭，父王兵機神妙，能出我父王之右，不曉有何妙術，致此奇謀。杲娘係是針 缐女流，那識波濤世態，即密取越王龍爪兜鍪示之，幷語其故。因曰我父王從 來克敵賴有此耳。雅郎潛謀易爪，乃謂杲娘曰吾為駙馬曰久，懸念雙親，豈有久 戀袵席之私情，乍缺晨昏之甘旨。吾意欲暫回問安，方孚至願，爭奈路途遙遠， 來往費程，顧不可朝發而夕至也。散多聚少，悵惆何如，吾歸國後，爾倘有不虞 之變，跟隨王駕，去向何方，卿當以鵞毛為便吾尋問。 雅郎歸，具以事白南帝。南帝大喜，即引兵直入越境，如履無人之壤，越王不之 覺，親披兜鍪拒戰以待。南帝神機既奪，兵氣不振。帝自知不敵，携其女南奔， 欲擇險地躲避，敵兵輒踵其後。因至州府憩息，左右報曰南帝兵至矣。王恐， 大呼曰黃龍神王不助我乎。忽見黃龍指告曰無他，祇是王女杲娘以落毛引道， 是大惡賊，不殺何待。王顧以刀斬之，落入水去。王引馬奔至小鴉海口，途阻復 回，東向至大雅海口，嘆曰吾窮矣。忽見黃龍劃水為道，引王入水，復如故。南 帝兵進至，渺然不知去向，遂引兵回越。 This Chinese text from the Compendium on Mystic Numina of the Viet Realm is based on Chan Hing-ho et al. 1992, series 2, vol. 1, pp. 175–180, which is based on the Complete Edition (Việt điện u linh tập toàn biên) (A.751, VHv.1285a, A.2879). 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