Hùng king


Hùng king or vua Hùng is the title given to the ancient Vietnamese rulers of the Hồng Bàng period.

Traditional Vietnamese account

Etymology

It is likely that the name Hùng Vương is a combination of the two Sino-Vietnamese words Hùng 雄 "masculine, virile, fierce, powerful, grand" and Vương 王, which means "king". The name Hùng Vương might have originally been a title bestowed on a chieftain. The Hùng Vương was allegedly the head chieftain of Văn Lang which at the time was composed of feudal communities of rice farmers.

Hùng kings' narrative

According to the Hùng kings narrative, the eighteen Hùng kings belonged to the Hong Bang dynasty that ruled over the northern part of Vietnam and southern part of modern China in antiquity. Their progenitors were Lạc Long Quân and his consort Goddess Âu Cơ who produced a sac containing one hundred eggs from which one hundred sons emerged. Dragon Lord Lạc preferred to live by the sea, and Goddess Âu Cơ preferred the snow-capped mountains. The two separated with half of the sons following each parent. The most illustrious of the sons became the first Hùng king who ruled Văn Lang, the realm of all the descendants of Dragon and Goddess Âu Cơ who became the Vietnamese people, from his capital in modern Phú Thọ Province.

List of Hùng kings

Earliest references

The earliest references to the Hung kings are found in early collections of Records of Nanyue or Nanyuezhi in the 978 anthology Extensive Records of the Taiping Era. It said:

Jiaozhi's land was very fertile. After people settled there, they began to cultivate. Its soils are black, its climate gloomy and fierce. So hitherto its fields were called Hùng fields and its people were Hùng people. Their leader was Hùng king, and his chief advisors were hùng lords, the lands distributed to Hùng generals.

However, the 4th century Almanacs of the Outer Territories of the Jiao province mentioned Lạc fields, Lạc people, Lạc generals, and Lạc lords, ruled by Lạc king, instead:

During the time before Jiaozhi had commanderies and prefectures, the soil and land had Lạc fields. These fields followed the flood's ebbs and flows. The people cultivated these fields for foods, so they were called Lạc people. The Lạc King and Lạc Lords established to govern all those commanderies and prefectures. prefectures many made Lạc generals. Lạc generals copper seals and blue-green ribbons.

Therefore, French scholar Henri Maspéro and Vietnamese scholar Nguyễn Văn Tố proposed that 雄 was actually a scribal error for 雒.
The Hùng kings' eighteen generations were mentioned in Đại Việt sử lược by an anonymous 14th-century author:

In King Zhuang of Zhou's time, in Gia Ninh division, there was a strange man, could use mystical arts overwhelm all the tribes; he styled self Đối king ; capital was in Văn Lang, appellation was Văn Lang state. Their customs were substantively honest; strings and knots for their regulations. Passing down eighteen generations, all styled Đối kings.

Chinese historian Luo Xianglin, apud Lai, considered 碓王 to be 雒王 erroneously transmitted.
Another early known reference is purportedly found in a story called "Tale of the Mountain Spirit and Water Spirit' in the 1329 Việt Điện U Linh Tập compiled by Lý Tế Xuyên, where the Hung King was a mere ruler. The next earliest appearance is in the fourteenth-fifteen century Lĩnh Nam chích quáí, a collection of myths and legends compiled by various authors.

Early 20th century textual references

Textual references in the early 20th century highlight that the Hùng kings were already a key part of the Vietnamese collective memory.
  • The 1916 Trần Trọng Kim's Elementary Textbook for a Brief History of Annam, the first vernacular history of Vietnam in the Vietnamese alphabet, covered the period from the Hùng kings to colonial times. In the book, Trần Trọng Kim uses the expression that has become one of the most popular labels for the Việt connecting them to the Hùng kings – "race of the Dragon and the Fairy", and in his revised 1920 edition, "children of the Fairy, grandchildren of the Dragon" or "the descendants of the Fairy and the Dragon". Trần Trọng Kim's text became a standard textbook until 1954 in all parts of Vietnam.
  • Phan Bội Châu, an early Vietnamese nationalist, wrote a poem in 1910 which glorifies the lineage of "children of the Dragon, grandchildren of the Fairy".
  • Hồ Chí Minh's biography, published in South Vietnam in 1948, mentions Ho recalling the day of the Proclamation of Independence of Vietnam on September 2, 1945, and describing it as a "day to remember for twenty-five million people, the children of the Lạc and the grandchildren of Hồng".

    Historicity

Developments in the 15th century

Historians studying the Hùng kings have suggested that developments from the 13th to the 15th centuries explain why there was a desire by Đại Việt to incorporate the founding epic of the Hùng kings into its history.
As different groups of local elites in Jiaozhi in the 1000s and worked at the transition to an independent Đại Việt, the question of political legitimisation was an urgent one that needed tackling – especially given the lack of ancient Viet sources to base on, and after about a thousand years of Chinese rule. This explained why it attempted to reach back in time and create a mythic past for itself to serve its present political needs. Although part of the legitimisation process included eliminating colonial influences, ironically, it was this ease with Chinese characters and sources that caused them to utilise Chinese history and sources to validate their own.
Academics have argued that the historicization and utilisation of the Hùng kings epic can be explained by developments from the thirteenth century. Three devastating invasions – by the Mongols in the thirteenth century, the Cham in the fourteenth century, and the Ming in the fifteenth century, corresponded with the myth's emergence and absorption into historiography. By late 1330, with social problems growing in the countryside, the Trần ruler Minh Tông started to move away from Thiền Buddhism which did not seem to be working in its integrative function, and looked to Confucianism and antiquity. He brought the Confucian teacher Chu Văn An into the capital, and the latter's emphasis on the classical beliefs of China and its antiquity set the intellectual tone of Thang-long. Antiquity was now seen as providing solutions for the difficult present. The disastrous invasion by the Cham under Chế Bồng Nga destroyed the Trần dynasty, and caused Vietnamese literati to seek desperately for a means to restore harmony. The Ming occupation of 1407–1427 dramatically deepened the influence of the literati through promoting schools and scholarship.
Developments from the thirteenth century then combined to set the stage for the state promotion of the Hùng king founding myth by the 15th century. There was a shift away from a more indigenous, pre-Southeast Asian phase, to the 'Neo-Confucian revolution" of Lê Thánh Tông. This, together with the chaos created by the devastating invasions and internal social problems, encouraged a search for 'Vietnamese Antiquity' modelled on classical Chinese antiquity, in the mythic creation of 'Văn Lang' via the Hùng king.

Canonization in Ngô Sĩ Liên's Đại Việt sử ký toàn thư (Complete Book of the Historical Records of Đại Việt)

The canonization of the Hùng kings founding myth was carried out by Ngô Sĩ Liên in his compiling of a new history of the realm under the order of Emperor Lê Thánh Tông, drawing upon popular sources. This history, the Đại Việt sử ký toàn thư, was used by the emperor as a tool to promote Việt 'national feeling'. Thus, Ngô Sĩ Liên was tasked to promote Đại Việt's supernatural and millennial ancestry. This marked the first time a Việt state traced its origins back to the first realm of Văn Lang of the Hùng kings, calculated by Ngô Sĩ Liên to be in 2879 BCE. Prior to this, official dynastic histories of the Việt started with Triệu Đà, acknowledging a Qin general as the founder of the Nam Việt. This was done based mostly on da su and in particular, the Arrayed Tales. Court historians in the later dynasties followed Ngô Sĩ Liên's example in integrating the Hùng kings into Việt official historiography.

Dissemination of Hùng kings epic from the 15th century

There was likely already a long oral tradition in the Red River Delta of the re-enactment of myths and legends at the level of the village even before myths were written into literature. Each village held yearly festivities at the communal temple with public recitations and re-enactments during which villagers recreated a specific myth, historical event, or character. Thus, Hùng kings worship may have existed locally before the 15th century, manifesting in the construction of temples and shrines, and in oral propagation of different variations of the Hùng kings epic.
Emperor Lê Thánh Tông authorised in 1470 the Hùng Vương ngọc phả thập bát thế truyền. The text was reproduced in the successive dynasties, and court-issued copies were worshipped in village temples. Spirit promulgation was promoted by imperial decrees and intensified as the dynasties passed. In the 16th and 17th century, court academicians compiled, recopied, and modified collections of myths and genealogies about supernatural beings and national heroes, including that of the Hùng kings. This were then accepted and perpetuated by villages. The Hùng kings were transformed into Thành hoàng sanctified by imperial orders and by popular feeling stemming from long traditions of ancestor worship.
Over time, the worship of Hùng kings evolved; they acquired sons-in-laws who became Mountain Spirits, when migrating south with the territorial expansion, and transformed themselves into Whale Spirits when near the sea. Land was also provided to temples in Phú Thọ province, the site of the main Hung temple, to meet the expense of Hùng kings worship. As late as 1945, the Nguyễn court continued to delegate officials to oversee rituals in the Hùng kings temples of Phú Thọ. Nguyễn Thị Diệu argues that as the result of the meeting of the two currents, that of the state's mythographic construction and that of popular, village-based animistic worship, the Hùng kings came to be venerated as the ancestral founders of the Việt nation in temples throughout the Red River Delta and beyond.
The dissemination of the Hùng kings myth was also facilitated by the use of the lục bát verse form – tales recounted using this form, aided with the use of Quốc Âm instead of Literary Chinese, and the use of colourful verse close to the vernacular, allowed for the ease of memorisation and transmission of such myths.