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About Vietnam
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 | About Vietnam >> Vietnam's History :>> Vietnam's History - Early Kingdoms According to Vietnamese myths, the first Vietnamese people descended from the Dragon Lord Lac Long Quan and the Immortal Au Co. Lac Long Quan and Âu Co had 100 sons before they split (50 children went with their mother to the mountains and the other 50 went with their father to the sea). The eldest son became the first in a line of earliest Vietnamese kings, collectively known as Hung Kings. The Hung Kings called the country Van Lan. It was located on the Red River delta in present-day northern Vietnam. The people of Van Lang were referred to as the Lac Viet. In ancient times, many tribes living south of the Yangtze River called themselves Yue (Viet in Vietnamese). Most of these tribes were linguistically related to the northern Chinese; even today, Cantonese people and their language are still referred to as Yue. The Lac Viet, however, were linguistically more closely related to other Southeast Asian people. Van Lang culture is theorized to have evolved from natives who had settled on the Red River delta since pre-historic times, rather than from migrating tribes from the North, as suggested in some Chinese legends. Van Lang was thought to be a matriarchal society, similar to many other matriarchal societies common in Southeast Asia and in the Pacific islands at the time. Various archaeological sites in northern Vietnam, such as Dong Son have yielded metal weapons and tools from this age. Most famous of these artifacts are the large bronze drums, probably made for ceremonial purposes, with sophisticated engravings on the surface, depicting life scenes with warriors, boats, houses, birds and animals in concentric circles around a radiating sun at the center.
By the 3rd century BC, another Viet group, the Au Viet, emigrated from present-day southern China to the Red River Delta and mixed with the indigenous Van Lang population. In 258 BC, a new kingdom, Au Lac, emerged as the union of the Âu Viet and the Lac Viet with Thuc Phan proclaiming himself king An Duong Vuong. At his capital Co Loa, he built many concentric layers of walls around the city for defensive purpose. These walls, together with skilled Âu Lac archers, kept the capital safe from invaders for a while. However, it also gave rise to the first story of espionage in Vietnamese history, which resulted in the downfall of king An Duong Vuong. In 207 BC, an ambitious Chinese warlord named Trieu Da defeated king An Duong Vuong by having his son Trong Thuy marrying An Duong Vuong's daughter, then acted as a spy. Trieu Da annexed the kingdom of Âu Lac into his domain in present-day Guangdong, southern China, then proclaimed himself king of a new independent kingdom, Nam Viet. Trong Thuy, the supposed crown prince, felt deep remorse as his wife was killed during the war, drowned himself in Co Loa. Some Vietnamese considered the period under Trieu's rule a Chinese domination, since Trieu Da was a former Qin general. Yet others consider it an era of Viet independence as the Trieu family in Nam Viet were assimilated to local culture. They ruled independently of what then constituted as China (Han dynasty). At one point, Trieu Da even declared himself Emperor as an equal to the Chinese Han Emperor in the North.
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