Hùng king


Hùng king or vua Hùng is the title given to the legendary 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, which means "brave" and Vương, 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/ Âu Lạc 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 modern Vietnam in antiquity. Their progenitors were Dragon Lac and his consort Fairy Âu Cơ who produced a sac containing one hundred eggs from which one hundred sons emerged. Dragon Lac preferred to live in the sea, and Fairy Âu Cơ preferred the 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 Van Lang, the realm of all the descendants of Dragon and Fairy Âu Cơ who became the Vietnamese people, from his capital in modern Phu Tho province.

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.

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 legitimation 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 legitimation 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-tong started to move away from Thien 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 Che Bong 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 ‘Van Lang’ via the Hùng king.

Hùng king as “[invented tradition]”

Analyses of the earliest sources on the Hùng kings have illustrated problems with these sources that have been used as historical evidence of the existence of the Hùng kings. In particular, historians have examined the Lĩnh Nam chích quái liệt truyện, compiled by Trần Thê´ Pháp under the late-fourteenth-century Trần dynasty, and amended in the fifteenth century under the Lê dynasty by Vũ Quỳnh and Kiều Phú. This source is of great importance in providing core information for Ngo Si Lien’s Đại Việt sử ký toàn thư created in 1479, which marked the official transformation of the Hùng kings into the founders of dynasties. The Đại Việt sử ký toàn thư was in turn the core text that DRV historians used as proof of the ancient origins of the Vietnamese people and the Vietnamese nation.
Based on an analysis of an essay called “Biography of the Hồng Bàng Clan” from the Arrayed Tales, historian Liam Kelley posits that the Hùng kings did not exist. Instead, he argues that they were invented in the medieval period when the Sinicised elite in the Red River Delta first constructed a separate identity in relation to China's cultural heritage. Kelley exposes the problems of the “Biography” in a few ways – for example, by showing how it borrowed figures and accounts from ancient Chinese texts and stories, and by highlighting issues with terms such as “hung”, “lac”, and “Viet”. He does this by examining ancient Chinese historical sources to highlight similar terms and stories as in “Biography”, and search for terms and accounts mentioned in “Biography” to corroborate the existence of the latter's information on the Hùng Kings. In doing so he also shows how this practice of drawing upon old texts for material to create a local history was also practiced at that time in parts of the Chinese empire like Sichuan and Guangdong, hence placing the “Biography” in the broader literary trends of the time.

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 Van Lang of the Hùng kings, calculated by Ngo Si Lien 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 Việt quoc. 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 was 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 established in 1470 the Hùng Vương ngọc phả thập bát thê´ 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 hòang 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 Nguyên court continued to delegate officials to oversee rituals in the Hùng kings temples of Phú Thọ. Dieu Thi Nguyen 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 Quoc Am instead of Han linguistic expression, and the use of colourful verse close to the vernacular, allowed for the ease of memorisation and transmission of such myths.

Hùng kings in South Vietnam/Republic of Vietnam (RVN)

The Hùng kings seem to have been well embedded in Vietnamese collective memory by the 1950s in the RVN. Olga Dror has written about how the perception of the Hùng kings as common ancestors of all Vietnamese was mobilised for various agendas despite admitting a lack of historical evidence about them.
Just like in the DRV and SRV, the RVN also commemorated the Hùng kings’ in a national holiday. The Hùng kings Memorial Day was one of the twenty official holidays at the inception of the RVN but was dropped in January 1956 from the official list as Ngô Đình Diệm as prime minister decided that citizens would not have time off for the holiday. The Hùng kings was hence rejected at the official level. However, at the public level, commemorations were allowed. The Saigon News Review and the Vietnam News Agency reported on celebrations around the state with the participation of many officials.
With the assassination of Ngô Đình Diệm and changes in the RVN government, the Hùng kings Memorial Day was restored to the list of official holidays in February 1964, allocating a whole day off for government employees and students. The Hùng kings Memorial Day became one of the seven official holidays in the RVN with a full day of rest. In an April 1964 decree, the Hùng kings Memorial Day also became one of the four holidays requiring private businesses to give their employees paid time off. This elevated the status of the Hùng kings and highlighted their importance for official discourse.
Perhaps the most important indication of the Hùng kings Memorial Day's significance is that it was a contender for the honour of being designated as National Day. In 1967, the National Assembly considered whether the Hùng kings Memorial Day should also be made Independence Day. While the initiative failed, the idea was surfaced again in the Senate in 1971 and discussed in the cabinet in 1973.

Hùng kings in North Vietnam/Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV)'s National History

The conversion of the Hùng kings to historical “truth” in the DRV emerged over time through extensive discussions by DRV official scholars and resolutions by the Party such as regarding the establishment of the date of the death anniversary of the Hùng kings and its celebration in festivals. The Institute of Archaeology was established in 1968 with the highest priority given to scientifically documenting the Hùng kings. The Institute launched excavations and organised conferences between 1968 and 1971 to discuss the findings and published their proceedings.
Historian Patricia Pelley posits that the selection of the Hùng Kings and the Hung dynasty during the Van Lang period was part of Hanoi's quest to create a “cult of antiquity” to illustrate the historical longevity and prestige of Vietnam that predated the Chinese occupation. The transformation of the Hùng kings into historical fact was based on the conflation of different kinds of evidence such as archaeological remains, dynastic chronicles, collections of legends, and a poem attributed to Ho Chi Minh titled “The History of Vietnam from 2879 BCE to 1945”.
DRV scholar and the first president of the Institute of History, :vi:Trần Huy Liệu|Trần Huy Liệu, settled the question of the origins of the Vietnamese nation in an article on the Hùng kings. The article noted that on the “tenth day of the third lunar month, the central government and local government held an official ceremony to commemorate the death anniversary of our Hung king ancestors at the Temple of the Hùng kings.” He commented that the Hùng kings were the “origins of the nation” as they “built the country”, and “if there had been no Hùng kings, then there would be no Dinh, Le, Ly, Trần, Ho, Le, or Nguyen, and also no Democratic Republic of Vietnam”. Trần Huy Liệu also wrote that the “patriotic spirit and indomitable tradition of our nation broke out in the thousand years of Chinese feudal rule, and it broke out in the hundred years under the domination of the French colonizers.” He concluded by lamenting that “at this time our lovely country has been provisionally divided into two regions and our fellow countrymen in the South moan and writhe under the fascist regime of the gang of Ngô Đình Diệm, lackey of the American imperialists.”
Historian Cherry Haydon notes that this article is important for a few reasons. First, it highlights the direct link made between the period of the Hùng kings and the formation of the Vietnamese nation. Second, it dates the origins of Vietnamese resistance to foreign aggression to the founding of the nation; third, it states explicitly the continuity between the period of the Hùng kings and the present. The dating of the origins of the nation to the rule of the Hùng kings would eventually become the orthodox position of historians at the Research Committee, the Institute of History, and later the Institute of Archaeology.

Hùng kings and the Bronze Age

relics have been used to support the existence of the kingdom of Van Lang and the Hùng kings. The official DRV national history, Lịch Sử Việt Nam, published in 1971, asserted the connection between the Bronze Age and the Dong Son culture and the period of the Hùng kings.
However, Haydon Cherry has argued that contrary to the assertions of Vietnamese scholars, such relics cannot provide such a support. He notes that the earliest Vietnamese text to describe this kingdom, the Đại Việt sử lược, dates from the thirteenth century, eighteen hundred years after the kingdom it is supposed to describe. The earliest Chinese text, which mentions not the Hung but the Lac kings, dates from the fourth century CE, eight hundred years after the period it discusses. Hence, such texts are not reliable transmissions of any written or oral tradition over eight or eighteen hundred years.

Cultural Significance

Nationalism

The Hùng kings are perceived as the founders of the Viet civilisation, and are promoted by the government as a source of national pride and solidarity through platforms such as the state-sponsored commemoration of an annual holiday, the Hùng kings Temple Festival, to honour the Hùng kings, and the promotion of the Hung King National Museum in Viet Tri City. In the Museum of Vietnamese History in Ho Chi Minh City, the exhibits are arranged chronologically, with the first one on the “Rise of the Hùng kings”.

Worship of Hùng kings

Revival of worship of Hùng kings

With the Đổi Mới reforms from 1986, Vietnam saw a resurrection of traditional festivals, including the Hùng kings Temple Festival. Celebrations of the Hùng kings moved from the local to the provincial and then to the state levels. This revival has been perceived as an attempt by the government to maintain the Vietnamese identity of its people in view of increasing foreign influence.
In 1999, the government issued a directive on the celebration on what it perceived as the most important events in 2000. Other than the Hùng kings Festival, the other events perceived to be important were: the seventieth anniversary of the Vietnamese Communist Party, the 110th anniversary of Ho Chi Minh's birthday, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the victory in the campaign against Americans to save the country, the fifty-fifth anniversary of the August Revolution, and the start of the twenty-first century.

Hùng kings Temple Festival

The Hùng Kings' Temple Festival is a Vietnamese festival held annually from the 8th to the 11th days of the third lunar month in honour of the Hùng Kings. The main festival day - which has been designated a public holiday in Vietnam since 2007 - is on the 10th day.
Every year, leading government figures make pilgrimages to the Hùng kings temple in Phu Tho province to honour the Quốc tộ.
In April 2016, the festival at the Hùng kings temple in Phu Tho attracted about seven million people. Nguyen Phu Trong, the general secretary of the Communist Party, also attended.
In 2018, the state-established Association for Liaison with Overseas Vietnamese implemented a project titled Vietnam Ancestral Global Day which organised various cultural activities worldwide to celebrate Hung Kings Memorial Day. This year is the first time that Vietnam Ancestral Global Day has been celebrated simultaneously in many European countries following a shared format. Since 2015, one of the three main goals of the Vietnam Ancestral Global Day Project has been to preserve and spread the Hùng kings worship rite amongst overseas Vietnamese.

UNESCO recognition

In 2012, the worship of the Hùng kings in Phu Tho was recognised by UNESCO as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, and the UNESCO page notes that this “tradition embodies spiritual solidarity and provides an occasion to acknowledge national origins and sources of Vietnamese cultural and moral identity”.