The Legend of the Origin of the Vietnamese people (A fairy tale)

Legend has it that Lac Long Quan was born to King Kinh Duong Vuong and Long Nu, a dragon incarnate; and Lady Au Co was a daughter of King De Lai and a Fairy in a northern country. Lac Long Quan was king of the immense region, which is now the whole area of South China and the northern part of Vietnam.

Lac Long Quan married Lady Au Co, and she gave birth to a huge sac containing one hundred eggs. On the day the eggs hatched, one hundred healthy boys walked out of their shells. The hundred boys grew up quickly. When they were ten years old, they already looked like young men.

One day, Lac Long Quan told his wife, “I came from the line of the Dragon, and you are from the line of the Fairy. We cannot live together forever. Therefore, you will take our fifty sons and go up to the highland and mountains and teach them a trade so they can feed themselves and take care of their families. I will take the other fifty sons to the sea and its adjacent low lands and teach them how to work to sustain themselves so they can raise their own families.”

No sooner said than King Lac Long Quan and his wife parted. Each spouse took fifty sons to their new lands. In the mountainous areas, the young men made their living by hunting and gathering at the beginning, then they practiced nomadic farming, and finally they settled down permanently whether in natural, limestone caves, called dong or in many mountainous villages called soc or buon. The fifty sons later became the leaders of the ethnic, minority tribes in the highlands.

Among the other fifty young men, who went to the sea with their father, some settled in the lowlands and later became peasants, artisans, or merchants. Others went to live and work on the rivers or at sea. They became fishermen, who lived whether on their boats most of their lives or built their permanent houses by the riverside or on the sea shore. A group of twenty houses was called xom chai (a fishing sub hamlet,) and a much larger group was called lang chai (a fishing village).

Later, Long Quan made his eldest son King of Van Lang. Through the ups and downs of history during the course of over thirty centuries, the Viet people and their kings moved steadily south to their present geographical location.

The number one hundred used to count the eggs has caused many heated debates among the Vietnamese. Some believed that the number one hundred accounted for the Bach Viet of the time. Others believed that it matched the number of one hundred powerful clans who lived there at the time.

However, everyone is unanimously agreed that the Vietnamese peoples are the descendants of the Dragon and the Fairy in the legend. In fact, in Vietnamese literature whether oral or written, the phrase “con Rong chau Tien” (descendants of the Dragon and the Fairy) was used over and over for centuries. Moreover, the picture of the dragon has long been used in national emblems, logos, and many other designs to represent Vietnam and its peoples.

The element that tell this is a fairy tale is Au Co can born 100 eggs in the same times.