Âu Cơ

What it is

Âu Cơ belongs to the creation story told by the Vietnamese. In it she is a tiên, or immortal, living among mountain peaks covered in snow. The tale gives her a healer's skill and a warm feeling for people who are unwell, and she travels out to reach them. She marries Lạc Long Quân, whose name is usually rendered as Dragon Lord of Lạc. Together they are remembered as the forebears of the Vietnamese, with her hundred offspring, the Bách Việt, as the link between them. Temple statues of her stand in Vietnam, and she is widely called the mother of the nation's civilization.

Where it comes from

The story survives in more than one written telling, and the tellings disagree. Lĩnh Nam chích quái, a collection from the 14th century whose title is rendered loosely as Wonders plucked from the dust of Linh-nam, makes her a concubine of Đế Lai before her marriage to Lạc Long Quân. A later chronicle, Đại Việt sử ký toàn thư, written in the 15th century, instead calls her Đế Lai's daughter. Đế Lai also appears under the name Emperor Ai, a descendant of Shennong. A traditional reckoning of her dates puts her life between 2825 BC and 2520 BC. Whether she existed at all is disputed.

What it is for

For listeners and readers the tale does several kinds of work. It supplies a shared origin, tracing a nation to one mother from the mountains and one father from the sea, and it places the Hùng kings, the early rulers, among her descendants. It also holds her up as a figure of compassion, since the story sends her out to nurse the sick. The American writer Mary McCarthy, in a pamphlet on the Vietnam War simply called Vietnam, noted that United States agents drew on the myth to stir patriotic feeling for South Vietnam.

Peoples and places

The myth is the Vietnamese people's own account of where they came from, and the hundred children it names, the Bách Việt, are given as their forebears. The two halves of the family are set in different landscapes: the mother in the cold high mountains of Vietnam, the father in the sea. Teaching of the story is widespread in Vietnamese schools, so it reaches children across the country rather than staying with one locality or one lineage.

What people believe

Behind the story lies a world where immortals, tiên, live in the high mountains and can take another shape when frightened, and where a dragon king rules the sea. Âu Cơ becomes a crane to escape a monster; Lạc Long Quân, coming from the water, kills the creature with a stone. The two are drawn together, yet each longs for a different home, so they divide the family and take fifty children apiece. Her fifty grow into the Hùng Vương, the Hùng kings. Ancestry here is both human and otherworldly.

How scholars and sceptics see it

The chronicle's own commentator, Ngô Sĩ Liên, found the union of the two progenitors somewhat crude and pointed out the kinship between them, since Lạc Long Quân's father Kinh Dương Vương and Âu Cơ's grandfather Đế Nghi were brothers. Cataloguing now records her as a figure whose existence is disputed, and the gap between the 14th-century and 15th-century versions is part of the record. McCarthy's pamphlet is a different kind of witness: she describes political operators reaching for the story because of its patriotic pull.

Compare and confuse

Âu Cơ is almost always named alongside Lạc Long Quân, and the two are treated as a pair, one out of the mountains and one out of the sea. Because her fifty children become the Hùng Vương, she stands at the head of the line of early rulers. The same narrative is also called the Vietnamese creation myth, and its offspring are called the Bách Việt.

Today

Statues keep her visible. One stands at Hộ Quốc Temple, where a close view of the image is used to picture her; another is at Hùng Temple in Tao Đàn, in Hồ Chí Minh City. Beyond the temples, the narrative is a standard item of Vietnamese schooling, so most children meet it as part of national history and literature.

Questions people ask about Âu Cơ

Good reading and sources

• Âu Cơ on WikipediaEncyclopedia
• More photos on Wikimedia CommonsPhotos and video
• Wikidata recordOpen data