An Duong Vuong and the Magic Crossbow

At the bottom of the sea, the old tellers say, there are oysters that hold pearls brighter than any other pearl. If those pearls are carried to the citadel of Cổ Loa and washed in the water of the old well there, they blaze with a light that no other well and no other sea can match. People call it the light of sorrow turned clear. This is one of the loveliest and saddest legends that Vietnamese people have handed down from one generation to the next.

The story begins with a citadel.

Around the 3rd century BC, a king moved his capital to Cổ Loa. He was An Dương Vương, and his real name was Thục Phán. His kingdom was called Âu Lạc. Cổ Loa lies in what is now Đông Anh, in Hanoi. The king ordered a great citadel built to protect the capital. The builders packed down earth by day and by night. But however much they raised during the day, the same amount fell down again when night came.

It went on like that, day after day. The walls were still not finished.

Every morning they saw stretches of earthen wall lying in heaps. Every day the king and his people carried earth basket by basket, pounding it down layer by layer and raising the walls higher and higher. And by the next morning, it would all slump to the ground again. No one could explain why. The king grieved, but he did not give up.

The legend says the cause was a white spirit rooster hiding on Mount Thất Diệu nearby. Every night the rooster crowed, and evil spirits came at its call. They pulled down everything the king and his people had raised during the day. The people of old Cổ Loa called that white rooster the source of every failure, every sleepless night, every morning when hearts felt as heavy as wet earth.

Then one morning, something strange happened. A great golden turtle rose slowly from beneath the surface of the water. People called it Kim Quy, the Golden Turtle Spirit.

The Golden Turtle showed the king where the spirit rooster was hiding. The king sent men up Mount Thất Diệu to find the white rooster and kill it. From that day on, every stretch of wall the builders raised stood firm. Little by little, a citadel with three rings of walls rose from the plain of the Red River. The rings coiled around one another like the shell of a snail. People of later times named it Cổ Loa, which means old snail. The three walls are estimated at about 16 kilometers of earthwork in all. Every bit of it was raised by human hands.

The Golden Turtle stayed with the king for a time. Before it went home to the Dragon King's palace beneath the water, it gave him one of its claws. The turtle told him to use it as the trigger of a crossbow. The king gave the task to General Cao Lỗ. He was a fine general, clever and good with his hands. He filed and shaped the claw, fitted it into the trigger, and tested the bow again and again. When the crossbow was finished, a single shot sent out a thousand arrows, and every one of them found its mark. The people of the capital called it the magic crossbow.

An enemy from the north named Triệu Đà heard the news and led his army across to attack. His soldiers swarmed right up to the foot of the walls. An Dương Vương raised the crossbow. One shrill hiss. A thousand arrows tore through the air. The enemy army scattered, and Triệu Đà asked for peace and pulled back.

Âu Lạc was at peace. But Triệu Đà did not give up.

He thought up another plan, one that needed no swords and no arrows. He sent his son, Trọng Thủy, to ask for the hand of Mỵ Châu. She was the princess, the beloved daughter of An Dương Vương. The king saw a chance for friendship between the two lands and agreed at once. Trọng Thủy came to live at Cổ Loa, in the household of his bride's family.

The legend never says that Trọng Thủy felt nothing real for Mỵ Châu. Those who passed it down tell it as a sorrow on both sides. He carried the duty of a son sent by his father. She carried the heart of a wife who trusted her husband. And between those two things lay a secret, and on that secret hung the fate of a whole country.

Peaceful days and months passed in the capital. Then, little by little, Trọng Thủy began asking about the secret of the magic crossbow. Mỵ Châu trusted her husband as she trusted herself, and she showed it to him. Quietly, he took out the real trigger. In its place he set a fake one that looked exactly the same. Then he asked leave to go home and visit his father.

Before he left, he asked his wife how he could find her if their two countries ever went to war. Mỵ Châu suspected nothing. She answered that she had a cloak of white goose feathers. Wherever she went, she would scatter its feathers to mark the way, and he could follow them to find her.

Trọng Thủy left, carrying the real trigger home to present to his father.

At once, Triệu Đà led his army across to attack. An Dương Vương calmly raised the crossbow and shot. The arrow flew, but it did nothing at all. There was no shrill hiss. There were no thousand arrows. There were only the sounds of horses and soldiers, and the familiar walls beginning to break apart, piece by piece. The citadel of Cổ Loa fell.

An Dương Vương and Mỵ Châu got on a horse and fled south, toward the sea. The princess sat behind her father, with no idea of what had happened. She still believed that her husband would come to find her. Quietly, she plucked the goose feathers from her cloak one by one and let them fall on the road behind them. Along every stretch of their flight, the white feathers marked the way in one long trail. A wife's love for her husband. A thread that, without her knowing, guided the ones who hunted them.

Trọng Thủy followed the trail of goose feathers and gave chase.

Father and daughter rode on and on, all the way to the shore. Before them stretched an endless expanse of waves. There was nowhere left to go. An Dương Vương cried out for help. And from the sea, the Golden Turtle rose once more.

The Golden Turtle lifted its head, looked, and said, "The enemy is the one sitting behind Your Majesty."

An Dương Vương turned and looked at Mỵ Châu.

And he understood. The goose feathers. The road he had thought only the two of them knew. It all broke open at once, like a stretch of the citadel wall collapsing in the night.

Mỵ Châu knelt down and wept. She swore to heaven and earth that she had never meant to betray him. Her heart had never wished her father any harm. She had only loved and trusted. And she prayed: if I have caused this wrong without knowing it, let my body turn into clear and shining pearls. Let them wash clean the name of a heart that was never false.

An Dương Vương stood before his daughter, before the sea, before everything he had built and lost in a single day. He looked at her. There were no words he wanted to say. There were no words she could hear anymore. There was only the sea and the sky, and his little daughter kneeling between them. He was a father. He was also a king. And in that moment, the king did the thing the father in him would carry forever: he did not spare his daughter.

Then he followed the Golden Turtle down into the sea, and he did not look back.

Trọng Thủy reached the shore by the trail of goose feathers, but he came too late. Mỵ Châu was gone. All that he had done, all that his father had won, turned to ashes in an instant. A country. A wife. And in his heart, he could not tell which one weighed more.

He brought her home to rest at the citadel of Cổ Loa. In the days that followed, the story goes, he sat beside the well inside the citadel for a long, long time. The well gave back his reflection, cold and silent, as if it had nothing to say. People say he sat there not knowing what he was waiting for, or what he was saying goodbye to. Then one day, Trọng Thủy was no longer seen beside the well. He had gone after Mỵ Châu, and the still, silent well kept him forever.

In the old telling, Mỵ Châu's prayer came true. Her blood mingled with the sea, and the oysters in those waters took it in and formed it into pearls. Those pearls shone brighter than any other kind. But carried back to Cổ Loa and washed in the well where Trọng Thủy had returned, they shone many times brighter still. It was as if the sorrow of the two of them, meeting again at the bottom of the well and the bottom of the sea, was only then enough to become light.

The Cổ Loa site still keeps two places from the legend today. One is the Mỵ Châu Shrine. The other is the Ngọc Well. For generation after generation, people have burned incense there with reverence.

And the pearls at the bottom of the sea are still there, shining brighter whenever they touch the water of the Cổ Loa well.