Trieu Da

More than 2,000 years ago, a very old king ruled a wide land in the south. His name was Triệu Đà. Today he appears only in the pages of old histories, pages gone the color of age.

In his day the world looked very different. There were no city lights and no paved roads. There were only long rivers, high mountains, and wide lands that a traveler walked and walked without reaching the end. On a land like that, one king lived and ruled for a very long time.

Triệu Đà began as a general. He came from far away in the north, from Chân Định County in the Hằng Sơn region. That land now lies in Hà Bắc Province in China. After the Qin dynasty collapsed, around 207 before the Common Era, he founded a kingdom of his own and named it Nam Việt.

He made his capital at a place called Phiên Ngung, which is now the city of Quảng Châu in China. Old accounts describe the kingdom as 10,000 miles wide, stretching from east to west, though that is a grand round figure and not a measured one. It reached from the lands of Quảng Đông and Quảng Tây south into what is now northern Vietnam. Ten thousand miles. A number that sounds like something out of a fairy tale.

Yet it is not the size of his land that later generations remember. It is something simpler and much warmer.

Though he came from the north, he lived in the south for so long that he came to love its ways. One account says he took up the way of life of the Indigenous Bách Việt people. He wore his hair in a topknot, as the local people did. He sat the way they sat. He ate, lived and went about his days like the people around him.

The story goes that an envoy named Lục Giả once came from the north to visit. He saw that the king's clothes, and the way he sat and stood, were nothing like those of a northerner. The king only smiled. He said, roughly, that he had lived on this land for a very long time and had grown used to the ways of its people. It was a gentle answer, and it shows how much he respected the customs of the Indigenous people of the land.

He also lived a very long life. This is the strangest part, and it is best heard as an old tale, not as a fact. The book Đại Việt Sử Ký Toàn Thư records that he lived to be 121 years old. That book is the oldest complete official history of Vietnam that survives. A hundred and twenty-one years. It sounds more like legend than record.

Researchers today have worked out the count again. They think the figure may only be the way people long ago told such tales. Many estimate that he lived about 99 years and died in 137 before the Common Era. Whether it was 121 years in the old history or 99 by the newer reckoning, he was still a king who lived an unusually long time.

Think of a man who passed through nearly a hundred seasons of falling leaves and watched so much change. People were born and grew up around him, a whole generation, and then another. And he sat on, quiet as an old tree in the land of the south.

Today Triệu Đà is only a dim shadow in the pages of old history, an old king of a faraway land in its earliest days. But whenever someone opens those pages again, an image rises, very softly. An old man with his hair high in a topknot sits quietly beside a southern river, so long-lived that he seems to touch legend. It comes like a very old breeze, blowing in from more than 2,000 years ago.