The inhabitants indigenous to the southernmost territories of Northern and Central China were referred to as the “Hundred Yue” to allude to the numerous different upland tribal hill cultures that made up the singular Baiyue identity.

[3] The emperor ordered his armies of five hundred thousand men to advance southward in the five columns to conquer and annex the Yue territories into the Qin empire.

Zhao Tuo married a Yue woman, incorporated locals into his army, and even fought off Han invasions later on to protect his kingdom.

[12] In 180 BC, Lu Jia led a diplomatic mission to Nanyue that succeeded in convincing Zhao Tuo to give up on his title as emperor and pay homage to Han as a nominal vassal.

[13] In 112 BC, the opposition retaliated violently and executed the Queen Dowager, a provocation that led to the mobilization of a large Han naval force into Nanyue.

[13] The Han imperial military forces consisted of six armies that traveled by sea, directly southward, or from Sichuan along the Xi River.

[21] The Han dynasty wanted to extend their control over the fertile Red River Delta, in part as the geographical terrain served as a convenient supply point and trading post for Han ships engaged in the growing maritime trade with various South and Southeast Asian Kingdoms and the Roman Empire.

[22][23][24] The Han dynasty relied heavily on trade with the Nanyue who produced unique items such as: bronze and pottery incense burners, ivory, and rhinoceros horns.

The Han dynasty took advantage of the Yue people's goods and used them in their maritime trade network that extended from Lingnan through Yunnan to Burma and India.

[25][26] Han imperial bureaucrats generally pursued a policy of peaceful relations with the indigenous Yue population, focusing their administrative roles in the prefectural headquarters and garrisons, and maintaining secure river routes for trade.

[27] By the first century AD, however, the Han dynasty intensified its efforts to assimilate its new territories by raising taxes and instituting marriage and land inheritance reforms aimed at turning Vietnam into a patriarchal society more amenable to political authority.

[28][19][24][27][22] The native Luo chief paid heavy tributes and imperial taxes to the Han mandarins to maintain the local administration and the military.

[21] The Han government sought to assimilate the Vietnamese into the dynasty exhibited through a "civilizing mission" in their maintenance of a unified cohesive empire.

[33] This portrayal has its roots in Dai Viet but scholars such as Nhi Hoang Thuc Nguyen argue that "the trope of a small country consistently repelling the China's cultural force is a recent, postcolonial, mid-20th-century construction".

This characterizes Vietnamese history under Chinese rule as a "steadfast popular resistance marked by armed insurrections against foreign domination".

Although it is true that the political situation in the Red River Plain was less stable than in Guangzhou to the north, such circumstances were not restricted to the area.

[41] These early moves toward autonomy in the 10th century were fairly tame compared to the activities of people who cushioned them from more direct contact with Southern dynasties empires.

[1] Following annexation, the name of Jiaozhi (Giao Chỉ) was established, dividing the former kingdom into nine commanderies with the last three commonly used in modern Vietnamese history books:[43][44] All nine districts were administered from Long Biên, near modern Hanoi;[45] each was ruled by a Chinese mandarin while the old system of lower rank rulers of Lac Hau, Lac Tuong were kept unchanged.