Hùng king
The most illustrious of the sons became the first Hùng king who ruled Văn Lang, the realm of all the descendants of Dragon and Goddess Âu Cơ who became the Vietnamese people, from his capital in modern Phú Thọ Province.
[10] The next earliest appearance is in the fourteenth-fifteen century Lĩnh Nam chích quáí (Arrayed Tales of Selected Oddities from South of the Passes), a collection of myths and legends compiled by various authors.
As different groups of local elites in Jiaozhi in the 1000s and worked at the transition to an independent Đại Việt, the question of political legitimisation was an urgent one that needed tackling – especially given the lack of ancient Viet sources to base on, and after about a thousand years of Chinese rule.
By late 1330, with social problems growing in the countryside, the Trần ruler Minh Tông started to move away from Thiền (Zen) Buddhism which did not seem to be working in its integrative function,[13] and looked to Confucianism and antiquity.
He brought the Confucian teacher Chu Văn An into the capital, and the latter's emphasis on the classical beliefs of China and its antiquity set the intellectual tone of Thang-long.
The disastrous invasion by the Cham under Chế Bồng Nga destroyed the Trần dynasty, and caused Vietnamese literati to seek desperately for a means to restore harmony.
The canonization of the Hùng kings founding myth was carried out by Ngô Sĩ Liên in his compiling of a new history of the realm under the order of Emperor Lê Thánh Tông (1460–97), drawing upon popular sources.
[16] This marked the first time a Việt state traced its origins back to the first realm of Văn Lang of the Hùng kings, calculated by Ngô Sĩ Liên to be in 2879 BCE.
In the 16th and 17th century, court academicians compiled, recopied, and modified collections of myths and genealogies about supernatural beings and national heroes, including that of the Hùng kings.
The Hùng kings were transformed into Thành hoàng (tutelary god) sanctified by imperial orders and by popular feeling stemming from long traditions of ancestor worship.
Nguyễn Thị Diệu argues that as the result of the meeting of the two currents, that of the state's mythographic construction and that of popular, village-based animistic worship, the Hùng kings came to be venerated as the ancestral founders of the Việt nation in temples throughout the Red River Delta and beyond.
Olga Dror has written about how the perception of the Hùng kings as common ancestors of all Vietnamese was mobilised for various agendas despite admitting a lack of historical evidence about them.
In an April 1964 decree, the Hùng kings Memorial Day also became one of the four holidays requiring private businesses to give their employees paid time off.
[23] Historian Patricia Pelley posits that the selection of the Hùng Kings and the Hung dynasty during the Văn Lang period was part of Hanoi's quest to create a "cult of antiquity" to illustrate the historical longevity and prestige of Vietnam that predated the Chinese occupation.
The transformation of the Hùng kings into historical fact was based on the conflation of different kinds of evidence such as archaeological remains, dynastic chronicles, collections of legends, and a poem attributed to Hồ Chí Minh titled "The History of Vietnam from 2879 BCE to 1945".
[24] DRV scholar and the first president of the Institute of History, Trần Huy Liệu, settled the question of the origins of the Vietnamese nation in an article on the Hùng kings.
He concluded by lamenting that "at this time our lovely country has been provisionally divided into two regions and our fellow countrymen in the South moan and writhe under the fascist regime of the gang of Ngô Đình Diệm, lackey of the American imperialists.
Second, it dates the origins of Vietnamese resistance to foreign aggression to the founding of the nation; third, it states explicitly the continuity between the period of the Hùng kings and the present.
The official DRV national history, Lịch Sử Việt Nam, published in 1971, asserted the connection between the Bronze Age and the Dong Son culture and the period of the Hùng kings.
The earliest Chinese text, which mentions not the Hung but the Lac kings, dates from the fourth century CE, eight hundred years after the period it discusses.
[30] Based on an analysis of an essay called "Biography of the Hồng Bàng Clan" from the Arrayed Tales, historian Liam Kelley posits that the Hùng kings did not exist.
Instead, he argues that they were invented in the medieval period when the Sinicised elite in the Red River Delta first constructed a separate identity in relation to China's cultural heritage.
Kelley exposes the problems of the "Biography" in a few ways – for example, by showing how it borrowed figures and accounts from ancient Chinese texts and stories, and by highlighting issues with terms such as "Hùng", "Lạc", and "Việt".
[34][35][36] Every year, leading government figures make pilgrimages to the Hùng kings temple in Phú Thọ province to honour the Quốc tộ (National Founder).
Since 2015, one of the three main goals of the Vietnam Ancestral Global Day Project has been to preserve and spread the Hùng kings worship rite amongst overseas Vietnamese.
