Vietnamese Lac Long Quan and Au Co

At a Glance

• Central figures: Lac Long Quan, the dragon lord of the southern seas and son of the dragon king Kinh Duong Vuong; Au Co, a fairy of the high mountains descended from the immortal line of the northern peaks.
• Setting: The ancient lands of Lac Viet (northern Vietnam and the Red River delta), in the Vietnamese foundation-myth tradition; the story is preserved in the Linh Nam Chich Quai (14th century) and earlier oral tradition.
• The turn: Au Co gave birth to a single sac containing one hundred eggs, which hatched into one hundred sons - but Lac Long Quan belonged to the water and Au Co to the mountains, and neither could live permanently in the other’s element.
• The outcome: The couple divided their children: fifty followed Lac Long Quan to the coasts and river deltas, fifty followed Au Co into the highlands. The eldest son of the coastal group became the first Hung King, founding the Hung Vuong dynasty.
• The legacy: The Vietnamese claim dual descent from dragon and fairy - con rong chau tien - and the Hung Kings are honored as the founding rulers of Van Lang, the first Vietnamese state.

Lac Long Quan came out of the sea smelling of salt and deep water. He had the blood of dragons in him - his father Kinh Duong Vuong ruled the undersea kingdom of Lac, and his mother was a daughter of the Dragon Lord of Dong Dinh Lake. He could breathe beneath the waves. He could call storms. But he walked on land as a man, tall, restless, with a taste for doing things that needed doing.

The lowlands of Lac Viet were not easy country. The rivers flooded. Creatures lived in the deep places that dragged farmers under. A fox spirit had taken residence in a mountain pass and was eating travelers. A giant fish was terrorizing the coast near Long Bien. Lac Long Quan killed the fish. He drove the fox spirit out. He taught the people of the plains how to grow wet rice, how to cook it, how to tattoo their skin so the water creatures would mistake them for kin and leave them alone.

Au Co in the Lowlands

Au Co came down from the northern mountains. She was of the immortal line - some say granddaughter of the god Nong, lord of agriculture in the high peaks. She was beautiful in the way mountain things are beautiful: sharp-featured, undomesticated, smelling of pine resin and cold air. She had come south to see the flowering trees of the lowlands, and she stayed because she found Lac Long Quan.

They married. It was not a complicated courtship. He was the lord of the rivers and the coast. She was a fairy of the peaks. Between them they held everything from the waterline to the clouds.

Au Co became pregnant, and when the time came she did not bear a child. She bore a single sac - a membrane smooth as silk, translucent, large enough that Lac Long Quan could hold it in both arms. Neither of them was alarmed. He was half dragon. She was an immortal. Normal births were for other people.

The sac contained one hundred eggs. They hatched into one hundred boys, all healthy, all strong, all hungry. They grew without illness. They did not need milk for long. Within weeks they were the size of children who should have taken years to reach that height.

The House That Could Not Hold

For a time the family stayed together in the lowlands near the sea. Lac Long Quan fished and tended the waterways. Au Co kept the house, though she kept looking toward the mountains the way a bird looks toward open sky. The hundred sons filled the house with noise and broke things and ate enormously.

But Lac Long Quan was a water creature. The sea pulled at him. He would disappear for days, swimming the deep channels, visiting the underwater palace of his father. He came back wet and distant. Au Co would be standing in the doorway of the house with the mountains behind her, and she would not say anything, but her silence had a specific quality.

He needed the water the way she needed altitude. It was not a quarrel. It was the nature of what each of them was. A dragon lord cannot stay dry. A mountain fairy cannot stay low. They had married across an elemental boundary, and the boundary held.

One evening Lac Long Quan came back from the sea and found Au Co sitting outside with the children around her. She spoke plainly.

I am of the mountains. You are of the water. We cannot keep living in one place.

He did not argue. He had known it too.

The Division at the River

They divided the children. Fifty sons went with Lac Long Quan toward the coast and the river deltas - the low country, the wet country, the rice paddies and fishing villages that would become the heartland of the Viet people. Fifty sons went with Au Co into the highlands - the mountains, the forests, the upland valleys where the air was thin and the rivers ran fast and cold.

The eldest son of Lac Long Quan’s group became the first Hung King. He established his seat at Phong Chau, in the land that would be called Van Lang, and he ruled the people of the lowlands. The Hung Vuong line would last, by tradition, eighteen kings deep - the oldest dynasty the Vietnamese claim.

The fifty sons who went to the mountains became the ancestors of the highland peoples - the Muong, the Tay, the upland groups who lived differently from the delta Viet but shared the same parentage. Mountain and coast, highland and lowland, all children of the same sac.

Con Rong Chau Tien

Lac Long Quan and Au Co did not meet again. The story does not say they grieved or that they didn’t. It says they returned to what they were: he to the water, she to the peaks. The division was clean. It was not a punishment or a failure. It was the acknowledgment that some unions produce extraordinary children precisely because the parents cannot occupy the same ground.

The Vietnamese took from this a phrase that became bone-deep: con rong chau tien - children of the dragon, grandchildren of the fairy. It is not a metaphor. It is a statement of parentage. Every Vietnamese person, lowland or highland, carries the dragon’s blood and the fairy’s blood together. The division at the river did not break the family. It mapped it onto the landscape - the coast is the dragon’s country, the mountains are the fairy’s country, and the whole of Vietnam is the space between, held by both.

The Hung Kings ruled from Phong Chau, and every year the people made offerings to the dragon lord of the sea and the fairy of the mountains. The sac that held one hundred eggs was remembered. The sea was remembered. The mountains were remembered. And when the Vietnamese said who they were, they said it with both hands open - one toward the water, one toward the peaks.