Âu Cơ

Also Known As: written 嫗姬 in the fifteenth-century Lĩnh Nam chích quái and 甌姬 in later usage; venerated today as Mẫu Âu Cơ and Tổ Mẫu Âu Cơ, “Ancestress Mother Âu Cơ”
Region/Culture: Southeast Asia
Mythos: Vietnamese Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: An immortal of the tiên kind who bore a hundred sons at once from a single sac and gave the crafts of rice, silk and weaving to the people who kept her.
Role in Mythos: She is the mother half of the founding pair of Vietnam, the ancestress from whom the Hùng kings and the Hundred Việt descend.
Relation to Humans: Every Vietnamese person is understood to be her descendant, which is why the ordinary word for a compatriot, đồng bào, means “same sac”. She is still given incense at Hiền Lương each year on the day she is said to have come down.

She carried it for a year, and then she put it down in a field.

The oldest account of her is blunt about this. What she delivered was not a child but a sac, one soft mass with no shape a mother could read, and she took it for a bad omen and left it out in the open grass. Six or seven days of sun and rain went past. Then the sac opened, and inside were a hundred eggs, and out of every egg came a boy. She went back for them. They needed no nursing. Each one grew on his own into something handsome and quick and unafraid, and the people who watched it happen decided this was a sign of the extraordinary, which was the only sensible conclusion available.

Before any of that she had belonged to somebody else. In the Lĩnh Nam chích quái she is the favoured woman of Đế Lai, a northern ruler descended from Shennong, who came south on progress and found a country he did not want to leave. The text lists what held him there like a man reciting an inventory he cannot quite believe: strange flowers, rare birds, rhinoceros and elephant and tortoiseshell, gold and silver, pepper and cinnamon, stalactite and sandalwood, and four seasons of weather that was neither cold nor hot. He left Âu Cơ and her attendants at his travelling lodge and went off to look at more of it.

The southern people, worn down by a northerner’s demands, did what they had always done when trouble came. They shouted into the air for the Lạc Dragon Lord, calling him father in their own language, asking where he had got to. He came. He saw her, and he was delighted with what he saw, and rather than arrive as himself he made himself into a beautiful young man with a crowd of attendants around him and singing and drums going ahead of him all the way into the lodge. She went with him gladly. He hid her at the crag called Long Đại. Đế Lai came back to an empty room and sent men out across the whole country to find her, and the dragon lord met them on the road as ghosts and goblins, as dragons and snakes and tigers and elephants, until the searchers lost their nerve and the northerner went home.

They had their year together and their hundred sons, and then he went back to the water and stayed there. She was left on land with a hundred boys and no husband. She got as far as the northern frontier trying to go home, and the Yellow Emperor heard she was coming and put troops across the passes, so she turned around. Out in open country she called for him again, and this time she said the thing plainly: she was a woman of the north, she had lived with him and borne him a hundred sons, and he would not raise them alongside her, and he had made her a wife with no husband. His answer is the line every Vietnamese schoolchild learns. He was of dragon stock and chief of the water tribes, and she was of immortal stock and belonged to the land. Yin and yang had met and made sons, but water and fire put each other out, and two kinds like theirs could not share a house. So he took fifty boys down to the water palace and gave her fifty for the mountains, and told her that whether they climbed or dived, if trouble came each side was to hear of it, and neither was to abandon the other.

She settled her fifty at Phong Châu, in the country the Red River comes down through. They raised the strongest among them up as ruler and called him Hùng Vương, and named the realm Văn Lang, and the text draws its borders with a confidence nobody has been able to justify since: the sea to the east, Ba Thục to the west, Lake Động Đình to the north, the Hồ Tôn country to the south. It was a poor place at the start. Bark for clothing, sedge woven into mats, rice cooked inside green bamboo over a fire, houses built up on posts because of the tigers. Later, when men fishing the rivers kept being taken by water dragons, the king had them prick dragon shapes into their own skin so the creatures below would read them as kin, and that ink is where the tattooing of the Hundred Việt is said to begin.

At Hiền Lương, in the low hills of Hạ Hòa, they tell it closer to the ground. She stopped there because the place was beautiful, and she stayed and showed the villagers how to put in rice, how to plant mulberry and keep silkworms, how to work a loom. On the twenty-fifth day of the twelfth month she went back up with the other immortals and left a silk sash lying at the foot of a banyan. The villagers built her a shrine on that spot and have kept the incense going ever since. Her festival falls on the seventh day of the first lunar month, the day she is said to have come down, and in January 2017 the whole practice of worshipping her there was entered on Vietnam’s register of national intangible heritage.

Nobody drew her face. The fifteenth-century compiler gives her one adjective and moves on, and every snow-capped peak and rescued crane in the versions told to children now arrived centuries afterwards. There is a further complication, and it is worth stating rather than hiding. Liam Kelley has argued that the Biography of the Hồng Bàng Clan is a medieval invented tradition, assembled by fifteenth-century Sinicized literati out of Chinese textual material, and that no Vietnamese or Chinese record before it knows anything of Hùng kings or a kingdom called Văn Lang. The hundred eggs are the one part with no traceable text behind them, though a Mường version of a hundred-egg story, written down by Pierre Grossin in Hòa Bình in 1926, has the same bones: a hundred eggs, and the people who hatch from them going two ways, half to the delta and half to the hills.

What she gives is scale. Not a spear or a storm, but a hundred at one delivery, and after that a rice crop, a silkworm, a length of cloth, and a word. Đồng bào is Sino-Vietnamese for “same sac”, and it is still the ordinary term a Vietnamese person uses for a fellow Vietnamese, which means the field she walked away from sits inside the everyday speech of a whole country.

Her limits are all borders. She cannot go north, because there are soldiers on the passes. She cannot stay married to water, because the elements will not have it. She has no adventure of her own outside the pairing, no enemy she defeats, no object she carries. The record allows her exactly one action taken on her own initiative, and it is the moment she decides the thing she has just given birth to is unlucky and leaves it in the grass.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Âu Cơ?

Âu Cơ is the immortal mountain fairy of Vietnamese myth who married the dragon lord Lạc Long Quân and became the mother of the Vietnamese people. Their hundred sons, born from a single sac of eggs, are the ancestors of the Hùng kings and the Hundred Việt. She is worshipped today as Tổ Mẫu Âu Cơ, the ancestress mother.

What is the story of Âu Cơ and the hundred eggs?

Âu Cơ gave birth to a single sac rather than a child, took it for a bad omen, and abandoned it in a field. After six or seven days it opened into a hundred eggs, and each egg produced a boy who grew without ever needing to be nursed. When Âu Cơ and Lạc Long Quân later separated, fifty sons went with their father into the water and fifty stayed with their mother on land.

Why did Âu Cơ and Lạc Long Quân separate?

Lạc Long Quân told Âu Cơ that he was of dragon stock and belonged to the water while she was of immortal stock and belonged to the land, and that water and fire cancel each other out. He divided the hundred sons between them and returned to the sea. He also promised that whichever side ran into trouble, the other would hear of it, and that neither would abandon the other.

Where is Âu Cơ worshipped in Vietnam?

Her principal temple is at Hiền Lương in Hạ Hòa district, Phú Thọ province, where local tradition says she taught the villagers to grow rice, raise silkworms and weave before returning to heaven. Her festival is held on the seventh day of the first lunar month. In January 2017 the worship of Mẫu Âu Cơ at that temple was recognised as national intangible cultural heritage.

Is the story of Âu Cơ genuinely ancient?

The story first appears in writing in the fifteenth-century Lĩnh Nam chích quái and in the Đại Việt sử ký toàn thư, not in any earlier record. Liam Kelley has argued that the Hồng Bàng narrative is a medieval invented tradition put together by Sinicized Vietnamese scholars, since no earlier Vietnamese or Chinese source mentions the Hùng kings or Văn Lang. The hundred-egg motif has no known textual precedent, although a similar Mường hundred-egg story was recorded in Hòa Bình in 1926.