Bà Triệu

The elephant came down the track at a walk, and the woman sat on its head, not on its back. Her clogs knocked against the bony dome of its skull with every stride. The grey hide under her was warm and cracked like dry paddy mud, and behind them came the men she had gathered in the hills of Jiuzhen, carrying whatever they had to fight with toward a county town of the kingdom of Wu.

That much the chronicles allow. Almost everything else about Bà Triệu has been added since, by people who loved her, and the gap between the two is the most interesting thing about her.

The year was 248. Jiuzhen was the southern frontier of the Chinese world, a commandery in what is now Thanh Hóa province in north central Vietnam, and it had been rebelling on and off for a generation. The Records of the Three Kingdoms, compiled in the late third century, notes that in the eleventh year of the Chiwu reign the “barbarian rebels” of Jiaozhi and Jiuzhen attacked and took walled towns, and the whole province was in uproar. The Wu court sent an official named Lu Yin to deal with it. His biography says he went in with promises and gifts, and that more than a hundred rebel chiefs and over fifty thousand households, wild and unapproachable until then, knocked their heads on the ground before him. He was rewarded with the title General Who Pacifies the South.

There is no woman in that account. The Chinese side did not think her worth a name.

She surfaces in the Complete Annals of Đại Việt, the Vietnamese court chronicle compiled under the Lê dynasty in the fifteenth century. Its entry for the same year repeats the uprising and Lu Yin’s bargains, which it says brought in more than thirty thousand households. Then it adds a second disturbance. A woman of Jiuzhen, called Triệu Ẩu, the matron Triệu, had breasts three thước long that she tied behind her back. She rode on the head of an elephant to fight her enemies, gathered followers, and raided the counties and commanderies. Lu Yin put her down. In a note the chroniclers quote an older Chinese gazetteer of Jiaozhi, which tells it with less patience: a woman surnamed Triệu lived in the mountains of Jiuzhen, would not marry, formed a gang and plundered the countryside, wore gilded clothes and toothed clogs, fought from the elephant’s head, died, and became a spirit.

Read with a straight face, the earliest picture is a hostile one. A woman who refuses marriage, leads armed men, and has a body so outlandish it could only belong to a frontier barbarian is exactly the figure a Chinese official would write down to explain why a province had to be pacified. The breasts, at well over a metre long, belong in the same family as the long-eared and one-eyed peoples of the old Chinese geographies. Vietnamese writers kept the detail anyway. Over centuries it turned from a mark of savagery into a mark of something larger than ordinary life, the way a hero in any tradition is allowed a body nobody else has.

The story most Vietnamese children learn is fuller, and none of its additions can be found in that fifteenth-century entry. In it she is Triệu Thị Trinh, from the district of Yên Định, about twenty-three years old when she died. She rides a white elephant in golden armour under a yellow headcloth, and takes the battle name Nhụy Kiều Tướng Quân, the Delicate Lady General. Above all, she speaks. The line tradition gives her is one of the most quoted sentences in Vietnamese: she wants to ride the strong wind, tread the fierce waves, cut down the great whale of the Eastern Sea, drive out the Wu, and throw off the yoke of slavery. It is a good sentence. It is also the work of later admirers rather than anything the old annals record her saying.

On how it ended, the sources split along the same line. The chronicles say only that Lu Yin “pacified” her and that she died. Temple tradition in Thanh Hóa holds that she died on Núi Tùng, Pine Mountain, in the 2nd lunar month of 248, rather than be taken. Her tomb stands on that hill now, in the commune of Triệu Lộc, Hậu Lộc district, with two lines carved at it: the rivers and mountains have a master; the wind and moon have no limit.

Her afterlife began early. The gazetteer’s flat remark that she died and became a spirit is the seed of everything that followed. Lý Nam Đế, who ruled an independent Vạn Xuân for a few years in the 540s, is credited with founding her temple and naming her Bật Chính Anh Liệt Hùng Tài Trinh Nhất Phu Nhân, roughly the upright, heroic, gifted and supremely chaste Lady. Later courts renewed the grants and listed her among the phúc thần, the guardian spirits of good fortune whom a village maintains and who in return keep the village. The temple stands on Núi Gai, a short distance from the tomb, inside a sacred landscape that also holds the graves of three generals of the Lý clan, an Oath Altar shrine, the Phú Điền communal house and a subsidiary temple. Vietnam declared the complex a special national relic in 2014.

Every year, from the 21st to the 24th day of the 2nd lunar month, Triệu Lộc keeps her death day. Incense hangs thick in the courtyard before dawn. Then the gates open and five palanquins come out, hers at the front, carried for hours by teams of young men between eighteen and thirty-five who change places at a run so the weight never stops moving, while one palanquin goes on the shoulders of women. The procession goes from the temple to the communal house, to the subsidiary temple, to the Oath Altar, and up to the tomb, and then home again. Drums carry the rhythm. Nobody in the line is thinking about Lu Yin.

What she could do comes down to two things, and both are attested. She could make men follow her out of the hills, and she could fight from the head of an elephant, which gave a commander height, terror and a moving wall of muscle against a town’s gate. Her limits are equally plain. One frontier commandery could not hold out against a state that could buy off its chiefs one by one, and Lu Yin’s method, gifts first and soldiers second, emptied the hills around her before the fighting was over. Whether she fell fighting or chose her own death on Pine Mountain, as her temple says, the rising was over within the year it began. The worship has now lasted close to fifteen hundred.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Bà Triệu?

Bà Triệu, also called Lady Triệu or Triệu Thị Trinh, was a woman from the Jiuzhen commandery, in modern Thanh Hóa province in Vietnam, who led a rising against the Wu kingdom in 248. The fifteenth-century Vietnamese chronicle, the Complete Annals of Đại Việt, records that she fought from the head of an elephant and raided the Wu-held counties until the official Lu Yin suppressed her. After her death she was worshipped as a guardian spirit.

Why do Chinese records not mention Bà Triệu?

The Records of the Three Kingdoms describe the rebellion of 248 in Jiaozhi and Jiuzhen and Lu Yin’s success in winning over more than a hundred rebel chiefs with promises and gifts, but they never name a woman leader. Bà Triệu appears by name in the Vietnamese court chronicle, which quotes an older Chinese gazetteer of Jiaozhi describing her as an unmarried woman who formed a gang, fought from an elephant’s head and became a spirit after death.

Did Bà Triệu really have breasts three feet long?

The oldest record says her breasts were three thước long and tied behind her back, a unit usually rendered as about three feet. The detail first appears in a hostile Chinese description that treated her as a frontier barbarian. Vietnamese tradition kept it and turned it into a sign of a heroic body beyond ordinary life.

Did Bà Triệu say she wanted to ride the strong wind and slay the whale of the Eastern Sea?

That famous declaration, about riding the strong wind, treading the fierce waves, killing the whale of the Eastern Sea and driving out the Wu, is the line Vietnamese tradition gives her. It does not appear in the fifteenth-century chronicle entry, which records her deeds but no words. It belongs to the later, fuller telling of her life that most Vietnamese readers know.

Where is Bà Triệu buried and how is she honoured?

Temple tradition places Bà Triệu’s death and tomb on Núi Tùng, in Triệu Lộc commune, Hậu Lộc district, Thanh Hóa province, near her temple on Núi Gai. The complex was declared a special national relic of Vietnam in 2014. Her festival runs from the 21st to the 24th day of the 2nd lunar month and centres on a procession of five palanquins to her tomb.

Related Entries

Âu Cơ, Lạc Long Quân, Bà Chúa Xứ, Chử Đồng Tử, Sơn Tinh, Thủy Tinh, Ông Trời, Scathach, Medb, Amazons