Lạc Long Quân

Also Known As: Sùng Lãm; 貉龍君, glossed as the Lạc Dragon Lord
Region/Culture: Southeast Asia
Mythos: Vietnamese Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: He is dragon-born and shape-shifting, master of an undersea kingdom whose creatures and waters obey him, and he can appear the instant he is called.
Role in Mythos: He is the founding father of the Vietnamese people, the sire of the hundred sons from whom the Hùng kings and the Việt descend, and the monster-killer who made the land habitable before he handed it over.
Relation to Humans: He taught his people to feed and clothe themselves and to order their households, then went back down to the sea, where he waits to be shouted for. The stories say the words for father and for ruler come from the cry his people raised when they needed him.

Off the coast of what is now northern Vietnam there was a crag standing in the water with a mouth and teeth. Boats that passed it did not always come back. The wind there turned without warning, the sea stood up, and at the foot of the rock was a cave where something lived with a body more than fifty yards long and many feet, like a centipede, that changed shape so restlessly no one could keep track of it. It had learned to wear a human face. It traded salt and rice and knives with the coastal people, and it ate them.

The man who killed it came in a large boat, and what he brought was a piece of steel heated white.

He had a person hold out food. The Fish Demon opened its maw to take the offering and got the glowing iron instead, and the sea around the boat filled with the sound of a thing that could not close its jaw. He took off its tail, stripped its skin, and dragged the carcass up the mountain that is called White Dragon Tail to this day. The head floated away, turned into a dog, and ran. He filled that stretch of ocean with stones to catch it, and beheaded it where it stopped. The island is still called Dog Head.

The manuscripts do not entirely agree on who did this. In one copy the killer has another name, and Lạc Long Quân appears only as a variant reading. That is a fair introduction to him. He is the most important figure in Vietnamese myth and he is barely pinned down anywhere.

His line runs through the mythic north before it turns south. He is descended from Thần Nông, the Spirit Farmer, through a grandson called Đế Minh who toured the southern ranges, met a woman there, and fathered a son on her named Lộc Tục. Lộc Tục refused the northern throne in favour of his elder brother and was given the south instead, a country called Xích Quỷ, the Red Demon Nation, and the title Kinh Dương Vương. He could go down into the water and live. He did, and married the Dragon Maid, daughter of the lord of Lake Động Đình, and their son was Sùng Lãm, whom everyone knows as Lạc Long Quân.

What became of the father, the text says with a shrug, is not known.

The son took the throne and taught his people how to eat and how to clothe themselves, how a ruler stands to a minister and a father to a son. Then he went back to the sea. This is the pattern of him. He does not sit on a throne and administer. He goes home to the water, and the country runs on without him until it cannot, and then the people gather at the shore and shout. Why do you not come and rescue us, oh father. And he is simply there, no thunder, no procession, standing among them as though he had been waiting just under the surface, which he had. The story adds that this is where the Vietnamese words for father and for ruler come from, which is a way of saying that the two ideas were never separated in the first place.

Nobody describes his face. What the texts describe is the wardrobe. When he wanted Âu Cơ, the consort a northern ruler had parked at a camp in the south while he went sightseeing, Lạc Long Quân turned himself into a handsome young man with a train of followers and set them playing music, and the sound carried across the dark to her tent until her heart went with it. When the ruler came back and sent men to hunt for her, Lạc Long Quân became a demon, a phantom, a mountain elf, a dragon, a snake, a tiger, an elephant, and the search parties went home. Centuries later, when a Hùng king fasted three days and prayed for help against an invasion, what arrived in a thunderstorm was an old man over six meters tall with a square face and a great belly and a silver beard, laughing and singing at a crossroads, who cast a bamboo divination, said the enemy would come in three years, told them to go find a champion, and rose into the air.

Âu Cơ gave birth to a sack. It looked like a bad omen and was thrown into a field, and after seven days it opened and there were a hundred eggs in it, and each egg held a boy. They grew without suckling, all of them strong, all of them clever.

Then the marriage ended. She had wanted to go north and the frontier was closed against her, so she and the boys stood at a place called the Wilds and called for him again, and again he came. She asked him to stay. He said no, in the plainest speech in the whole story: he belonged to the race of dragons and had been raised among sea creatures, she belonged to the immortals of the high ground, their natures did not fit, they were round and square, fire and water. He took fifty sons back to the sea and gave each a domain there. She took fifty to the mountains and did the same. They promised that if trouble came to either, both would answer.

The founding story of a whole people is the story of a marriage that failed.

Âu Cơ settled at Phong Châu and made the eldest and strongest of her sons a king, Hùng Vương, and named his country Văn Lang. When the mountain folk came down to fish and were savaged by dragons and serpents in the water, that king had them ink sea monsters onto their skin so the river creatures would take them for kin, and the Việt have been tattooing themselves ever since. Two and a half thousand years or so later, in the third lunar month, millions of people still climb Nghĩa Lĩnh mountain in Phú Thọ to burn incense to the Hùng kings and lay out square rice cakes for them, a practice UNESCO added to its heritage list in 2012.

His powers are the powers of water and of shape. He commands the kingdom under the sea and the things in it; when a thousand-year-old nine-tailed fox was luring young men and women into a cave west of the old capital and eating them, he ordered his subjects to raise the flood and take the whole mountain apart, and the hole they left behind filled and became West Lake, which is still there in Hanoi. He can order the sea god to hold his winds. He can be any creature or none. He can read the future off a bamboo slip. And he can be summoned, instantly, from anywhere, by anyone desperate enough to call him a father.

He is popularly credited with killing three monsters. The oldest text does not support it. The fish is his and the fox is his, but the Tree Demon that ate a human being every year on the last night of the twelfth month was fought by his father and was still going strong centuries later, when a wandering magician finally beheaded it during a rope-acrobatics display staged to hold its attention. The stories are also cheerfully impossible about time; the fox is dated to the eleventh century, long after the world it belongs to had ended.

That is the honest limit of him, and it is not a limit of strength. Nothing outside these tales shows that the Hùng kings ever existed. The earliest written version of any of this comes from a collection of oddities assembled in the fourteenth century, and it was only in 1479 that the court historian Ngô Sĩ Liên gave the Hồng Bàng clan a chapter at the head of the official chronicle and made the Spirit Farmer the ancestor of a nation. His real weakness, though, is written into the character itself. He will not stay. He cannot live alongside the people he made, or the woman he made them with, and the whole apparatus of his help depends on somebody standing on a beach, shouting into the water, hoping.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Lạc Long Quân?

Lạc Long Quân is the dragon lord of Vietnamese mythology and the founding father of the Vietnamese people. He is the son of Kinh Dương Vương and the Dragon Maid of Lake Động Đình, and by the mountain immortal Âu Cơ he fathered a hundred sons who hatched from a hundred eggs. His eldest son became the first Hùng king of Văn Lang.

What monsters did Lạc Long Quân kill?

He killed the Fish Demon of the Eastern Sea by tricking it into swallowing a red-hot piece of steel, and he destroyed the nine-tailed Fox Demon by flooding its mountain, which left the hollow that became West Lake in Hanoi. He is often credited with a third kill, the Tree Demon, but the oldest text gives that fight to his father Kinh Dương Vương and its final death to a magician centuries afterwards.

Why did Lạc Long Quân and Âu Cơ separate?

Lạc Long Quân told Âu Cơ that their natures were incompatible: he was of the dragon race and raised among sea creatures, while she belonged to the immortals of the highlands. He took fifty of their sons to the sea and she took fifty to the mountains, and they promised to come to each other’s aid if either was in trouble. This is the origin of the Vietnamese self-description as children of the dragon and the fairy.

Are the hundred sons and the Hùng kings historical?

There is no evidence outside the legends themselves that the Hùng kings existed. The earliest written account of Lạc Long Quân comes from a fourteenth-century Vietnamese collection of tales, and the story was written into the official chronicle only in 1479 by the historian Ngô Sĩ Liên.

Where is Lạc Long Quân honoured today?

The line he founded is honoured at the Hùng temple complex on Nghĩa Lĩnh mountain in Phú Thọ province, where millions of people gather at the start of the third lunar month for the Ancestral Anniversary festival of the Hùng Kings. The rites involve incense, palanquin processions, bronze drums and offerings of square and glutinous rice cakes, and UNESCO inscribed the practice on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2012.