Sơn Tinh

In the seventh lunar month the Đà River runs the colour of milky tea and carries whole trees past the foot of Ba Vì. The paddy goes under. Buffalo stand shoulder-deep in what was a road. Above all of it the three peaks are precisely where they were in spring, grey and streaming and, if anything, a little sharper for having been rinsed. Vietnam has a name for the reason the mountain never loses.

Sơn Tinh means mountain spirit, and for most of a thousand years he has been the answer to a practical question about weather.

The oldest tellings are brisk with him. The fifteenth-century Lĩnh Nam chích quái gives him a surname, Nguyễn, calls him extremely responsive to prayer, and records that in drought and in flood alike people petitioned him and the answer came at once. It credits him with two abilities and no face. He could point at a mountain and the mountain would come down. He could walk into stone and out the other side with nothing in his way. The Việt điện u linh tập is shorter still: he had the art of seeing clean through jade and rock, his rival had the art of entering water and fire, and both of them were spirits rather than men.

Picture the ordinary transaction that made him worth writing down. A drought village sends someone up the path in the dry heat with three sticks of incense and a dish of sticky rice, sets them on the stone, says what is needed, and walks back down. Rain follows. Nobody in the village finds this remarkable enough to record, which is why the record is so thin and the shrines are so many.

The rival is the whole story. Thủy Tinh, the Water Spirit, could throw a spray of water into the air and turn it into cloud and rain, and he wanted what Sơn Tinh wanted. The eighteenth Hùng king had a daughter, Mỵ Nương, and two suitors who were plainly not of the ordinary sort. Unable to separate them on merit, the king set a race: bride gifts, delivered in full, and whoever arrived first would have her.

The version every Vietnamese child now learns names the gifts, and it names them cruelly. A hundred trays of sticky rice, a hundred layers of bánh chưng, and a pair each of an elephant with nine tusks, a cockerel with nine spurs, and a horse with nine red manes. Every item is forest and upland produce. Thủy Tinh lost the contest at the moment it was announced. This inventory belongs to the later folk telling and to the schoolbooks, not to the medieval texts, which say only that the man who brought the full gifts first would take the bride, and leave the sting to be invented by people who had noticed how the story always ends.

Sơn Tinh arrived at dawn and carried Mỵ Nương up to Tản Viên.

What happened next is the oldest description of a flood defence in Vietnamese literature. Thủy Tinh came behind with the water-folk to take her back. Sơn Tinh strung an iron net across the river at Từ Liêm, so the water spirit cut himself new roads: a channel from Lý Nhân out to the Hát, into the Đà, to come at Tản Viên from behind, and another gouged past Cam Giá, Xa Lâu, Cổ Hào and Ma Sá until the bank collapsed into a pool wide enough to march an army of fish through. Then the rain came down and did not stop. The people at the foot of the mountain staked a thin bamboo fence into the flood and stood behind it beating drums and hammering on rice mortars and shouting, and whenever they saw straw and rubbish drifting on the far side of the fence they shot into it. What washed up afterwards were softshell turtles and thuồng luồng, dead in enough quantity to block the channel.

He is not fighting in that scene. Read both medieval accounts closely and Sơn Tinh never lays a hand on anyone. He builds, he calls, and other people shoot.

The war did not end, and none of the tellings pretends otherwise. Thủy Tinh comes back every year in the rains, the water rises, and the mountain rises exactly as much, and the two of them go on being enemies generation after generation, which is a fairly elegant way of saying that the Red River delta floods on schedule and the hills above it do not drown.

Where he came from depends on when you ask. In the fifteenth century he is simply the spirit on the mountain, without parents or a childhood. By the nineteenth he has acquired a full life as a man named Nguyễn Tùng, later renamed Nguyễn Tuấn, whose mother conceived him without ever lying with anyone, and who collected from strange passing figures a magic staff and a magic book. In one episode he buys a dead snake from a boy who has just killed it, having noticed the character for king marked on its head, and touches it with the staff until it revives, whereupon the snake thanks him and mentions that it is a dragon prince. That biography is Daoist through and through, and it is roughly fourteen centuries younger than the events it narrates.

The state historians went the other way. Ngô Sĩ Liên, compiling the Đại Việt sử ký toàn thư in the fifteenth century, quietly stripped the magic out. In his version Mỵ Nương is a descendant of Âu Cơ and therefore of immortal stock, but her two suitors are mortal men, both of them resident subjects of the realm, and the marriage is arranged as a defensive measure after the Thục king’s own suit was refused. The king strings the iron net alongside Sơn Tinh. Sơn Tinh summons the Man, the upland peoples, who weave bamboo against the water and shoot down into it until every scaled and shelled thing that takes an arrow flees. It reads like a campaign report. Turning a god into a serviceable general also solved an embarrassment: a spirit who could throw mountains ought to have been available when the Thục finally took Văn Lang, and a mortal son-in-law can simply have died by then.

There is an older awkwardness underneath all of it. Into the late nineteenth century the settlements on and around the mountain were not Vietnamese. The Nguyễn dynasty’s own geography lists Thủ Pháp, where his temple stood, and Lăng Sương, where his mother is said to have come from, as sách, the term reserved for upland villages of non-Vietnamese people, and a French officer who walked through Thủ Pháp in 1885 found Mường living there. The cult that produced him grew on the edge of the empire, in a Mường world that had absorbed a good deal of Chinese magical religion and very little Confucian propriety, and its texts were later swept into the spirit-writing revelations of the Holy Mothers cult. What is worshipped today as a piece of the national inheritance began as somebody else’s mountain.

His powers all reduce to one thing, which is why they are so hard to counter. He does not command water and he cannot calm a storm. He raises ground. Stone opens for him, mountains fall where he points, and the land under his feet answers faster than the flood can climb it. Against a spirit whose entire method is to add height, height is a poor weapon.

His limits are the same fact seen from the other side. He never destroys Thủy Tinh, never pursues him, never ends anything. He does not descend to fight, and in the Việt điện he simply withdraws to the summit and stays there. The war is annual because he cannot win it, only outlast it, and the price of being unmoveable is that he never moves. Ba Vì district today counts a hundred and sixteen places where he is worshipped, which is a large number of doors for a god who has spent two thousand years standing still.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Sơn Tinh in Vietnamese mythology?

Sơn Tinh is the mountain spirit of Tản Viên in the Ba Vì range west of Hanoi, worshipped as Tản Viên Sơn Thánh and counted as one of Vietnam’s Four Immortals. The fifteenth-century Lĩnh Nam chích quái describes him as a spirit who answers prayer immediately, can bring down a mountain by pointing at it, and can pass through solid stone.

What is the story of Sơn Tinh and Thủy Tinh?

Both Sơn Tinh and the water spirit Thủy Tinh sought to marry Mỵ Nương, daughter of the eighteenth Hùng king, and the king awarded her to whichever suitor delivered the bride gifts first. Sơn Tinh arrived at dawn and took her to Tản Viên. Thủy Tinh arrived too late, raised the floodwaters and attacked, and has repeated the attack every rainy season since.

Why does Sơn Tinh always win?

He wins because his power is to raise land, so however high Thủy Tinh lifts the water, the mountain rises to match it. The medieval accounts show him blocking the river with an iron net and having the people below build bamboo barriers and shoot into the flood rather than fighting directly. The contest is never resolved, only survived.

Is Sơn Tinh a god or a man?

The sources disagree deliberately. Lĩnh Nam chích quái and Việt điện u linh tập treat him as a spirit, but Ngô Sĩ Liên’s Đại Việt sử ký toàn thư recast him as a mortal subject of the realm so the story would fit a national history. A nineteenth-century hagiography goes further and gives him a human name, Nguyễn Tuấn, a miraculous birth and a Daoist apprenticeship.

Where is Sơn Tinh worshipped?

He is worshipped across the Ba Vì mountain range outside Hanoi, chiefly at the linked Hạ, Trung and Thượng temples, and at Và Temple in Sơn Tây. Around a hundred and sixteen worship sites dedicated to him have been recorded. Vietnam’s Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism listed the worship of Tản Viên as national intangible cultural heritage in 2018.

Related Entries

Âu Cơ, Lạc Long Quân, Chử Đồng Tử, Rồng, Ông Trời, Bà Chúa Xứ, Oyamatsumi, Gong Gong, Yu the Great, Tlaloc, Naga