Thủy Tinh

The rice goes under first. Then the road, then the low houses, and by the sixth or seventh lunar month the Red River delta is a shallow brown sea with the crowns of banana trees standing up out of it. Somewhere under the East Sea there is a god doing this on purpose, and he has been doing it for about as long as anyone here has had a calendar.

Thủy Tinh means the essence of water, and the second syllable is doing more work than it looks. The character covers spirits and monsters in the same breath, which is roughly the register the oldest texts use for him. The fifteenth-century Lĩnh Nam chích quái gives him one ability and describes it in a single clause: he takes water, throws it up into the air, and it becomes cloud and rain. The Việt điện u linh tập is shorter still. Sơn Tinh, it says, had the art of seeing clean through jade and stone, Thủy Tinh had the art of entering into water and fire, and both of them had the spiritual gift.

There is an unremarkable version of that trick going on over the sea most afternoons of the wet season, which is presumably why nobody bothered to write it down. A handful of spray lifts off flat grey water, thickens, spreads, and by evening it has come inland and settled over the paddy like a lid. That is the whole of the job. The story only begins when he does it for a reason.

The eighteenth Hùng king had a daughter, Mỵ Nương, and two suitors he could not separate. Both were plainly not men. Both could do impossible things on request. In the medieval accounts the king simply sets a bride-price and says that whoever delivers it in full first will have her, which is a fair enough race between equals.

The version every Vietnamese child now meets in a Grade 6 literature textbook is not fair at all. It itemises the gifts: a hundred trays of glutinous 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 last item comes off dry land. The contest was decided the moment it was announced. That inventory is nowhere in the older texts, which suggests it was supplied later by people who already knew the ending and wanted the defeat to be visible on the page.

Sơn Tinh arrived at first light with the lot and took the bride up to Tản Viên. Thủy Tinh came behind with his own train of gifts, and in one widely told folk variant the two processions meet at the Đà River, one going up the bank with a wedding in it and one coming down with a dowry that has just become worthless.

What he did next is the most specific writing in the whole story, and it reads less like a tantrum than like a campaign. He brought the water-folk up with him. Sơn Tinh strung an iron net across the river at Từ Liêm to stop the advance, so he went around it, opening a course from Lý Nhân out to the Hát, into the Đà, and coming at Tản Viên from behind. Then he cut a second channel at the front of the mountain, past Cam Giá, Xa Lâu, Cổ Hào and Ma Sá, undercutting the bank until it collapsed into a pool wide enough to march an army of fish through. After that he kept the sky shut and the water high and waited.

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. Whenever they saw straw and rubbish riding the current on the far side of the fence they shot into it. What surfaced afterwards were the bodies of softshell turtles and thuồng luồng, enough of them to choke the reach and to be smelled from the bank for days. He was beaten by a fence and some noise.

Nobody says what he looked like. The medieval texts hand him verbs and no face, which is ordinary for spirits of his kind and unusually frustrating for a figure this famous. The folk retellings, arriving centuries later and needing a villain an audience could picture, supply exactly one detail and it is a good one. Where Sơn Tinh presents himself at the contest with a clear face and a healthy ruddy colour, Thủy Tinh has skin of a blue-green and a shape that is somehow wrong. That is a description of drowned flesh, dressed up as a rival suitor.

The state historians solved the problem a different way. Compiling the Đại Việt sử ký toàn thư in the fifteenth century, Ngô Sĩ Liên wrote the tale into the national record as history and quietly took the magic out of both of them. Mỵ Nương becomes a descendant of Âu Cơ and so of immortal stock, while her two suitors become ordinary men resident inside the realm. Thủy Tinh still drags the cloud down and floods the country, but now the Hùng king is standing at the iron net alongside Sơn Tinh, the water-folk dig pits and store water to set an ambush, and the scaled and shelled things that flee when the arrows come down look a great deal like a seaborne invasion force. The marriage itself is recast as a defensive measure taken after the Thục king’s suit was refused.

His powers are all one power applied at scale. He raises water. He can pull cloud out of a flat sea, hold rain over a province for weeks, lift a river out of its bed and route it somewhere it has never been, and he commands everything living under the surface, which in the older telling means giant softshell turtles and thuồng luồng and in the folk telling takes in every shrimp and crab in the delta. He is also patient in a way winners rarely need to be. The Việt điện has him vowing to grind Mount Lôi Sơn to powder and then simply becoming Sơn Tinh’s enemy generation after generation, which is a description of a grudge with no end date on it.

His limits are geometric and he has never found a way past them. Water finds a level and a mountain does not have one, so every foot he lifts the flood the hills go up a foot and the whole contest resets. He cannot produce a nine-tusked elephant. He is, in every telling anyone gives, late. And where Sơn Tinh holds a place among the Four Immortals and more than a hundred worship sites in the Ba Vì district alone, the record names no temple for Thủy Tinh anywhere, which leaves the flood as the only rite he gets.

The water still comes up in the sixth and seventh months. The delta still answers it by piling earth higher than it was the year before, which is what the story said to do.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Thủy Tinh in Vietnamese mythology?

Thủy Tinh is the water spirit of Vietnamese myth, the rival of the mountain spirit Sơn Tinh. His name means the essence of water, and the fifteenth-century Lĩnh Nam chích quái describes his power as taking water, throwing it into the air and turning it into cloud and rain. He is the reason Vietnamese tradition gives for the annual monsoon flood.

Why does Thủy Tinh flood Vietnam every year?

He floods the country because he lost a marriage contest and never accepted it. The eighteenth Hùng king promised his daughter Mỵ Nương to whichever suitor delivered the bride-gifts first, and Sơn Tinh arrived at dawn while Thủy Tinh arrived after him. Thủy Tinh raised the water to take her back, was driven off, and has repeated the attack every rainy season since.

What army does Thủy Tinh command?

Thủy Tinh commands the water-folk, the creatures that live beneath the surface. The Lĩnh Nam chích quái names softshell turtles and thuồng luồng, the water serpents of Vietnamese tradition, and describes their bodies choking the river after they were shot down. Later folk versions widen the army to include shrimp, crabs and fish.

How was Thủy Tinh defeated?

He was defeated by earthworks, barriers and arrows rather than by a duel. Sơn Tinh strung an iron net across the river at Từ Liêm, and when Thủy Tinh cut new channels to come at Tản Viên from behind, the people at the foot of the mountain staked a bamboo fence into the flood, beat drums and rice mortars, and shot into anything drifting past it. Sơn Tinh himself never fights him directly in any of the early accounts.

Is Thủy Tinh worshipped in Vietnam?

No temple to Thủy Tinh is recorded. His rival Sơn Tinh is worshipped as Tản Viên Sơn Thánh at more than a hundred sites in the Ba Vì area and counted among Vietnam’s Four Immortals, while Thủy Tinh survives only as the explanation for the flood season and as the antagonist of one of the country’s best-known stories.

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