Epic Movie ｜ Lac Long Quan & Au Co - The birth of Vietnam P1 - Truth behind Myths

This is a new series we call Truth Behind Myths. It will unfold in two parts. The first part brings these ancient tales to life, told in the language of cinema. The second part is where we look deeper, to ask why such myths were created and to uncover the parallels they share with real history. Stay with us until the end and you will uncover insights both rich and profound. There is a fascinating myth of Son Tin and Thuy Tin. The story tells of a rivalry between the mountain god and the water god for the hand of a Vietnamese princess. But what does it really mean? Why did the people create such a myth? First of all, the struggle against water is a universal theme in ancient humanity. As we researched, we found that almost every settled civilization created its own myth about fighting the water gods. For ancient people, water was both a blessing and a curse. The Nile in Egypt nourished life but also flooded dangerously every year. The Celts had goddesses like Sequana and Boan, the Balkans worshipped Drylon, the Iberians feared the wrath of Targus, and the Germanic tribes told of Aegir battling the Jotnar. So what was unique about the Luoyue and the larger Bayou myth? In most Bayou stories, a hero or a mountain god uses earth and stone to block floods, a reflection of the agricultural lifestyle of building dikes. But among the Luoyue, the myth expanded further. The water god competed with the mountain god for a Luoyue princess and the victor fathered the next generation of the Luoyue. This is fascinating. It leads us to the second point. The Luoyue emphasized both their divine origin and their mastery over nature. Living in the Red River Delta, they faced floods almost every year. Water was both friend and foe, giving life and bringing death. That's why in the story, the water god wanted to marry the Luoyue princess. He could have been accepted as family, but the mountain god won, symbolizing the preference for the earth element tied to agriculture. The children of the Luoyue were said to descend from the mountain god, inheriting the power to build dikes and reshape the land. Unlike other myths where the battle with water is won once and for all, the Luoyue myth repeated every year with the floods, passing the duty on to every generation. When this myth became part of the founding legend, it fueled collective pride and unity, exactly what an agricultural society needed. Long ago, there was a people of the rice civilization who lived by the rhythm of the waters and the fields. They had warriors brave and loyal, clad in bronze armor, and archers whose arrows were tipped with poison. They dwelled in tall stilt houses to guard against beasts and floods, mastered the art of metalworking, and followed a matrilineal order in their society. But where did their ancestors come from? Legend says they were the descendants of a fairy and a dragon. The union of these two mighty beings, one born of the waters, the other of the mountains, brought forth a giant egg sac from which a hundred children hatched. Fifty followed their father, the dragon lord, down to the sea, while fifty went with their mother, the fairy, up into the mountains. It is said that from then on, mountain and water became the eternal elements bound to this people's soul. The ancestor myth of the Vietnamese and before that, the Luoyue tells of a dragon lord and an immortal fairy who gave birth to a sac of one hundred eggs, which hatched into one hundred children. Fifty followed their father to the sea. Fifty followed their mother to the mountains. First of all, why a marriage between dragon lord and an immortal fairy? Because Vietnam's early state was built on the alliance of two tribes, the Uyu of the mountains and the Luoyue of the Red River Delta. By deifying both, the myth showed equality between the two peoples, binding them together as one family. One interpretation comes from Baiyue culture itself. The very word Baiyue means hundreds of Yue. The hundred children are a metaphor for the many Yue clans. The Baiyue had their own customs, distinct from the Han, and lived in southern China before the Han expansion. By 221 BC, Qin Shi Huang sent half a million troops south to invade. The Yue won the first war and their leader used that prestige to conquer the Luoyue in the Red River Delta, creating an Oyue Luoyue called Ulu, what we now recognize as ancient Vietnam. As Han conquests spread, many Baiyue nobles fled south into Vietnam and merged with the Luoyue. The myth of the hundred exarch was a way to unite migrants and natives under one shared ancestral story. In a sense, Vietnam became the last fortress of Baiyue identity against Han assimilation. Looking wider, the Baiyue can be compared to tribal confederations in the west, like the Celts in Gaul, the Illyrians in the Balkans, or the Iberians. All had strong warrior cultures, but because they were fragmented, they were eventually conquered and assimilated by Rome. Vietnam, however, was one branch of the Baiyue that escaped assimilation, preserving its own identity. You might even compare Versin Jetorix of Gaul with the Trung sisters of Vietnam, but we'll save that story for another video. Are founding myths like this common worldwide? Yes and no. Many cultures have mythical couples who gave birth to humanity, Deucalion and Pyrrha in Greece, Isanagi and Isanami in Japan, the maze ancestors of the Maya. But what makes Vietnam's myth unique is the pairing of mountain and sea, reflecting a real alliance of two powerful tribes who split their descendants across different landscapes. The closest parallel is the Inca myth of Manco Capac and Mama Oclo in South America. But unlike the Inca, whose empire was eventually destroyed, the Vietnamese myth survived and still lives today.