Lady Triệu’s uprising against Wu

The Chinese record, in the biography of Lu Yin in the Records of the Three Kingdoms, says that in 248 ‘barbarian rebels’ of Jiaozhi and Jiuzhen captured towns and the province of Jiao was in turmoil. Sun Quan made Lu Yin inspector of Jiao province and Colonel Who Pacifies the South. Lu Yin won the rebels over with assurances of good faith: Huang Wu, a chief of Gaoliang, surrendered with more than 3,000 households; then, marching south and distributing money and goods, he brought more than a hundred rebel leaders and over 50,000 households to submit, and was promoted to General Who Pacifies the South. The official Chinese histories do not mention Lady Triệu, and Keith Taylor (1983) believed that she was known only from Vietnamese sources; but the earliest record of her is Chinese: the Record of Jiao Province (Jiaozhou ji) by Liu Xinqi, a Jin-period work quoted in the 10th-century encyclopaedia Taiping yulan, tells of Zhao Yu (Triệu Ẩu), an unmarried woman of Jiuzhen with breasts several feet long, who gathered bandits in the mountains, attacked the commandery and was put down by the inspector Lu Yin.

The Complete Annals of Đại Việt, compiled in the 15th century, say that after Lu Yin had pacified the province, a woman of Jiuzhen named Triệu Ẩu raised troops and attacked the commanderies and districts until he crushed her. They add legendary details — breasts three thước long that she slung behind her back and an elephant that she rode into battle — and quote an older Record of Jiaozhi, which gives her a gilded robe and says that after her death she became a spirit. Later tradition, which calls her Triệu Thị Trinh, makes her about twenty, sets her camp on Mount Nưa and her death, by her own hand after defeat, at Bồ Điền by Mount Tùng in the former Hậu Lộc district, where her temple stands. The famous words attributed to her — that she wished to ride the storm and slay the whale of the Eastern Sea rather than bow as anyone’s concubine — first appear in the Thanh Hóa kỷ thắng, a description of Thanh Hóa province completed in 1903 under its governor Vương Duy Trinh.