Lý Thái Tổ moves the capital to Thăng Long

After the death of Lê Hoàn in 1005 the Early Lê kingdom was torn by a succession struggle, and when King Lê Long Đĩnh died in late 1009, the court proclaimed Lý Công Uẩn, the commander of the palace guard, who had been raised and educated by the Buddhist monks of the Red River plain and enjoyed their support. Hoa Lư, the capital of the Đinh and Early Lê kings, was a natural fortress of limestone cliffs at the southern edge of the plain; Đại La, about 85 km to the north, lay at the hub of its riverine network and was the walled city that the Tang general Gao Pian had built in the 860s after driving the armies of Nanzhao from Annam. It was also only about ten kilometres from Đình Bảng, the village where the new king had been brought up by the monk Vạn Hạnh.

The move was justified by an edict, preserved in the 15th-century chronicle Đại Việt sử ký toàn thư: citing the kings of the Shang and Zhou who had moved their capitals for the good of their descendants, it reproached the Đinh and Lê for clinging to Hoa Lư and praised Đại La, the old capital of ‘King Gao’, for its central position on a broad plain and its geomantic power — ‘the coiled dragon and the crouching tiger’ — as a capital fit for emperors of ten thousand generations. According to the chronicle, which records the edict in its entry for the spring of 1010, the court set out in the seventh lunar month (about 13 August – 10 September 1010). The Song court recognised the new king without delay, and the reigns of Lý Công Uẩn, his son and his grandson, in K. W. Taylor’s words, brought six decades of internal peace and an expansion of royal power outward from Thăng Long. The central sector of the Imperial Citadel of Thăng Long was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2010, the city’s thousandth year.