Tran Hung Dao twice drove Kublai Khan's armies out of Vietnam
The Mongols conquered most of Asia, but in Dai Viet they met Tran Hung Dao. He lost battles, lost the capital, and even fielded a question from his emperor about surrendering. He refused, wore the invaders down, and in 1288 destroyed their fleet in an ambush on the Bach Dang River.
He was born Prince Tran Quoc Tuan in 1228, just after the Tran family displaced the Ly dynasty. His father, Tran Lieu, was elder brother of the boy emperor Tran Thai Tong, and was pressured by the regent Tran Thu Do to give up his own wife to the emperor to secure the dynasty, a grievance both brothers nursed. During the first Mongol invasion, in 1258, the young prince commanded troops on the frontier.
Relations with Kublai Khan's Yuan dynasty soured as successive Vietnamese rulers refused summons to appear in China, and in 1283 they rejected demands to let a Yuan army cross their land to attack Champa. In January 1285 Prince Toghan invaded. Tran Hung Dao, commanding land and naval forces together, was beaten back to Thang Long, and the emperor Tran Nhan Tong came by small boat to ask whether they should give in. The general refused and called up the private armies of the Tran princes. The capital fell and a defector was installed as king.
Then the balance shifted. With heat and disease setting in and fighting flaring in Champa, the Mongol deputy Sodu was ordered to withdraw. On the Red River Tran Hung Dao's forces won major victories during the retreat; Sodu was killed, and Thang Long was retaken while Toghan limped home with heavy losses.
Kublai sent Toghan again in 1287 with a far bigger force, put at 120,000 by Mongol figures and 500,000 by Vietnamese ones. Tran Hung Dao answered with guerrilla raids, scorched earth and an ambush on the Yuan supply fleet. In April 1288 a much smaller Vietnamese fleet trapped the Mongol ships on the Bach Dang and almost wiped them out. He died of natural causes in 1300, aged 70, and was later worshipped as a saint; many places in Vietnam bear his name.
Source: Trần Hưng Đạo
