Two sisters took sixty-five towns from the Han Empire in AD 40
In AD 40 the aristocratic sisters Trưng Trắc and Trưng Nhị led a revolt against Han Chinese rule in what is now northern Vietnam. They seized some sixty-five settlements, and Trưng Trắc became Vietnam's first female monarch. Their reign lasted about three years before a Han army of 20,000 arrived.
The background stretches back centuries. A former Qin commander, Zhao Tuo, founded the state of Nanyue in 204 BC and absorbed the Vietnamese kingdom of Âu Lạc in 180 BC. Emperor Wu of Han annexed Nanyue in 111 BC and carved the region into nine commanderies, three of them in present-day northern Vietnam. The sisters grew up in one of these, Jiaozhi, daughters of a Lạc lord of Mê Linh, a district that today lies within Hanoi.
The trigger, in the best-known version, was the governor Su Ding, remembered for cruelty, who had Trưng Trắc's husband Thi Sách put to death without trial. She rallied the Lạc lords, and in March 40 the sisters rose. The revolt spread from the Red River Delta across a wide region, Chinese settlements were overrun, and Su Ding fled. Trưng Trắc was proclaimed queen regnant. Her sister's rank is unclear: one Vietnamese history calls her co-ruler, while folk tradition makes her a deputy.
Emperor Guangwu responded in 42 by sending the general Ma Yuan, known by the title Wave-Subduing General. By 43 the rising had been crushed, and the sisters were either executed or took their own lives. Ma Yuan then reorganised the territory, repaired fortifications, dug irrigation canals and imposed Han rules on the local Luoyue people. His own army paid a heavy price: on its return in 44, disease had killed four or five of every ten soldiers.
What survives is thin and mostly written by the victors. The chief source is the Book of the Later Han, compiled in the 5th century by Fan Ye, whose accounts are remarkably brief. An older, now lost record quoted by a 6th-century geographer differs: it has the husband rebelling alongside his wife. In Vietnam the popular version comes mainly from the Complete Annals of Đại Việt, finished in 1479, which honours Trưng Trắc posthumously as queen. The sisters are now national heroines.
Source: Trưng sisters
