So what do you do if you woke up one day and found that a Mongol army was about to invade your country? That is an issue which the Trần Dynasty monarch, Trần Thái Tông, had to deal with in 1257. His first reaction was to lead an army to confront the Mongols. This strategy, however, failed as Trần Thái Tông’s forces were routed by the Mongols. Trần Thái Tông then went and asked one of his top commanders, Defender-in-chief Trần Nhật Hiệu, what to do. Nhật Hiệu sat leaning on his boat and did not get up. He just traced in the water beside the boat the two characters, “enter Song.”
What Defender-in-chief Trần Nhật Hiệu was saying was that Trần Thái Tông should go and seek the protection of the Song Dynasty. Why did he trace these characters in the water rather than say this to Trần Thái Tông directly? Although we can not answer that question with certainty, it would appear that Trần Nhật Hiệu was suggesting that Trần Thái Tông should abandon his kingdom and go to China to save his own skin. My guess would be that Trần Nhật Hiệu expected to accompany the monarch on such a journey, in which case they would both save their skins, but many others would likely suffer as a result of this decision. Hence, Trần Nhật Hiệu’s reluctance to state this verbally, out of fear that someone might hear.
The royal family of the Trần was divided by rivalries. In 1256 a member of the family, Prince Vũ Thành had tried to flee to the Song, but had been apprehended by a Tai man who was serving as a border official for the Song and sent back to Vietnam. This same man, Hoàng Bính/Huang Bing, then sought to save his own skin from Mongol attacks in 1257 by offering his daughter to Trần Thái Tông and submitting with 1,200 of his followers.
So what is evident here is that in times of danger, self preservation is a very strong impulse. The official Vietnamese narrative of the past which declares that Vietnamese have always united against “foreign aggression” is not easily supported by the historical record. In times of danger, the powerful seek first to save their own skins. That is a basic human impulse, one which is shared by Vietnamese, Tai and every other people on the planet.
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I think the big thing we have to remember is that the Tran family was divided. Tran Thu Do played an important role in establishing the dynasty, so he may have felt more strongly about preserving it. Then there were people like Tran Lieu, who died an angry man because his pregnant wife was taken away from him and married to the first Tran monarch so that he could have offspring. On his deathbed, Tran Lieu told his son, Tran Quoc Tuan (the future Tran Hung Dao), to create his own dynasty, an order which Tran Quoc Tuan did not carry out. So my guess would be that Tran Nhat Hieu was not saying that the entire royal family should seek shelter from the Song Dynasty, but only some of them. That is a type of message which you wouldn’t want other people to hear.
Yea, the Mongols and the Song were not in the same category. The Tran and the Song shared a great deal culturally (many accounts say that the Tran were originally from China, in which case they shared more than culture), whereas the Mongols were different, and both the Tran and the Song recognized this. You are right, today people do not always make that distinction.
Premodern Europe provides an interesting comparison. Today we think of Europe as divided up between distinct nations each of which has a long history and periods when there were monarchs. However, if you study European history you find that so many of these monarchs intermarried, or ruled over peoples who were of a different ethnicity than themselves. Then there is the issue of culture. The great “Russian” novel “War and Peace” begins with a dialog in French because that is the language which the Russian nobility preferred to speak at the time the novel takes place in the early nineteenth century, because French was considered by these people to be more sophisticated than Russian. So it shouldn’t surprise us that members of a “Vietnamese” ruling family would seek the safety of a “Chinese” court, because such distinctions were not important at that time.
I just checked the Dai Viet su ky toan thu (I had read about this issue in the Kham dinh Viet su thong giam cuong muc) and found that Ngo Si Lien has a critical comment about this. He says that Nhat Hieu was a family member of the emperor, that he became scared when the Mongols arrived, and that he did not have a plan for defense, so he decided to flee. Ngo Si Lien stated that there wasn’t much use in employing a person like this.
I strongly support for your hypothesis about Trần Nhật Hiệu’s “two characters”. He really feared that someone might hear his “secret”. Trần Thái Tông clearly understood the case. He took a small boat to visit the large boat of Defender-in-chief, the temporary “house” of Trần Nhật Hiệu. Hiệu confided to Trần Thái Tông’s because they were endearing siblings.
Btw, I’d like to correct just a small thing: according to Dai Viet Su Ki Toan Thu (Nhà xuất bản Khoa Học Xã Hội, 1993), Nhật Hiệu didn’t trace in the water beside the boat the two characters but he used water (as “ink”) to write the two characters on a boat side ( http://www.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/~duc/sach/dvsktt/dvsktt10a.html )