After a spectacular sunrise on Ha Long Bay, it’s time to head back towards Hanoi. We’ll drive parallel to Vietnam’s Bạch Đằng river, the scene of something that has rarely happened in history – the rout of an invading Mongol army.
We’re traveling through Vietnam’s Red River Delta. We can see mountains off in the distance, but we’re traveling through farm country. They can grow just about anything in the valley’s fertile soil, but conditions here are ideally suited for growing rice.
A Prize Sought by Many
The fertile land in the delta has been a prize sought after by many. The first to invade were the Chinese, crossing over the mountains from the north. After invading a few times, they managed to take and occupy the region for the entire 1st century AD.
The Vietnamese finally kicked them out and established what many consider to be the first “official” Vietnam. They called it Đại Việt. Đại Việt was about the size of the state of Colorado.
The next three centuries are considered to be Vietnam’s golden age. There was positive growth in every way imaginable. But the Red River Delta was still a sought-after prize for armies with expansionist ideas
And it’s hard to think of a more expansionist group than a 13th-century Mongol horde. As always, they were on the move, and they happened to be in the vicinity. They invaded Đại Việt four times. One of those invasions took place on the Bạch Đằng river, nearby.
Vietnam’s George Washington
If you’ve been following along, you may remember that a few hundred years earlier, this is where Ngô Quyền, “Vietnam’s George Washington,” scored a historic victory. Washington threw the British out of Colonial America. Ngô Quyền threw the Chinese out of the Red River Valley.
His soldiers planted sharpened stakes in the water at low tide, then at high tide, lured the Chinese army in for an attack. When the tide went out, Chinese warships got skewered on the spikes, where they were sitting ducks.
Enter the Mongols
Hundreds of years later, when attacking Mongol forces sailed up the Bạch Đằng river into the delta, the Vietnamese repeated the old “sharpened-stakes-at-low-tide” strategy. It worked just as well the second time. Apparently the Mongol leader of that campaign hadn’t been a history buff.
When the subject of Mongol invasions comes up in Vietnamese history, Vietnam’s victory at the Third Battle of Bạch Đằng is often the focus. It was a great victory, but the big picture wasn’t so great.
At the time, Kublai Khan, (grandson of Genghis Khan), was head of the Mongol Empire. Under Kublai Khan, the Mongols expanded eastward. There was no stopping them. They even took most of China.
The Vietnamese scored some big wins, but overall, they got beat up just like everyone else who came up against Mongol armies. There were just too many of ‘em, and they were too good at making war. That’s how they established the largest empire the world has ever seen.
Not that the Vietnamese didn’t put up a fight. On one occasion, they used an army of soldiers mounted on war elephants to counter attacking Mongol troops. (It worked for the Trưng sisters). Who could possibly win against an army of charging elephants?
The Mongols, that’s who. War elephants? No problem. Mongol archers shot arrows into the elephants’ legs, and the elephants ran for the hills. And that was the last time anyone used war elephants against an attacking Mongol horde.
To be continued…
Ghengis Khan. Credit: istockphoto/rache1
