Đại Việt sử ký toàn thư: the chronicle behind the series

The series is built on a book that was compiled in the fifteenth century, printed in full only in the seventeenth, translated several times in the twentieth, and read on the site in a handful of lines. This page is about that book: what it is, how it survives, and what exactly the series takes from it.

What the chronicle is

The Đại Việt sử ký toàn thư — the complete annals of Đại Việt — is the central chronicle of the Vietnamese past. Its compiler was Ngô Sĩ Liên, a Lê-dynasty official, who completed his version in 1479, under Lê Thánh Tông. His work rested on earlier histories, including Lê Văn Hưu's thirteenth-century annals and Phan Phu Tiên's continuation.

The 1479 compilation was not printed at the time. It was revised later, by the Phạm Công Trứ group in the seventeenth century and then by the Lê Hy group, whose edition produced the first complete woodblock print in 1697, the eighteenth year of Chính Hòa, in twenty-five quyển. That printed edition is the ancestor of the standard text.

How it survives

Three layers of survival matter for anyone quoting the chronicle. First, the Hán text: a transcription of the Bản kỷ, quyển 1, is available on Wikisource and covers the Đinh and Lê entries the series uses. Its base edition is not stated on the page, so it is best cited as “the Hán text as transcribed on Wikisource”, not as the 1697 print.

Second, the translations. A public-domain Vietnamese translation by Mạc Bảo Thần (Nhượng Tống), published by Tân Việt in Hanoi in 1945, is held in scans on Wikimedia Commons and is public domain in Vietnam. The standard modern reference translation, based on the Nội các quan bản copy, was published by the Social Sciences Publishing House in Hanoi in 1993 and is still in copyright; it can be quoted briefly and with attribution.

Third, modern editions and scans. Commons holds page scans and PDFs of the chronicle, but their editions vary; none of them should be labelled “the 1697 print” without checking the file page. The series' own source line does not pretend to reproduce an edition: it quotes lines and labels what kind of statement each one is.

What the series takes from it

The site's history section is organised around four readings of Lê Long Đĩnh's death, and all four come from this chronicle or from a later work commenting on it. The Toàn thư supplies the main text — the bedchamber death and the explanation of the epithet Ngọa Triều — the wild-history note about wine and women, and the campaign entries for 1005–1009. It also supplies the 1010 edict and the line about the dragon and the tiger.

The series' method is to keep those layers visible: what the main text says, what the note marked as wild history adds, what the campaign record shows, and where a later historian, Ngô Thì Sĩ, proposed something the chronicle does not contain. The point of a source page like this one is to make the first link in that chain inspectable.

What this page does not claim

It does not claim that the Wikisource transcription is the 1697 print. It does not claim that the 1479 version was printed in 1479. It does not give a page number for any entry, because no page was checked for this site. It does not present the 1993 translation as public domain, and it does not cite a dead online mirror as a source.

What it can say is narrower and firmer: the chronicle was compiled in 1479, first printed in full in 1697, and survives through a Hán transcription, public-domain and copyrighted translations, and modern editions. The lines the series quotes are drawn from that tradition.

Why the book is the spine

Every date the series keeps — 968, 979, 980, 981, 1005, 1007, 1009, 1010 — is a chronicle date. Every silence the series dramatises is a chronicle silence. The drama is not built on the book's authority; it is built on its shape: a record that states some things and withholds others, and a succession of later readers who filled the gaps differently.

That is why the Toàn thư has a page of its own here. The series asks which page of history you believe. This is the page most of them start from.