Battle of Bạch Đằng (938)

The Battle of Bạch Đằng, fought in late 938 on the Bạch Đằng River near Hạ Long Bay in northern Vietnam, was a victory of the Vietnamese lord Ngô Quyền over an invasion fleet sent by the southern Chinese kingdom of Southern Han. Using hidden stakes planted in the riverbed and the rise and fall of the tide, his forces trapped and destroyed the enemy ships. Vietnamese tradition regards the battle as the moment the country won lasting independence after roughly a thousand years of Chinese rule.

The Red River delta had been governed by Chinese dynasties, with interruptions, since the Han dynasty conquered it in 111 BC. Under the Tang dynasty it formed a frontier province, reorganised in 866 as the military command known as Tĩnh Hải quân, or Jinghai. As Tang power collapsed, the province slipped out of Chinese control, and from 905 the local Khúc family ruled it as nominal governors.

After the Tang fell in 907, China split into rival states. One of them, Southern Han, was founded in 917 by Liu Yan and ruled from Guangzhou over what is now Guangdong and Guangxi. In 930 Liu Yan's army occupied the delta and carried off its ruler, Khúc Thừa Mỹ. The next year Dương Đình Nghệ, a former follower of the Khúc, raised an army of about 3,000 retainers and drove the Southern Han forces out. He governed for six years until he was murdered in 937 by an officer, Kiều Công Tiễn, who seized power. Dương Đình Nghệ's son-in-law, the general Ngô Quyền, marched north to avenge him, and Kiều Công Tiễn turned to Southern Han for help.

Liu Yan put his son Liu Hongcao in command of a war fleet, naming him governor of Jinghai in advance, and followed with further forces of his own. Ngô Quyền had already defeated and executed Kiều Công Tiễn and prepared for the invaders. Expecting them to enter by the Bạch Đằng, a northern arm of the delta, he had large wooden stakes tipped with iron driven into the riverbed, where they would be hidden at high tide. When the Southern Han ships came into the estuary on the rising tide, light Vietnamese boats harassed them and drew them upstream. As the tide went out, Ngô Quyền's forces counter-attacked and drove the enemy back towards the sea, where the stakes, now exposed, pierced and held the ships fast. A large part of the invading army was killed or drowned, Liu Hongcao among them. On hearing the news, Liu Yan abandoned the campaign and returned to Guangzhou. The sizes of the two forces are not known with certainty.

In early 939 Ngô Quyền declared himself king, ending the office of Chinese-style military governor, and made his capital at Cổ Loa, the seat of an ancient local kingdom. His state kept much of the Chinese pattern of government. After his death in 944 his realm fell into rivalry between the Dương and Ngô families and then into a period of civil war among regional warlords, until Đinh Bộ Lĩnh reunited the country in 968. Southern Han itself was absorbed by the Song dynasty in 971. Northern Vietnam was never again permanently ruled from China, although Chinese armies returned in later centuries.

In 1288 the Trần prince Trần Quốc Tuấn used the same stake-and-tide tactic on the same river to defeat a Yuan fleet during the Mongol invasions of Vietnam. Both battles are counted among the greatest victories in Vietnamese history, and Ngô Quyền is honoured as a national hero in Vietnam, where a district of Haiphong bears his name.

Our 900 map shows the region shortly before the battle, at the end of Chinese rule, and the 1000 map shows the independent Vietnamese state, later known as Đại Việt, that emerged after it.