The Hung Kings and Children of the Dragon and Fairy

The eldest of the fifty sons who remain with Au Co in the highlands is proclaimed the first Hung King, founding a dynasty, the Hong Bang, that traditional Vietnamese chronology holds ruled the early Vietnamese kingdom of Van Lang for many generations before the historical record becomes clearer. Successive Hung Kings are credited with organizing agriculture, teaching the cultivation of rice, and establishing the basic social and political order later Vietnamese tradition looks back on as the founding period of the nation.

The myth remains alive in modern Vietnamese national self-understanding through the phrase con Rong chau Tien, children of the dragon and the fairy, still used as a description of the Vietnamese people as a whole regardless of religious affiliation. Keith Taylor's history of early Vietnam situates the legend within the broader project of medieval Vietnamese chroniclers, writing under Chinese literary influence but asserting a distinct Vietnamese identity, who compiled and formalized older oral material into the connected dynastic genealogy that now opens most standard accounts of Vietnamese history, giving the young kingdom an antiquity and legitimacy to set against its powerful northern neighbor.