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Women That Left Their Mark Throughout History

Khalid Elhassan August 4, 2020 34 min

17. An Army of Badass Women

The execution of Trung Trac’s husband led his widow to rally Vietnamese nobles in an uprising against the Chinese. With the help of her sister Trung Nhi, Trung Trac launched a rebellion in the Red River Delta, near modern Hanoi. From there, the revolt quickly spread up and down the long Vietnamese coast. After generations of living under foreign domination, the Vietnamese were ready to rebel, and the uprising became wildly popular.

Unique among armed rebellions, the Trung sisters’ armies had huge contingents of women fighting in the front lines. With their heavily-female armies, the badass siblings seized numerous Chinese forts and citadels, chasing out or defeating their garrisons. Within a few months, Chinese authority in Vietnam was broken, the Chinese had been expelled from the country, and Trung Trac was proclaimed queen.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.