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Women That Left Their Mark Throughout History

Khalid Elhassan August 4, 2020 34 min

16. Forging a National Identity

Statue of the Trung Sisters. Historic Vietnam

The Chinese set out to reconquer Vietnam, and the Trung sisters led Vietnamese armies to keep the invaders out. Despite being greatly outnumbered, the badass siblings managed to fend off the Chinese for three years. Eventually, however, the Chinese concentrated an overwhelming force to recapture Vietnam, and in 43 AD, the Trung sisters were finally defeated in battle. Captured, they were decapitated by the Chinese, who then went on to reassert their control over Vietnam.

Their independent state might have been short-lived, but the Trung sisters succeeded in planting the seeds of Vietnamese national identity. Conventional wisdom in Vietnam holds that if the Trung sisters had not rebelled and fought against the Chinese, Vietnam would have been wholly absorbed and dissolved into China, and there would be no Vietnamese nation today.

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.