Lạc Long Quân and Âu Cơ

In Vietnamese tradition the people descend from a union of water and mountain. Lạc Long Quân, a dragon lord of the sea and a bringer of civilization, married Âu Cơ, a fairy or immortal of the highlands. Âu Cơ bore a sac of a hundred eggs, from which hatched a hundred children — the ancestors of the Vietnamese.

Being of two natures, dragon and fairy, the couple could not remain together. They divided their children: fifty followed their mother up into the mountains, and fifty followed their father down to the sea, promising to come to one another's aid. The eldest of those who went with the mother is said to have become the first of the Hùng kings, the legendary founders of the earliest Vietnamese state.

From this story the Vietnamese call themselves «con Rồng cháu Tiên» — children of the dragon, grandchildren of the fairy — a phrase of shared origin and kinship still in everyday use. Like all foundation myths it is told to explain a people to itself; it circulated in speech and in early chronicles long before it was fixed in its familiar form.