Ngo King (939 – 944)
Later Ngo King (950 – 965)
In 931, a patriot, Duong Dinh Nghe, took
up the fight and made himself governor. After Duong Dinh Nghe died, murdered by
one of his aides, the fight was led by Ngo Quyen, who in 938 clashed with a
Southern Han expeditionary corps approaching by sea. The Southern Han fleet
entered Vietnam via the Bach Dang estuary (mouth of the river which flows into
Halong Bay) where iron-tipped stakes had been sunk into the riverbed by Ngo
Quyen. At high-tide a Vietnamese flotilla attacked the enemy then, pretending
to escape, lured the Southern Han boats into the estuary beyond the stakes
still covered by the tide. At low-tide, the entire Vietnamese fleet
counter-attacked, forcing the enemy to flee and sink, impaled on the barrage of
stakes.
The Bach Dang victory in 938 put an end to the period of Chinese imperial domination. In 939 Ngo Quyen proclaimed himself king, established his capital at Co Loa (previously a capital in the 3rd century B.C.) and set up a centralized government. It was the first truly independent Vietnamese state.
Domestically, the main obstacle to the founding of a centralized power
structure capable of assuming direction of the economy - management of the dyke
system in particular - and of successfully resisting foreign aggression was the
existence of feudal lords who each ruled an area of territory. On the death of
Ngo Quyen in 944, 12 warlords divided the country among them and began to fight
one another.