the Daughters of Dragon

In the spring of 40 CE, two noblewomen raised a flag at the confluence of two rivers and changed the course of Vietnamese history. What followed was the first great Vietnamese war of independence - a three-year enterprise that expelled the Han empire's administration from an entire province, established a functioning independent state under a female monarch, and deployed more than seventy women in positions of military command and territorial governance.The Daughters of the Dragon reconstructs the world that made Trưng Trắc and Trưng Nhị possible: the Red River Delta's five-century Đông Sơn civilisation, its matrilineal traditions of female authority, and the century and a half of Han colonial pressure that turned accumulated resentment into organised rebellion. Lewis Horner brings to this story the full resources of narrative nonfiction - the military campaign's operational precision, the personal courage of the leaders on both sides, the archaeological evidence of the drums and the dikes, and the extraordinary legacy of a tradition that preserved the memory of the rebellion across two thousand years of changed political circumstance.This is the story of a defeat that became a foundation. It is the story of a people who refused to let the victors write the only account of what had happened. And it is, above all, the story of two women who understood what they were risking and raised the flag anyway.