Au Co and Seal Script.

#AUCO #Vietnamesemyth #kanzi #sealscript

(updated with minor errors corrected June 24 - 2020)

The Vietnamese culture has a story of a bird spirit who came from the mountains and was trapped while in bird form and rescued by a dragon prince who became her husband. Their children hatched from 100 eggs and became the ancestors of the Viet people.

Her name is Au Co in Vietnamese and is written like this in modern Chinese though the characters do have other simplified forms.

Literally in modern Chinese this is something like old woman concubine but take another look at the older seal script form of the first element in her name. It shows a woman facing an enclosure with round objects probably mouths representing people? 

Maybe the original concept was woman who protects like royalty?

In Chinese Au is Yu4 

I wonder if an entity similar to Au Co was once honored in Southern China or the Yue realms adjacent to North Vietnam?

While people think of the Chinese writing system as spreading from central china outwards and most modern characters have been standardized odd rare characters like this make me wonder if regional variants have been absorbed into the greater body of characters?

As I've written before while North and South have a yin yang relationship in Chinese culture and while the culture of the central Plains is usually dominant sometimes the South is stronger?