Fan Chuo, a secretary serving a second…

Fan Chuo, a secretary serving a second tenure under the Jie-du (similar to the Eastern Roman thema) with headquarters located at Hanoi, is able to get his hands on the updated diplomatic and military documents of Tang China and Nanzhao, since the Hanoi thema is China’s frontier with Nanzhao, a Bai kingdom centered around present-day Yunnan in China.

He had also lived in Hanoi during his first tenure; therefore he has some firsthand information of the city, such as trades, deployments, population, etc.

As the Nanzhao army sacked the city for the first time, he had barely escaped capture by jumping into the Red River and swimming to the opposite bank.

Servimg subsequently under another Jie-du located at Guangzhou, he there compiled the first draft of Manchu (literally, barbarous document; roughly meaning the book on the southern tribes).

In 862, during a second tenure in Hanoi, he finishes the book, which is an invaluable source of Tang-Nanzhao relations and for anthropological research on the Hmong and Vietnamese during the later years of the T'ang Dynasty.