The Grain of Rice
A trickster asks to be paid one grain of rice, doubled every day. The governor agrees without counting.
A governor liked to be seen as generous, so he announced that any man clever enough to make him say "enough" would be rewarded. Quỳnh came with one grain of rice in his palm. All I ask, he said, is this grain today, and twice as much tomorrow, and twice again the day after, for one month. The governor laughed at how little it was and agreed in front of everyone without doing the sum. For a week the servants carried out handfuls. In the second week they carried out baskets. By the twentieth day they were carrying out sacks, and the granary doors would not close, and the governor stood in the courtyard and shouted enough, enough. Quỳnh bowed. You said it yourself, and everyone heard.
Quan lớn thích tiếng rộng rãi, nên tuyên bố ai làm được ông phải kêu "đủ rồi" thì sẽ được thưởng. Quỳnh đến, trong tay chỉ có một hạt gạo. Con xin hạt này hôm nay, mai gấp đôi, ngày kia lại gấp đôi, trong một tháng thôi. Quan cười, thấy ít quá, gật đầu ngay trước mặt mọi người mà không thèm tính. Tuần đầu người nhà bưng ra từng nắm. Tuần sau bưng ra từng thúng. Đến ngày thứ hai mươi thì phải vác từng bao, cửa kho không đóng được nữa, quan đứng giữa sân mà kêu đủ rồi, đủ rồi. Quỳnh vái một cái: Chính miệng quan nói đấy ạ, cả làng đều nghe.
Trạng Quỳnh is a semi-legendary scholar of Vietnamese oral tradition, the commoner who beats officials with arithmetic and nerve rather than force. The doubling wager is one of the oldest shapes in the cycle and appears in folk traditions well beyond Vietnam. Many modern printed and filmed versions exist. None of them is the source used here: this is told from the shape of the story, not from anybody's page.
Public domain: Vietnamese oral folk tradition — the Trạng Quỳnh trickster cycle, told since roughly the seventeenth century, no known author. Told here in our own words, deliberately not from: Nguyễn Đổng Chi's printed collection; the Tuttle English editions; the 2019 feature film; any published English translation.