An Phu Tran Hung Dao Statue

From the summit of Mount An Phụ, 246 meters up, the northern delta spreads out below. Far to the east, on a clear day, the mouth of the Bạch Đằng River glitters.

Right in that line of sight stands a huge figure of green stone, upright and proud. It is the monument to the Great Prince Hưng Đạo, Trần Quốc Tuấn.

The monument is 12.7 meters tall including its base. The statue itself is 9.7 meters. It is assembled from 65 slabs of green stone from Mount Nhồi in Thanh Hóa. They form eight large sections around a core of reinforced concrete, which carries the load and withstands the sea wind on the high summit. The whole weighs about 200 tons. It was unveiled on October 8, 1998, the 18th day of the eighth lunar month in the year of Mậu Dần. That was exactly 698 years after the death of the Great Prince in 1300.

The pose of the statue tells its own story. His left hand rests on a sword, the sign of the warrior. His right hand holds a book of military strategy, the sign of the scholar. Vietnamese people see this pose, complete in both letters and arms, as the ideal of a great general. The book is said to be the Binh Thư Yếu Lược, a military work that he wrote himself and that is still studied today.

And the statue faces east, toward the mouth of the Bạch Đằng River. About 25 kilometers from An Phụ in a straight line, that is where Trần Hưng Đạo crushed the Mongol armies in 1288. He had wooden stakes tipped with iron driven into the riverbed, then lured the enemy boats in just as the tide went out. He destroyed the Yuan fleet and captured Ô Mã Nhi alive. The Yuan were the Mongol dynasty then ruling China. The face of the statue turns toward that place, as if he is still looking at the ground that history has recorded with his name.

Trần Quốc Tuấn was born in 1228 and died in 1300. He was the son of An Sinh Vương Trần Liễu. He was also a kinsman of Emperor Trần Thái Tông. Three times he was ordered to serve as supreme commander against the Mongols. The first time was in 1258. The second came in 1285, and in that year he wrote the Hịch Tướng Sĩ, a historic proclamation calling the whole army to give everything for the country. The third was in 1288, the immortal battle of Bạch Đằng.

After his death, ordinary people raised him to the rank of a saint, Đức Thánh Trần. He is one of the most widely worshipped deities in Vietnam. Temples to him stand across the country, from Kiếp Bạc to Nam Định, Quy Nhơn, Da Nang and Ho Chi Minh City.

To the left of the statue runs a terracotta relief. It is 45 meters long and 2.5 meters high on average. Its surface is made of 526 terracotta bricks. Terracotta is a traditional Vietnamese material. The relief tells the story of the three wars of resistance against the Mongols in many lively scenes. The army of Đại Việt marches out to battle. Đại Việt is an old name for Vietnam. The Hịch Tướng Sĩ has a scene of its own. The Bạch Đằng battle shows its wooden stakes and enemy ships caught on them.

The monument stands right beside Cao Temple, where An Sinh Vương Trần Liễu is worshipped. He was the father of Trần Hưng Đạo. This is what sets the An Phụ area apart: the father in the temple, the son as a monument, two heroes of one family honored on a single mountaintop.

One story from this family deserves a pause. It is told in popular tradition and in the Đại Việt Sử Ký Toàn Thư. That book is the oldest complete official history of Vietnam that survives. According to both, before he died, Trần Liễu urged his son to take revenge for the wrongs he had suffered in life. But Trần Hưng Đạo did not do so. He put the good of the country above a private grudge and served the emperor against the Mongols to his last breath. History calls this "great righteousness," the greatest lesson in loyalty to the ruler that he left to later generations.

The relic complex around the monument was ranked a Special National Monument by the Prime Minister on December 22, 2016. It carries the name An Phụ, Kính Chủ and Nhẫm Dương.

Three times he kept Đại Việt independent, at a time when the Mongol empire ruled almost all of the world then known. It is no exaggeration to call him the most important figure in the medieval history of Vietnam.