Ba Om Pond

Under the old trees around Ao Bà Om, the air feels different. It is cooler and quieter, as though the ground itself were breathing.

This is Nguyệt Hóa ward, in Vĩnh Long province. The land was once ward eight of Trà Vinh city. Trà Vinh is in the Mekong Delta. Since July 1, 2025, after the administrative merger, the area has belonged to Vĩnh Long. Yet in the memory of travelers and in the minds of the Khmer community, Ao Bà Om still belongs to the cultural world of Trà Vinh.

The pond is also called Ao Vuông, the square pond, because its water is almost square. According to the heritage file of the Trà Vinh monuments management board, the grounds cover more than eighteen hectares, and the water itself spreads over 42,040 square meters. Around it lie sandy banks, high in places and low in others, wide here and narrow there. More than five hundred dầu and sao trees, many of them ancient, form a canopy over it all.

Then there are the roots. They are the first thing anyone notices. Many rise out of the ground and twist into strange shapes. Some root systems are wider than a person's arms can embrace. They are the trace of countless rainy and dry seasons gathered underground, a kind of time that the eye can actually see.

Several explanations are recorded for the name Ao Bà Om. One links it to the herb ngò om that grew around the bank. Another holds that "Bà Om" is a changed form of Prah Ang, the name of the nearby Âng Pagoda. The most widespread version tells of a contest to dig a pond, between a group of men and a group of women led by Bà Om. The women hung a lamp from a tall bamboo pole. The men took it for the morning star, believed the night was over and put down their tools. The women kept digging until dawn and won.

That tale has the color of legend, but it says something worth noticing. In Khmer folk culture, women have a strength and a wit of their own. These stories belong to folk tradition and are not an exact chronicle.

In 1994, the Ministry of Culture and Information ranked Ao Bà Om a national monument in the category of scenic landscape, under Decision number 921.

Ao Bà Om is more than scenery. It is also the setting for Ok Om Bok, the moon-offering festival of the Khmer of southern Vietnam. The festival falls on the night running from the fourteenth into the fifteenth of Ka-đâk, a month of the Khmer calendar. On the lunar calendar, that is about the same two nights in the tenth month. The Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism has placed the Ok Om Bok festival of the Khmer of Trà Vinh on the national list of intangible cultural heritage. On festival night the whole space changes. There are lamps and fire, the sound of drums, teams racing their ghe ngo boats, and the community's rites of offering to the moon.

For the Khmer community this is a faith practiced for countless generations. It is a thanksgiving to the moon and the earth after the harvest, not a show put on for visitors.

Right beside the pond stands Âng Pagoda. The Khmer Ethnic Culture Museum lies in the same grounds. The three form one connected cluster. There is the landscape of the pond, there is Khmer religious architecture, and there is a collection of objects on the life, writing and art of the Khmer of southern Vietnam. Taken together, they show that Ao Bà Om is not only a beautiful pond but a gateway into a whole culture.

On the sandy bank, under century-old dầu trees, the wind moves across the still, square water. In this place the ground really is breathing.