Bom Bo S'tieng Village

The song "Tiếng chày trên Sóc Bom Bo," by the composer Xuân Hồng, is about the sound of pestles pounding rice. For generations, Vietnamese listeners have wanted to know whose pestles they were, why they pounded, and when.

The answer lies in what is now Bom Bo commune, in Đồng Nai province. It was once Bình Minh commune, in the Bù Đăng area. Back then the province was Bình Phước. The S'tiêng people of the Bù lơ branch have lived on this land for many generations.

The story happened in 1965, when the regional command opened the Phước Long and Đồng Xoài campaign. The campaign needed food. Sóc Bom Bo was not rich then, but the S'tiêng people here did not refuse. They gathered every mortar and pestle in the village. They even used special mortars hollowed from long sao trunks, with many hollows so that more rice could be pounded at once. For three days and nights, the pestles never stopped. In the end, five tons of rice went out to the campaign.

It was not five tons from a large storehouse. It was five tons from a community that had poured nearly all its strength and belongings into feeding the soldiers.

Xuân Hồng heard this story and wrote his song. It spread far and wide, and the name Bom Bo became familiar to many generations of Vietnamese, even to people who had never set foot there.

In 2012, work began on the S'tiêng Ethnic Cultural Conservation Area of Sóc Bom Bo, on more than 113 hectares. Three years later, in October 2015, it opened its gates to visitors. In September 2025, the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism officially designated Sóc Bom Bo a national historic site.

Today the conservation area is a living space for S'tiêng cultural memory, where images and objects from the community's daily life and wartime years are kept. The song is also played on the traditional đàn đá, a set of stone bars, right on the ground where its story began.

The main feature of the conservation area stands in the festival yard. There, the artisan Trương Đình Chiếu made a đàn đá of 20 stone bars. The lightest bar weighs a quarter of a ton and the heaviest 400 kilograms. It takes four people playing together. Beside it is a set of 12 gongs, called cồng chiêng, made of copper and tin. Together they weigh more than 3,500 kilograms, and the set holds a Vietnamese record. Two traditional longhouses of the S'tiêng people of the Bù lơ branch stand in the grounds. They recall how the S'tiêng have lived as a community for generations.

The stone bars, the gongs and the longhouses are not decorations. Each is part of S'tiêng cultural life: music at festivals and rituals, and evenings spent gathered under a longhouse roof. The S'tiêng also have a writing system of their own. The people's committee of Bình Phước province approved its alphabet in 2018. It belongs to a community whose language and culture are being carefully preserved.

Sóc Bom Bo no longer hears pestles pounding rice all night, as in wartime. But the gongs, the stone bars, the looms and the story of five tons of rice in 1965 are still here. They are kept by this conservation area, by its standing as a national historic site, and by the lives of the S'tiêng people who live on this same land.

Here, gongs ring out under the forest canopy, beside the longhouses of the S'tiêng. This is the ground that gave Vietnam a song about pounding rice, and that song has stayed with so many generations.