Buu Long Park

Long Ẩn Lake is, at heart, a very large quarry pit that filled with water. Nature did not make the lake as it looks today. The people of Bửu Long cut blue stone from this ground over many centuries. The more they cut, the deeper the ground went, and the higher the water rose. Slowly a lake of 18.5 hectares appeared, 22 meters deep at its deepest, in the middle of a neighborhood where families live. Standing here, a visitor would hardly guess that the ground beneath their feet is the work of hundreds of years.

The Bửu Long tourist area lies in Trấn Biên ward. That is in Biên Hòa, in Đồng Nai. It is about 6 kilometers from the center of Biên Hòa, and more than 30 kilometers from Ho Chi Minh City. The whole scenic area covers 84 hectares. It spreads across Long Ẩn Lake and Long Vân Lake. It also takes in Long Ẩn Mountain and Bình Điện Mountain, at an average height of about 100 meters above sea level. This is not an ordinary amusement park. It brings landscape, culture and belief together. Lakes and rock hills sit among old pagodas, shrines, and the long craft of the Hakka people, who settled around Biên Hòa.

At the edge of Long Ẩn Lake, rock islets and sheer cliffs rise out of the water. Many articles in the local press call this sight a small Ha Long Bay, because there is water, there are islands of rock, and the whole scene seems gathered into the bowl of the lake. But that is a way of describing how the place feels. It is not a comparison of geology or of size. The two places were made in entirely different ways. Ha Long Bay is a geological heritage site formed over millions of years. Long Ẩn Lake is the mark left by generations of Bửu Long stonecutters. Each place has its own beauty and its own story, and the story of Bửu Long deserves to be told.

From the lake, a path leads toward Long Ẩn Mountain and up to Long Sơn Thạch Động. People also call it Chùa Hang, the Cave Pagoda. There are 88 stone steps from the foot of the mountain to the pagoda. It is a pagoda set inside a rock cave, with tree branches around it and green water below, in a style typical of the south. After the 88 steps comes a quiet, old space, the kind that few places in the southeast of Vietnam can offer.

Bửu Phong Pagoda stands on Bình Điện Mountain. It is said to be among the earliest pagodas in Đồng Nai. It is described as a building that reflects the clearing of this land and the spread of Buddhism into it. The pagoda keeps close to the rock hill and the old trees. Time here seems to flow more slowly than in the life below.

Beyond the lake and the two pagodas, Bửu Long also holds a shrine to the Founding Master of the stone trade, and the space of a traditional stone-working village. The Đồng Nai Literature and Arts Association records that the Hakka people of Bửu Long quarried blue stone for many centuries. Around that trade grew a very distinctive tradition of worship. The shrine is not only a place of the spirit. It shows that this craft was large and old enough to be honored as a heritage of the whole community.

In 1990 the Bửu Long scenic area was ranked a national scenic site. It is one of the earliest scenic areas to be protected in the southeast of Vietnam.

One thing sets Bửu Long apart from many tourist places. Nobody designed its beauty. No geomancer drew it up to please visitors. It is beautiful because stonecutters worked here, because rain and time gathered the water, and because people built pagodas on the rock and honored their founding master right beside the lake they had made. Bửu Long is a painting made without a brush, and today a visitor sits inside it.