Chu Dong Tu and Princess Tien Dung

It is early morning on a sandbank of the Red River, and the dew still soaks every tuft of grass. Out on the riverbed, a man lies still under a thin layer of sand, with only his face showing. The sound of oars drifts in from far away. He holds his breath and pulls another handful of sand over his chest. His name is Chử Đồng Tử.

This is one of the oldest and most tender legends that Vietnamese people still keep. It is not an event that anyone can dig up and look at. Still, people have told this story from one generation to the next, because it holds something very true about the human heart.

Chử Đồng Tử grew up in the deepest poverty. He and his father owned a single loincloth between them. Whoever went out wore it, and whoever stayed home did without. The old tale says that as the father lay dying, he made one last request. He told his son to keep the loincloth for himself. But Chử Đồng Tử loved his father too much to let him go with nothing to cover him. He laid that one loincloth over his father's body. Then he stood alone before heaven and earth, with nothing at all to cover himself.

He was that poor, and still he gave his father everything he had. That was Chử Đồng Tử.

With nothing to wear, the young man went down to the river and felt along the shallows for shrimp and crabs to get by. Whenever he heard a boat in the distance, he quietly pulled sand over his body. He lay still on the riverbed until everything had passed. Day after day he lived like this on his own lonely stretch of river, between sand and water and sky.

Then one day, something nobody could have foreseen took place.

As the legend goes, Princess Tiên Dung was the daughter of a Hùng King. Vietnamese people honor the Hùng Kings as their ancestors. One day the princess led a fleet of boats on a pleasure trip along the Red River. She loved rivers and open water. She liked to drift along in a boat and watch the banks go by, rather than stay all day inside her palace of gold and jade. When the boats reached that lonely stretch of river, she had her guards drive in stakes and hang curtains along the bank. Behind those curtains, she would bathe.

It was the very spot where Chử Đồng Tử lay still beneath the sand.

Her attendants scooped up water and poured it inside the curtains. The water slowly washed the sand away, then a little more, and more again. And there was Chử Đồng Tử, uncovered right inside the princess's curtains, with no way to escape.

In the story, Tiên Dung was not frightened. For a while she said nothing. Then she thought: she had never meant to marry, yet her bathing screens had been set up right where this young man lay buried in the sand. Surely this was Heaven's doing. She told him to get up and wash, had her attendants give him clothes to wear, and invited him aboard her boat. When he told her how poor his family had been, her heart went out to him. Of her own free will, Tiên Dung chose to take Chử Đồng Tử as her husband, right there by the river that same day.

When the news reached the capital, the king her father was furious. He could not accept a princess marrying a man from a river sandbank who had no clothes. He would no longer let Tiên Dung come home to the palace.

So the two of them stayed.

The couple began a new life in the marshes of Dạ Trạch, along the Red River. They did not complain, and they bore no grudge. Tiên Dung put away her court silks. With her husband, she set up a market by the river landing and traded goods with honest country people.

Little by little, their trading landing grew busy. Word spread of the gentle, honest couple who never overcharged and never cheated anyone, and more people came every day.

One roof after another went up around the landing. Slowly the whole Dạ Trạch area grew prosperous. It had all begun with nothing but the bare hands of a poor young man and a princess who had chosen to become an ordinary woman.

But the legend does not end there.

On one long trading trip, Chử Đồng Tử stopped at a lonely mountain. There he met a monk named Phật Quang. The monk shared his teachings with the young man. Then he handed him a magic staff and a magic conical hat. Chử Đồng Tử took them and bowed his head in thanks. He went back to the river landing and told his wife everything, and their hearts began to turn toward things greater than buying and selling.

From then on, the couple took up spiritual study together. They sought to understand what lies beyond the world that ordinary eyes can see.

Then came a night when the story reached its most wondrous moment.

That night, Chử Đồng Tử planted the staff in the ground and set the hat on top of it. Husband and wife lay down to sleep right beside it, on an open patch of ground in the middle of the marsh. At daybreak they opened their eyes, and they were astonished.

A splendid palace had risen overnight. It had city walls and towers glittering with gold, silver, pearls and jade, and crowds of servants. It was as lovely as a dream, yet no one had built it, and no one had laid a single brick. The news spread across the whole region, and people flocked to gaze at it in wonder. When the king heard, he came too, bringing his troops. He was still angry with his daughter, and he suspected a rebellion.

But the next night, before dawn broke, the palace vanished.

In a single night, it all melted away as if it had never been. Where the palace had stood, the ground sank into a great marsh. People later called it Nhất Dạ Trạch, the One-Night Marsh. And Chử Đồng Tử and Tiên Dung were no longer there either. The tale tells that the two were carried up to Heaven and became immortals. They left this world for a place with no more poverty and no more parting, where no one could forbid them to choose each other.

Chử Đồng Tử is revered as one of the Four Immortals of Vietnamese folk belief. The Four Immortals are undying deities that Vietnamese people have worshipped for generations. Two of them are Tản Viên Sơn Thánh and Thánh Gióng. The other two are Chử Đồng Tử himself and the Holy Mother Liễu Hạnh. He began as a man on a riverbank without a scrap of cloth. He became an undying deity in the heart of the nation. Tiên Dung stands beside him, just as she chose, on that very first day, to stand beside a man the whole world thought had nothing. It is said that after they ascended, the couple sometimes appeared to protect the people of the Red River in times of trouble. And the people have never stopped being grateful to them.

Two old temples still stand in the Khoái Châu area. That area lies in Hưng Yên province. Their names are Đa Hòa and Dạ Trạch. Every year, in the second month of the lunar calendar, people come from far and wide to hold a festival here. Drums and gongs ring out, boats crowd the river, and incense smoke drifts on the early morning breeze.

On the Red River, there are evenings when the water runs red with silt and the sky turns from orange to purple. Somewhere on that river, as the legend has it, a palace once rose in a single night and then faded away like mist. Two figures flew up together, higher and higher. One was a young man who once had not a scrap of cloth to cover him. The other was a princess who chose to leave her palace of gold and jade behind. They melted into the sky above the river that flows on below. That river is still here today. And so is the story.