Dau Tieng Lake

Early morning on the shore of Dầu Tiếng Lake, the eye searches for the far bank and cannot find it. The water spreads out, on and on, then melts into a thin band of mist lying flat along the horizon. The wind comes in cool and damp, exactly the kind of wind people are used to calling a sea breeze. Small waves lap the shore in a steady rhythm, like the slow breathing of someone very large and fast asleep.

Everything here says this is the sea.

Only one detail refuses to fit. This lake has a birthday.

Not a vague, long-ago kind of birthday. Not one handed down from the grandparents' time either. It is one exact date, down to the day, the month and the year, as clear as the date on a child's birth certificate. Nobody knows on what day a river first began to flow. Still less the sea. So it is strange that water this wide, too wide to see across, should have a birthday all its own.

The answer will come. But first, a walk around the shore.

Going all the way around Dầu Tiếng Lake is a much longer trip than many people think. The water here covers nearly 300 square kilometers. From any point on the shore, the part of the lake the eye can see is only a small piece of the real lake.

It is so wide that this one lake reaches into three provinces and cities. The water touches Tây Ninh, touches Ho Chi Minh City, and reaches over into Đồng Nai as well. Walking along the shore, there comes a moment when you cross from one of them into another, while your feet stay on the same strip of shore and your eyes on the same water. The border lies on the map. The water knows nothing of borders.

The depth of the lake is better hidden. Its basin holds about 1.58 billion cubic meters of water. A billion is a number the human mind struggles to picture, so try this instead. Take all that water and pour it over a perfectly flat field, exactly as wide as the lake. The water would not just wash over the ankles. It would rise above the head of an adult, flat and silent, covering a stretch of land that a whole day's walk would not cross.

When rain falls here, the lake keeps it. When the sun shines here, the lake throws the light back. The whole enormous body of water just lies still like that, patient, like a bowl the sky forgot in the middle of the fields.

Now, back to the birthday.

The birthday of Dầu Tiếng Lake is April 29, 1981. But on that day there was no lake. There were no waves, no mist, no hazy line on the horizon. There was only bare ground, people, the roar of engines and a building site that had just opened. It was the day construction began.

Dầu Tiếng Lake was not made by nature. It was made by people.

Nearly four years later, in early 1985, the work was finished. By then the water had already been rising for some months. Slowly, patiently, day after day, it covered places where people had once stood on their own two feet. What had been ground became the bottom of the lake. The water that looks so much like a sea turns out to be far younger than its vast appearance suggests.

With that known, the view across the lake changes completely.

A natural body of water simply lies there and needs no explanation. A body of water built by people always has a reason. The reason for Dầu Tiếng Lake fits neatly into two names, Kênh Đông and Kênh Tây, the East Canal and the West Canal.

The water here is not kept just to be looked at. It is given away. The two canals carry water out of the lake, farther and farther, out of sight of anyone standing on the shore. The surface may look calm, but in truth the lake works day and night.

Vietnamese has an old word for this work: thủy lợi. Thủy means water. Lợi means making something useful. Thủy lợi means bringing water to the place that needs it, at the moment it is needed. A whole lake spread across three provinces and cities exists, in the end, to get exactly that done.

The care of the lake and its whole system of works was handed to a company with a long official name. In English it comes out as the Southern Irrigation Operation One-Member Limited Liability Company. It is a long name and a dry one, with no poetry at all next to an evening on the water. But behind that name are people who keep watch over the lake. They must know how high the water stands today. They must work out how much to hold back today, and how much to let go.

People have also given this place a much prettier name: the blue-green jewel in the heart of Tây Ninh. It is a fond name from the tourism industry, a nickname rather than a name on the map. But standing on the shore on a still evening, anyone can see why the nickname stuck. The water is blue-green, wide and bright, lying right in the middle of the land from which water will spread out in every direction.

And this is the best part of the story. The birthday that sounded so odd at first turns out to be what made everything else. Because there was a day when work began, there is water. Because there is water, there are two canals. Because there are two canals, water can reach places that lie very far from the shore.

As evening comes down, the last light of the day lies long across the lake, red, then orange, then pale purple, still as a length of silk spread out to the horizon. Far out there, at the mouth of a canal, the water is still quietly leaving the lake. It carries a little of that evening's light to places this lake will never get to see.