Diem Quan Ho Village

There is a kind of singing that nobody performs. People sing it to give and to receive, to become sworn friends and to court. The singer and the listener sit face to face in the night. There are no instruments and no stage, only human voices and the quiet between them. This is Quan họ. Quan họ is call-and-response folk singing from Bắc Ninh, sung by pairs of women and pairs of men.

The village of Diềm is one of the cradles of that tradition.

Viêm Xá is its official name. Diềm is the everyday name that people in this area still use. Today the village belongs to Kinh Bắc ward, in Bắc Ninh province. According to the Nhân Dân newspaper, it is one of the oldest of the 49 Quan họ villages in the province. It is also the only one with a temple to Vua Bà, whom the local community honors as the founding ancestor of Bắc Ninh Quan họ.

Before turning to the Vua Bà Temple, one thing needs saying plainly. The story of Vua Bà is a legend, not verified history. Tradition says she was a daughter of one of the Hùng Kings, whom Vietnamese people honor as their ancestors. She stopped in the old land of Viêm Trang, cleared the soil, founded a village, taught the people to make their living and passed on the melodies of Quan họ. This is a layer of community memory, handed down through many generations. At the Vua Bà Temple, a visitor steps into a world of belief and legend, not a history museum in the narrow sense. That does not make it any less meaningful.

The most important place in the story of Diềm is the Vua Bà Temple. It shows how closely Diềm is tied to Quan họ culture. UNESCO placed that culture on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2009. That list is for living traditions, passed on from one generation to the next.

From the temple, the way leads to the Diềm communal house. The province's tourism information says it was built in 1692. It honors two deities, Trương Hống and Trương Hát. Many places in Kinh Bắc revere them. The communal house was ranked a historic site in 1964. Its timber, its posts and beams and its old yard show a Vietnamese village that has kept its ways from long ago.

One ritual in the Diềm festival stands out. A procession walks from the temple to the communal house and around the village. Then it reaches Cùng Temple and the Ngọc Well, where it takes water. The water is carried back for worship at the Vua Bà Temple. It shows that Quan họ in Diềm is not only a song performed on a stage. It lives in the ritual life of the community, tied to the communal house, the temple, the village water, the harvests, and the bond between the living and the dead.

The festival usually falls early in the second lunar month. The ritual part has formal rites, offerings of incense, the reading of a prayer text, and re-enactments of running the flags and snatching the ball. The festival part has canh hát singing sessions, singing on boats, and exchanges at the communal house, at the temple and at the homes of the ông trùm and bà trùm.

These homes are called nhà trùm. A nhà trùm is where the traditional singers, the liền anh and liền chị, gather to learn songs, to sing through the night and to keep the old ways of Quan họ. It is the most lasting informal way of teaching Quan họ. In Diềm, this tradition still goes on.

The village is quiet in a rare way. The communal house, the temple, the pagoda, the mossy lanes and the scenery along the Cầu River give the village an unhurried air. A visitor lucky enough to hear a true canh hát here would understand why people call Quan họ the singing of the soul. The voices of the liền anh and liền chị rise in the yard of the communal house at night. There is no amplifier and no colored light, only human voices and the quiet between them.

Quan họ is the singing of affection and loyalty, of promises to meet and of partings. Diềm is where that singing has put down its deepest roots in the soil of Kinh Bắc.