Dong Ho Painting Village

An old folk verse that people in the village often repeat goes: "Làng Mái has its calendar and its customs, a pond for a cool bath, and a craft of making pictures." Làng Mái is the village's everyday name. Its official name is Đông Hồ, and it lies in Bắc Ninh Province. Today it belongs to the Đông Khê quarter of Thuận Thành ward. The craft of making pictures here has lasted for more than 500 years.

More than 500 years.

Đông Hồ pictures are not painted. That is the first thing to understand. Nobody sits with a brush and draws each line on each sheet. The pictures are printed from carved wooden blocks. An artisan carves a design into wood, spreads color on the block, and presses it onto paper, one color at a time, one layer at a time. Each color has its own block. A picture may need four blocks, five, or even more when it has many colors. When the layers of color lie over each other in exactly the right place, the picture appears.

The paper is not ordinary paper either. It is dó paper, coated with a layer of điệp, which is finely ground scallop shell mixed with sticky rice paste. This coat gives the pictures their shimmer. Their colors are bright yet gentle on the eye, and no picture matches another, even when printed from the same block.

The colors come entirely from natural materials. Red comes from young brick or young pebbles, ground fine. Yellow comes from hòe flowers. Black comes from the charcoal of bamboo leaves. Blue comes from chàm leaves. White comes from scallop shell. This is the palette of a village in the northern delta, taken from the nature around it and turned into art.

Among the best-known pictures is the Wedding of the Mice. Others are called Vinh hoa and Phú quý. Two more are Tiến tài and Tiến lộc. Each one is a small story, carrying a good wish or a gentle laugh about village life. The Wedding of the Mice, for example, is read by many scholars as social criticism wrapped in humorous images. Mice hold a wedding, and a cat sits to receive the ceremony. But the exact meaning of each picture needs documents to back it up, and it is better not to guess.

Tết is the Lunar New Year festival in Vietnam. Đông Hồ pictures were once the pictures of Tết for the Vietnamese people of the northern delta. The picture market met at the Đông Hồ communal house on the 6th, 11th, 16th, 21st and 26th days of the lunar month of Chạp. People bought pictures to paste on walls, gates and house posts, as a wish for the new year. That market, its sessions busy with color beside the Đuống River, has been gone since the years after 1945.

In 2023, the Đông Hồ Folk Painting Conservation Center opened an exhibition house with more than 1,000 documents and objects, including carved wooden blocks and old sample pictures. Bắc Ninh also re-created the space of the Tết picture market there. It is an effort to hold on to a memory, not only in words but in real space.

But the most important part of this story is very recent.

On December 9, 2025, at the 20th session of UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage Committee in New Delhi, the craft of making Đông Hồ folk pictures was officially added to UNESCO's list of intangible cultural heritage in need of urgent safeguarding. It is the 17th item of intangible heritage from Vietnam that UNESCO has recognized.

The phrase "urgent safeguarding" needs to be understood clearly. It does not mean the heritage is already lost. It means the risk of fading away is real, and the international community has seen it. According to the Government's online newspaper, only a few families in Bắc Ninh still practice the craft and pass it on, mostly within the household. Without artisans, without apprentices, and without people who understand the value of handmade pictures and choose real ones over industrially printed ones, this heritage will slowly go out, like a fire without wood.

The Đuống River still flows through this land, as it did when the craft began. Làng Mái is still there, on the south bank. And the carved wooden blocks in the artisans' hands still hold a way of seeing the world, people and life that no phone camera can capture.