Dong Ky Woodcarving Village

A village of cattle traders, rice growers and weavers in the Kinh Bắc region became known across the country for fine wooden craft. How that happened is not a simple story. The answer is what makes Đồng Kỵ matter more than any collection of furniture.

Đồng Kỵ is also called Cời. Today it belongs to Đồng Nguyên Ward in Bắc Ninh Province, and its fine woodcraft is counted among the best known of the province's craft villages. But before it was a wood village, it lived a very different life.

Before 1945, the village was best known for trading buffalo and cattle between the provinces of the north, alongside farming and weaving cloth. That trade stopped in 1960, against the background of the economic policy of the day. The village had to find a new road. From the late 1960s, people in Đồng Kỵ began to buy, sell and make old and old-style wooden furniture. They invited carpenters from nearby woodworking villages, Phù Khê and Hương Mạc. Carpenters came from Thiết Úng too, and craftsmen who inlay mother-of-pearl came from Chuyên Mỹ. Together they built a network of making, subcontracting and trade. By 1980 the village's fine woodcraft was growing strongly, and Saigon and Cambodia were its two big markets.

That is the story of a village that knew how to adapt. It did not wait to be rescued. It found its own way out and built a trade from nothing.

But looking only at the furniture trade misses a deeper layer of Đồng Kỵ. That layer is the cluster of communal house, temple and pagoda, which speaks for the spiritual life of the village across many centuries.

The communal house is the first stop. Its architecture carries the art of the 18th century, with a frame of lim wood and carvings of the four sacred animals and the four seasons. The house has been ranked as a historic and cultural monument since 1988. Inside hangs a large inscribed board with four characters, "Mỹ tục, khả phong". They mean fine customs, worthy of praise. Emperor Tự Đức gave the board to the village in 1871. A village praised by an emperor for its fine customs is not something every village can claim.

The wood carvings inside the communal house deserve a long look. There are dragons, phoenixes, mythical lân and tortoises, flowers of the four seasons, and small details such as leaves, clouds and waves. This is the traditional art of working wood that the village later carried into the goods it sold. The craft did not appear out of thin air. It rests on an eye for beauty that grew in the village's own place of worship.

The village festival runs from the 4th to the 6th day of the first lunar month. Its best known rite is the firecracker procession, recognized as national intangible cultural heritage in 2016. The procession is a symbolic rite. It remembers the march to battle of General Thiên Cương, guardian spirit of the village. It is a cultural ritual, not the setting off of firecrackers in the usual sense.

The temple honors Saint Thiên Cương. It stands within the cluster of communal house, temple and pagoda, and it faces the Ngũ Huyện Khê River. Behind the temple, open space stretches toward the water. It feels airy, quite unlike the space of the communal house.

The pagoda of Đồng Kỵ, known in Chinese characters as Tây Am tự, is the last stop in the cluster. Besides its architecture, it has a stone incense pillar set up in 1679 and a bronze bell cast in 1822. From 1940 to 1945 the pagoda also hid revolutionary officials, a role few people think of when they picture a village pagoda in Kinh Bắc.

Đồng Kỵ is a living example of something special about the Vietnamese village. A solid cultural ground is what lets a village change without losing its roots. Culture and the market do not contradict each other: a village can turn fully toward the market when it must, and still keep its communal house, temple and pagoda for centuries, and keep its traditional festival.