Duong Lam Ancient Village

About 50 kilometers west of central Hanoi lies a village that Vietnamese history has visited twice.

The first time came in the 8th century. A son of this village named Phùng Hưng rose up against the rule of the Tang dynasty of China. He captured the citadel of Tống Bình, where Hanoi stands today, and won self-rule for about seven years. After he died in 791, he was honored with a special title: Bố Cái Đại Vương. In old Vietnamese, "Bố" means father and "Cái" means mother. The title calls him the great father and mother of the people. It is a rare honor in Vietnamese history.

The second time came in 938, with another son of the village, Ngô Quyền. Born in 898, he commanded a fleet of warships on the Bạch Đằng River. He had sharpened wooden stakes driven into the riverbed. Then he used the rise and fall of the tide to destroy the fleet of the Southern Han, a Chinese kingdom of that time. That victory ended more than a thousand years of Chinese rule. The next year he took the throne and set his capital at Cổ Loa, about 40 kilometers to the east of Đường Lâm. His reign did not last long. He died in 944, only five years after he took the throne.

Two kings, both born in one small village. Twice, the same small piece of land sent one of its sons into the history books.

That is why Đường Lâm is called "the land of two kings." And that is why, on May 19, 2006, Đường Lâm became the first village in Vietnam to receive the state certificate of a National Historical and Cultural Monument. The date fell on the birthday of President Hồ Chí Minh.

But Đường Lâm is more than a place to remember two kings. It is also a place to see how Vietnamese people have lived over the past three or four hundred years.

The "ancient village of Đường Lâm" is really five hamlets side by side. Mông Phụ sits at the center. The others are Đông Sàng, Cam Thịnh, Đoài Giáp and Cam Lâm. Each hamlet has its own figures and its own stories.

The most typical building material here is đá ong, a kind of laterite. It is not stone cut from a quarry. It is a clay rich in iron and aluminum, built up over millions of years in the ground of the northern midlands. People dig it out while it is still soft and cut it into blocks of about 20 kilograms each. Then they leave the blocks in the sun. As they dry, they slowly harden, and their surface shows small holes like a honeycomb. That is where the name comes from: đá ong means honeycomb stone. House walls, the village gates and garden walls are all built of it. Every block in those walls was once soft as earth, until the sun hardened it.

The gate of Mông Phụ hamlet was built in 1833, under Emperor Minh Mạng of the Nguyễn dynasty, Vietnam's last royal dynasty. It is a classic arched gate, built mainly of laterite. Passing through it means stepping into a different rhythm of life.

The communal house of Mông Phụ was built in 1684, in the reign of Emperor Lê Hy Tông. That makes it nearly 350 years old. It is older than the Mông Phụ gate by nearly 150 years. It follows the traditional design of a Vietnamese communal house, with five bays and a roof whose corners curve upward. Its wood carvings of dragons, phoenixes, flowers and leaves are finely made. The columns, rafters and beams are all of wood. This is the kind of building that the suburbs of the cities are slowly losing.

In Đông Sàng hamlet stands Mía Pagoda. Its formal name is Sùng Nghiêm Tự. People call it Mía Pagoda because Mía was the old vernacular name of this area. In 1632, a woman named Nguyễn Thị Ngọc Dao sponsored a major restoration of the pagoda. She was a consort of Lord Trịnh Tráng in the 17th century. The Trịnh lords were a noble family who dominated northern Vietnam. The villagers honored her as Bà Chúa Mía, the Lady of Mía.

What makes Mía Pagoda special is its 287 sacred statues. Of these, 174 are of terracotta, painted red and gilded. Another 107 are carved from wood, and six are cast in bronze. It is one of the pagodas with the most statues in northern Vietnam. Nearly 400 years have passed since the restoration Bà Chúa Mía sponsored in 1632.

Cam Lâm hamlet has the Temple of Phùng Hưng. It also has the Temple and Tomb of Ngô Quyền. The tomb is said to be only symbolic. It was built to give people a place of worship, because, as tradition holds, the real tomb was lost over more than a thousand years. Still, the temple to King Ngô is a place where people come with deep respect.

The village also has foods of its own. There is gà Mía, a local breed of chicken with fragrant, firm meat. There is pork roasted on a pole, chè lam, peanut candy and tương Đường Lâm, the village soybean sauce.

The village is still a village, not a museum. The laterite gate still stands where it has stood since 1833. The communal house still opens on festival days. And people still grow bananas, make soybean sauce and raise Mía chickens, as they did a century ago. On sunny middays, the laterite walls still warm themselves in the light, as when they were soft earth waiting for the sun to harden them.