Emperor Ham Nghi

A hand dips a brush into paint, then lifts it gently to a stretched canvas. Slowly a far mountain slope appears, then a narrow path, then an evening sky as golden as honey. The painter is a man who has been away from home for a very long time. The mountain he paints is not the one before his eyes. It is the mountain of his memory. The man is Emperor Hàm Nghi.

His story begins very early, in the royal city of Hue. Hàm Nghi lived from 1871 to 1944. He was the eighth emperor of the Nguyễn dynasty. That was Vietnam's last royal dynasty, and it reigned from 1802 to 1945.

In 1884, a boy of only 13 was placed on the throne. Each morning he sat straight and dignified in the gilded palace, with a whole country waiting before him. The boy among all that gold would, many years later, be the man painting mountains in a foreign land.

The palace was beautiful. It was splendid and warm, enough for a boy to spend his whole life in silk and comfort. But the young emperor did not choose to stay in that comfort. When the country fell into hardship, he chose a road that hardly anyone dared to take. He left the curved tile roofs and walked out toward the deep green of the mountains and forests.

On July 13, 1885, the emperor sent out a call from a citadel called Tân Sở in Quảng Trị. It was the Cần Vương edict. Cần Vương means "aid the king", and the edict called on the people to resist the French. Through it he sent word to his subjects in all three regions of the country, hoping everyone would stand together to protect their homeland. It was not a shout. It was more like an earnest whisper, hoping people would take each other by the hand.

A teenager who could have lived among silk and comfort chose to leave it all and live deep in the forest. One night there were curved tile roofs and a courtyard of gilded bricks. The next, there was cold dew on the leaves, the sound of a stream in the dark, and a plain tent in the great forest. He chose the green woods over the palace, to stay closer to the words he had sent to his homeland.

Then life carried him somewhere very far away. It was a land across the sea called Algeria, in Africa. Its capital is Algiers. His homeland lay behind him, an immense distance away. In that unfamiliar place the evening sky still poured out its golden light, but it was not the light on the hills of home that he had known since childhood.

In that foreign land, Emperor Hàm Nghi found a companion for his soul, and it was painting. From 1889, a painter named Marius Reynaud taught him to paint. He studied tirelessly for more than 15 years.

From an emperor he became a true painter. He left about 91 works of painting and sculpture. Some also regard him as the first Vietnamese painter trained in the academic style of the West.

Each morning the man mixed his colors, took up his brush and painted. People imagine his canvases held rows of trees, sunsets and long stretches of sunlight. Many who stand before his paintings feel a gentle longing hovering somewhere in them, as if he were borrowing color to paint his homeland as it lived in his heart.

And the story is not finished. 20 of his works were brought home in 2026 to be shown at the Temple of Literature, in the heart of Hanoi. The paintings he made in a faraway land had, after so many years, come back to their homeland at last.

In those pictures, the far mountain and the path sinking into the evening sun are the homeland he carried all his life, placed whole into every stroke of the brush.