Emperor Le Chieu Thong

There was once a very long journey, a trip back along the river of time, to bring one son back to his homeland. In 1804, a coffin was carried home along countless country roads. It crossed mountains and rivers, and at last it reached a quiet stretch of countryside in Thanh Hóa. The man inside was an emperor named Lê Chiêu Thống. His is a gentle story, about a young ruler who traveled very far and was finally brought back.

He was born in 1765 into an old line of emperors, the Lê family. The Lê family had been emperors for a very long time, through many generations. The boy came into the world in the last days of such a long dynasty, when everything around him had begun to close quietly.

His birth name was Lê Duy Khiêm, a gentle name like so many other names. When he became emperor he changed it to Lê Duy Kỳ, and he took the reign name Chiêu Thống, the name people have called him ever since.

He took the throne in the middle of 1786, when he was only 21. That is still very young. At that age many people are still studying, still learning their first tasks in life. Yet he had to carry on his shoulders a whole dynasty that was slowly coming to its end, the great ancestral house that had already grown very old.

To be emperor in such days was not easy. It was like giving a small child a candle to guard in a strong wind. The child would cup both hands around the flame, hoping the light would not go out. The young emperor tried in the same way to protect the flame of his family, even as the wind blew harder and harder.

Then life carried him to a place very far from home, a distant land thousands of miles away. There he must have missed his homeland badly. A man living in a foreign country woke each morning to scenery he did not know. Yet in his sleep he still heard the wind over the fields at home and the water running beside the old river. His heart always turned south, toward the old house and the land of his forefathers.

He died in that foreign land in 1793, at the age of only 28. It was a very short life for a person. One published account calls it a life adrift, and one that stirs deep sympathy. But the story does not end there, because one more journey, a journey home, still lay ahead of him.

More than ten years after his death, a warm and kind thing was done. In 1804, under Emperor Gia Long, he was brought back from that distant place to his homeland. Gia Long was the founder of the Nguyễn dynasty. People had not forgotten the young emperor. They went to bring him home, and they escorted him back to the land of his ancestors. The place where he was laid to rest was Thanh Hóa, the ancestral land of the Lê family.

Thanh Hóa was no ordinary countryside for that royal line. It was from the Lam Sơn area that his forefathers had set out long ago and built the foundations of their rule. So taking him there meant more than bringing him to a patch of earth. It meant bringing a son who had gone far from home to the very place where his forefathers had begun everything.

He was laid to rest in a place called the Bàn Thạch tomb. It lies in what is now the Thọ Xuân area of Thanh Hóa. There are fields there, and rice growing, and afternoons that are very gentle. After so many years adrift in a foreign land, the young emperor lay at last on the soil of his forefathers. He could hear the wind of the countryside again. He could breathe again the air of his old home, the air of the homeland.