Emperor Le Huyen Tong

The people of the palace bow their heads and call a small boy "Your Majesty." Yet the boy they bow to sits in a small room in the capital, Thăng Long, his back a little bent and his tiny fingers gripping a brush bigger than his hand. Thăng Long is the city now called Hanoi. Freshly ground ink still hangs cool and fragrant in the air. He is learning to write, like any child in the first days of holding a brush. This boy is Emperor Lê Huyền Tông.

His personal name was Lê Duy Vũ. He was born in 1654, the son of Emperor Lê Thần Tông, a ruler of the Restored Lê dynasty. He was born into a line of kings. But before he was an emperor, he was a child, with clumsy hands and round eyes full of wonder at everything around him.

He took the throne at the end of 1662, when he was only about eight years old. At eight, a child is still counting on his fingers, still busy with crickets and kites. Yet he was placed on the throne, and a whole country was put into his hands. Perhaps in those first days, sitting in the vast dragon hall, he was as shy as he was before a blank page each morning.

The next year, 1663, the court chose a reign name for him, a name for the whole age of his rule. The name was Cảnh Trị. And here is the strangest part. Scribes copied those two characters onto edicts, and the edicts were sent in every direction, out to the most distant villages in the land. The strokes on those edicts were beautiful and steady, the work of skilled adult hands.

Out there, the two characters that named his age were traveling to the four corners of the country, bold and full, and everyone who saw them felt respect. Meanwhile, in the small room in Thăng Long, the boy who owned that name was still shaping his first strokes with a trembling hand. Some strokes leaned. Some were not yet straight. A name had already grown up and gone out among the people, while the small hand behind it was still learning to write. There is something both funny and warm in that picture.

But the boy emperor did not have to carry everything alone. Nearest to him, and fondest of him, sat his mother, the Empress Dowager Phạm Thị Ngọc Hậu. She looked after him in the deep quiet of the palace and watched over his lessons in writing, in good manners, and in the proper way for an emperor to speak. Surely there were times when she sat beside him and watched him dip the brush in the inkstone. She would gently remind him to hold it straight and sit up tall, as so many mothers do beside their children.

Helping with the heavy business of the country was Lord Trịnh Tạc, who at that time oversaw the affairs of the court. A child of eight could hardly carry the hundred tasks of a whole realm. The grown-ups around him each lent a hand and took on the heavy work, so that the boy could grow up in peace and keep learning. Day after day, the palace in Thăng Long was warm with patient teaching.

And he grew up in their care. Each day he learned a little more, one more character, one more wise saying. The leaning and clumsiness of the early days would slowly become upright and neat, the way every diligent child grows from one day to the next.

Out in the country, along countless roads, the two characters Cảnh Trị still travel on the edicts, carrying the name of an age that belongs to the boy in Thăng Long. And in the quiet room, in the morning light, the boy still bends over his paper and slowly draws one round, beautiful stroke. A name has grown up and gone across the land, and a small hand grows a little every day to keep up with it.