Emperor Ly Than Tong

Late one afternoon, a soldier set his armor down by the porch. Then he lifted the plow that had hung on the wall for a long time. He wiped off the dust, looked over the blade, and smiled. Tomorrow he would go back to his own family's field. A few children from the hamlet ran after him. They all asked at once how a soldier who guarded the country could come home to plow. He rubbed their heads and said the emperor cared for his soldiers and let them take turns going home. That was an afternoon in the time of Emperor Lý Thần Tông.

The emperor in this story came from an unusual background. His real name was Lý Dương Hoán. His father was Sùng Hiền hầu, a younger brother of Emperor Lý Nhân Tông. Both men belonged to the Lý dynasty, which ruled Vietnam from 1009 to 1225. Lý Nhân Tông had no son, so the old emperor brought his nephew Dương Hoán into the palace, adopted him, and made him crown prince.

That was how a boy not born in the royal palace came to be chosen as heir to the throne. While still a child, at the end of the lunar year Đinh Mùi, Lý Dương Hoán took the throne and became Emperor Lý Thần Tông. He had been born in 1116. When he first put on the royal robe, he was a boy of just over ten.

In fact, from the age of about two, the boy had been raised inside the palace, not under the roof of his father, Sùng Hiền hầu. And as he grew up there at court, people say, he showed a bright mind and a generous nature. He knew how to set the country in order and how to use able, worthy people.

Of all he did, one thing made country people love him most: he let soldiers go home to plow their fields.

In those days, guarding the country was heavy work. The young men of each village had to serve as soldiers, far from their wives and children, far from their plots of land. At home only the old and the very young remained. The fields lacked hands, and harvest time was quieter too. Soldiering kept the country safe, but the work at home piled up. That was the worry of countless families.

Emperor Lý Thần Tông encouraged farming, and he revived a very clever solution. In 1128 he gave an order, following an old custom. The six divisions of the army would take turns going home to work the fields. The practice was given a lovely name, ngụ binh ư nông. It means lodging the army in farming, lodging the soldier in the rice fields.

The method was simple and sound. The soldiers were divided into shifts. Every six months, each group in turn went home to plant and plow. While one shift went back to the fields, another stayed behind on guard, and then they changed places. So the country always had guards, and the fields always had hands.

A soldier's joy on the day he came home was hard to put into words. He leaned his spear against the wall and set his worn conical hat on the step. He took a deep breath of the familiar smell of straw. Only yesterday his hand had gripped a spear shaft at a border pass. Today it held the handle of a plow in his own family's field. His wife followed him out, carrying rice seedlings on a shoulder pole. His child trotted along the raised edge of the field. The whole field buzzed with voices, the splash of water and laughter.

Now the soldier guarded the country with a far easier heart. He knew the field at home would not lie fallow and his children would not go without rice. Half a year later he set off again, light of heart, because when his turn was over he would come home once more.

The emperor's care for his people went further still. Soon after taking the throne, he issued a decree of general amnesty. People whose land had been taken over by the state were all pardoned. That kindness let countless families breathe again.

Later generations have remembered what this way of lodging soldiers in farming achieved. The people had enough to eat and could work in peace. The court spent less, and the army stayed strong. It was a skillful, caring policy that looked after both the men who guarded the country and the people who grew the rice.

Long ago, country people also passed around a gentle folk tale about the emperor's origins. It tells of a kind monk named Từ Đạo Hạnh. But that is only a legend, told among neighbors by the kitchen fire, not something from the history books. What is real, and worth remembering, is an emperor who cared for his soldiers and valued every grain of rice.

The years went by. A country afternoon, more than 800 years ago. The soldier of long ago has become a white-haired old man. He sits by a plow propped in a corner of the yard, telling his grandchildren a story. Long ago, he says, the emperor let him leave the border pass in turns and come home to plant rice. That way he could guard the country and still tend the family field. The children listen with shining eyes. The story of the soldier who came home to his furrows has passed down through many generations. Yet told again, it still seems to carry the sound of people calling each other out to the fields, under the gentle sky of the Vietnamese countryside.