Emperor Mac Dang Dung

In a fishing village by the sea, the salt wind blows in from the river mouth. On the sand, a boy bends his back to haul a net. This is the village of Cổ Trai. The region was called Nghi Dương then. Today it belongs to Kiến Thụy, in the city of Hải Phòng. And the sturdy boy would grow up to do something the whole country still remembers.

That boy was Mạc Đăng Dung.

His family was poor, and he made his living by fishing. Every day he went out to sea with his father, hauling in heavy nets, his hands rough from rope and salt water. Those hard years by the sea gave him a broad, powerful body and a strength greater than most.

In the village, the children wrestled on the sand and raced their boats over the waves. Young Mạc Đăng Dung was often the winner. Hands used to holding the oar grew used to the wrestler's hold as well. People say that because he wrestled so well, he took the examination and was made a Đô lực sĩ. It was a rank in the army for men of strength and martial skill.

That strength began as a way to haul nets. Then it became a way to go far.

He was a fishing-village boy with no wide fields and no family standing, only the sea and his two hands. Yet from the sand of his home, he rose step by step into the army, and then into history.

In 1527, Mạc Đăng Dung ascended the throne and began the Mạc dynasty. From then on, he did something few earlier rulers had done. He turned toward the sea.

Most of the country's old capitals lay deep inland, with their backs to the sea. But he took his own seaside homeland and built it into a new center, called Dương Kinh. It was one of the rare capitals in Vietnam's medieval period that faced the sea. It was also the second largest center, after Thăng Long, the city now called Hanoi.

So the fishing district where he once hauled nets became a new political and economic center, facing the water. A place that had known only the sound of waves and the voices of men calling to each other as they put out to sea now had the rhythm of a land turned toward the ocean.

People say he never forgot where he came from. After a few years as emperor, he handed the throne to his son, Mạc Đăng Doanh. Then he withdrew to live in his own home village, Cổ Trai. A child of the sea, at the end of his life he came back to the sea.

Mạc Đăng Dung was born in 1483 and died in 1541. The dynasty he founded lasted from 1527 to 1592. On the land of Dương Kinh, it left a layer of history of its own, one that smells of sea salt.

There are many ways of seeing him in history, and each age has argued about him differently. But one thing is remembered. It is the story of a poor fishing-village boy who grew up strong thanks to the sea, and who carried his seaside homeland to a new stature.

At the river mouth of Kiến Thụy, the wind is as salty today as it was then, and the waves still break with the same steady beat. Somewhere in that sound, the shadow of a boy hauling a net seems to linger, the boy who walked out from the sand of his home, carrying the strength of the sea, to found a whole dynasty.