Emperor Thieu Tri

A poem whose characters do not stand in lines. They sit in rings, one inside another, like the petals of a flower or a round board for a game. Here is the strange part. A reader may begin at different characters, follow different rings, and still come out with a proper poem. The person who thought up this marvelous game of words was an emperor. His name was Thiệu Trị.

The poem is called Vũ trung sơn thủy, which means mountains and rivers in the rain. It has only 56 characters. Yet from those 56 small characters, readers find 64 different poems of eight lines each, and every one is neat, with rhyme and rhythm.

There is more. Researchers who try other poetic forms, change where the lines break and change the path between the characters have found 128 ways to read it in all. Those 128 readings all bloom from one circle of 56 characters. Even with so few characters, it is like a small maze, and whichever way a reader turns, the path ends in a lovely poem.

The old chronicles describe the emperor behind it as gentle, mild in temper, and careful of the affairs of the country. He was deeply learned, which means he read widely and understood much. Above all, he loved to write poems. Perhaps it was this love of words that led him to think of setting them in circles, a way so clever and so full of fun.

Thiệu Trị was the third emperor of the Nguyễn dynasty, and he held his court in Hue. The Nguyễn dynasty was Vietnam's last royal dynasty, which reigned from 1802 to 1945. His father was Emperor Minh Mạng, a ruler who loved books. A father who loved books and a son who was crazy about poetry: the two of them were joined by one love of the written word. Thiệu Trị came to the throne in 1841 and reigned until 1847.

As a small boy, he was looked after and taught by his grandmother, Empress Dowager Nhân Tuyên. Her own hands fed and raised him, and shaped him from his earliest days. Grown up, he was a dutiful son and grandson, and he kept in his heart what he owed to the one who had cherished him. He was a gentle, grateful boy, raised among so much love, and he grew up to become a gentle emperor.

Now back to the circle poem. The 56 characters sit still on their rings, quietly waiting for a reader to come. One person puts a finger on a character and moves on. A poem appears. Another person touches the character beside it and takes a different road. Another new poem appears. So it goes, 64 poems, then 128 ways, each reader finding a path of their own.

That is the gift the gentle Emperor Thiệu Trị left behind. It is not a poem to learn by heart. It is a game of words, to be explored together. Read forward, read backward, read around the ring, and see how many different poems the characters give. The joy of the poetry-loving emperor still sits in every one of them, put there a very long time ago.