Emperor Tran Nghe Tong

An old man sits on the step beside his house, his hair gone white and his walk grown slow. Next to him a child hugs both knees, eyes wide, waiting for a story. Out in the yard the afternoon wind stirs the leaves of the tree, and yellow sunlight rests on the old tiled roof. The old man was once an emperor, and now he is a retired emperor. Yet those slow feet once had to travel very far from a roof like this one. The old man is Emperor Trần Nghệ Tông.

His given name was Trần Phủ. He was an emperor of the Trần dynasty, which ruled Vietnam from 1225 to 1400.

His father was Emperor Trần Minh Tông. So Trần Phủ was born into a house where the throne passed from one generation to the next.

But the story he tells the child that day is not a cheerful one. It is about a hard stretch of his life, before he was emperor, when everything seemed lost.

He tells how the Trần court fell into trouble. The throne, which belonged to the Trần family, passed into the hands of a man from outside the family, Dương Nhật Lễ. So Trần Phủ, not yet an emperor, had to leave the capital. He had to leave the places he knew and go to a land that was strange to him.

The child blinks and asks softly, "Where did you have to go, Grandfather?" The old man smiles. He went up to the Đà Giang region, he says, in the autumn of 1370.

A man who had lived in the capital now packed his bundle and set off for a far country of forests and mountains. Everything had to begin again from nothing. It must have been sad, and it must have been frightening. Yet as the old man tells it, his voice is not sad at all. Those hard days taught him something precious.

It was patience. In Đà Giang he did not sit still and complain. Quietly, together with the people of his family, he prepared and rebuilt his strength little by little. Day by day, one person after another found their way to him. It was the way people gather small sticks, one at a time, to light a hearth fire.

The child asks again, "And then what, Grandfather?" The old man answers, "Then I went back." When he was strong enough, he led his men to Kiến Hưng, and from there back to the capital. He won the throne back for the Trần family, and in November 1370 he formally became emperor.

That is the wonder of it. A man had given up everything, gone far away, and started again from the smallest things. And still he did not give up. He kept on, patient, one step after another, until at last he found the road home.

The child cries out and claps with delight. "So you did get home, Grandfather!" The old man nods, and a kind gladness shines in his eyes. "That is right, child," he says. "Sometimes even grown people have to begin again."

He was emperor for about two years. In 1372 he gave up the throne and became a retired emperor, a Thượng hoàng. He chose to stand behind the throne, to live quiet days, and to watch over the affairs of the country from afar.

His years as a retired emperor were long, from 1372 to about 1394, more than 20 years of watching quietly from a distance. The man who had once fled the capital now sat in peace on his own doorstep and told stories to a child.

That golden afternoon stays as it was. An old man with white hair on the step, a child listening with all his heart, and the wind moving lightly in the tree in the yard. The one telling the story had gone very far, and he had come home.