Empress Dowager Tu Cung

In Hue, a small woman crossed the grounds of the royal tombs with a light step. She stopped before an altar to her ancestors and quietly lit a single stick of incense. She made no noise and put on no show. Yet this quiet woman had once been the last empress dowager of the Nguyễn dynasty.

Her given name was Hoàng Thị Cúc. Later generations knew her by a lovely royal title, Đoan Huy Empress Dowager Từ Cung. Newspaper accounts give 1890 as the year she was born. Her home was the village of Mỹ Lợi, in Phú Lộc, in the Hue region.

From a country girl of Hue, life carried her into the royal court. She was the mother of Emperor Bảo Đại. Bảo Đại was the last emperor of Vietnam. That made her the last empress dowager of a long dynasty. The Nguyễn dynasty, Vietnam's last royal dynasty, reigned from 1802 to 1945.

She was the mother of an emperor, with the highest rank in the inner palace. It would be easy to assume that such a woman lived in silk and had whatever she wished. But she chose a completely different way of life.

Though her rank was high, she lived very simply and thriftily. She was modest and careful in every habit of her day. Her meals were plain, and she saved her money coin by coin, like a frugal daughter of Hue. Her elegance lay not in gold and finery but in a calm, gentle character.

She was also a sincere follower of the Buddha. Every day, in a still room, she chanted sutras, and her only prayer was for the country to be at peace and for ordinary people to live in calm. Her chanting was steady and soft, like a stream running quietly through the last years of her life.

Yet what the people of Hue remember most may be her devotion to the old ways. After the Nguyễn dynasty had ended, many of the royal family's tombs and shrines grew lonely and empty, with few people left to burn incense there. She could not bear to let the places that honored her ancestors fade away with time.

She used her own money to repair the royal family's tombs and shrines. She also took charge of the offerings made on the death anniversaries of the ancestors. She almost never missed one. Alone and without fuss, she carried the work of keeping the incense burning for a whole family line. She kept the old ways not for the sake of rank but out of deep respect for her forebears.

That same devotion is why she stayed in Hue. Many times, people invited her to move to Saigon, where life would be easier, and each time she refused. She wanted to remain beside the tombs and shrines, with the old ways, in the old capital she had been tied to all her life.

In 1955 she went to live in a small house on Phan Đình Phùng Street, beside the An Cựu River. A newspaper says this is where she spent her last years, in peace beside the gentle water. Today the house is a memorial house.

She died in 1980 at the age of 90. Her life lasted nearly a full century and passed through many changes. Yet what she left behind fits in a single Vietnamese word, giữ, which means to keep. She kept the family's ways, she kept the incense burning, and she kept a sincere heart.

She was an empress dowager who lived like a kind old woman of the neighborhood, lighting a stick of incense each day for those who had passed. That quiet, warm picture stays on beside her river, like thin smoke from the incense that lingers over the old capital.