Hai Ba Trung School Hue

Many people walking along Lê Lợi Street, on the south bank of the Perfume River in Hue, turn to look back at a pink school. It is Hai Bà Trưng School. Older people in Hue still call it by its former name, Đồng Khánh.

The school was founded in 1917. It was the first school for girls serving the 13 provinces of central Vietnam. A school just for girls, reaching across so wide a stretch of the country, opened more than a hundred years ago. That was no small thing.

In those days the Đồng Khánh girls wore purple áo dài. The áo dài is a traditional Vietnamese long tunic. Purple became the first thing people remembered when they heard the name of the school. The girls learned sewing and cooking, and also poetry. Sewing and cooking were more than skills. In Hue they were a way of teaching a girl to live with order, and to keep beauty in every small task.

In the mornings of that time, purple tunics flowed from the school gate into the street by the Perfume River. There was the sound of water, and the sound of wooden clogs on the stone-paved road. It was a Hue both calm and lively, never loud, yet remembered always.

What Hai Bà Trưng School holds is more than its name. It holds a layer of memory kept for a whole region. Hue does not live only in its great symbols. It also lives in details small enough to hear ordinary life in, and deep enough to be remembered long after a visit.

Looking through the pink gate, one may glimpse, somewhere in the quiet courtyard at midday, the shadow of a Hue in which the purple tunic still seems to linger to this day.