Hang Kenh Communal House

Dragons coil along the beams of a communal house in the heart of Hải Phòng. The house is more than 300 years old, and it is far more than a place of worship. It is a museum of carving. Researchers of fine art are said to call it a museum of 18th-century folk carving in Vietnam. Looking up at the rafters, crossbeams and wooden panels overhead, it is easy to see why.

This is the Hàng Kênh Communal House. Its formal name in Chinese characters is Nhân Thọ Đình, also known as Đình Trường Thọ. It was built around the year 1719, in the reign of Emperor Lê Dụ Tông.

The communal house honors King Ngô Quyền, who commanded the Battle of Bạch Đằng in 938. That victory ended more than a thousand years of Chinese rule. The villagers of Hàng Kênh honor him as Quốc Tổ Trung Hưng, the ancestor who revived the nation.

Yet worship is not what makes this house famous. Art is. Inside are more than 150 carved panels. Among them are nearly 400 carved dragons, each one in a different pose. Some dragons curl into the shape of a bodhi leaf. Others play among clouds, chase a jewel, appear as mother and child, or ride the waves. Still more share a scene with phoenixes, cranes, the mythical lân, tigers, flowers and leaves. Up on the beams, the dragons coil and surge as if they were moving.

This is the full-bodied dragon style typical of village communal house carving in northern Vietnam, from the end of the 17th century into the start of the 18th. It is very different from the refined court dragons of the Lý and Trần dynasties.

All of these works were made with the traditional mother-and-child joinery of northern carpenters, a system of mortises and tenons. No iron nails were used. The wooden pieces lock tightly into one another through the joints. That is why, after three centuries and many restorations, most of the wooden structure still stands.

In 1962, the Ministry of Culture ranked the communal house a national relic of architecture and art. It was part of the first group of national relics recognized in Vietnam.

Those years were the high point of carving in northern communal houses. But most old communal houses in the north were destroyed or heavily altered through wars and social movements. Hàng Kênh is one of the few that kept its carvings from that period almost whole. That is why it is so rare.

Around the middle of the second lunar month each year, the communal house holds a festival to pray for blessings. It has three special features. The first is hát ả đào, the same art as ca trù. Ca trù is a form of sung poetry from northern Vietnam, and UNESCO has recognized it as intangible cultural heritage. The second is old chèo, a folk theater of northern Vietnam. The third is múa hạc gỗ, the dance of the wooden cranes, which few places have. A system of pull strings moves the wooden cranes, and they sway as if alive among the drums and the music.

In the evening, lights fall on the dragon carvings and give the scene a dreamlike glow. Ca trù and old chèo ring out across the courtyard, while the shadows of 18th-century dragons shimmer in the light.

Hàng Kênh brings three things together. There is history, tied to Ngô Quyền and the Battle of Bạch Đằng. There is art, in nearly 400 carved dragons of the 18th century. And there is community life, in festivals and performances that are still alive today. Overhead, a whole century of northern carpentry unfolds, one dragon chasing another without end.