Home of the Poet Nguyen Du

The poem begins with a single line of verse: within a hundred years of human life, talent and fate are strangely apt to hate each other.

That is the opening line of the Tale of Kiều. This is Tiên Điền, in the Nghi Xuân area. It lies in Hà Tĩnh province. Here, the line gains one more layer of meaning. Nguyễn Du was not only writing about human fate in general. He wrote from his own life, full of upheaval, loss, and changing fortunes.

The heritage site of the great poet Nguyễn Du stands here, on his home ground. It is ranked a special national monument.

In 2013, UNESCO's General Conference met in Paris for its 37th session. There, Nguyễn Du was honored as a great figure of world culture. The honor was tied to the 250th anniversary of his birth, marked from 2014 to 2015.

The site belongs not only to Nguyễn Du but to the whole Nguyễn family of Tiên Điền. Over many generations, it was one of the most famous families of examination scholars in the Nghệ Tĩnh region. His father, Nguyễn Nghiễm, passed the royal examinations in 1731 with the rank of Hoàng giáp. Under the Lê dynasty he rose to the office of Tham Tụng, the highest office among the officials of that time. Around 1735, he built the Văn Thánh Bình Văn hall in the family garden. There the young were taught the love of learning.

Nguyễn Du was born in 1765 in Thăng Long, the city now called Hanoi. His courtesy name was Tố Như, and his pen name was Thanh Hiên. His father came from Tiên Điền, and his mother from Kinh Bắc. He lost his father at the age of ten. At 13, he lost his mother.

The years from 1789 to 1802 were the hardest. The Lê dynasty collapsed and the Tây Sơn rose to power. The Tây Sơn were three brothers who led an uprising from 1771 and for a time ruled Vietnam. Nguyễn Du lived in retreat and wandered, poor and often ill. Those years shaped the deep humanity of his poetry. In the Tale of Kiều, one hears a man who truly knew what pain was.

In 1802, he took office under the Nguyễn dynasty, Vietnam's last royal dynasty. From 1813 to 1814, he led an embassy as chief envoy to the court of the Qing, the dynasty then ruling China. That journey left 131 poems in classical Chinese, collected as Bắc hành tạp lục.

He died in Hue on the tenth day of the eighth lunar month of the year Canh Thìn. That was September 16, 1820. The cause was cholera, in a great epidemic that took more than 200,000 lives. He was only in his fifties. He had not yet carried out his mission to the Qing court, to report the death of Emperor Gia Long.

Four years later, in 1824, his son Nguyễn Ngũ went to Hue to ask leave to bring his father's remains home. The remains were moved several times. At last they were buried in the Cùng field at Tiên Điền. Not long after his death, a memorial temple to Nguyễn Du was set up in the garden of his old home.

The Văn Thánh Bình Văn hall is the first stop. The poet's father built it as a place to honor learning. The young people of the family and the village gathered there to read and judge one another's writing. It bears witness to a tradition of study that ran through many generations of this family.

The memorial temple is the heart of the site. Its plan follows the shape of the character đinh. Đinh is a Chinese character shaped like the letter T. An upper hall and a lower hall are joined together. Inside stands a stone ancestral tablet, carved with his pen name.

The exhibition house keeps nearly 1,000 objects and documents about Nguyễn Du and his family. The space follows three themes. The first is his homeland and family, the second his life and work. The third is his influence on literature in Vietnam and around the world. The collection includes a copy of the Tale of Kiều printed from woodblocks in 1866. An inkstone and brush linked with his writing life are here too. There is also a calligraphy scroll that copies out all 3,254 lines of the poem. It is recorded as the longest in Vietnam.

The last stop, and the most moving, is the tomb in the Cùng field. The grave is rectangular and faces due west, quiet in the middle of the field. A stone stele reads: "World Cultural Figure, Great Poet Nguyễn Du."

The man who lies beneath this ground wrote the Tale of Kiều. It runs to 3,254 lines of lục bát. Lục bát means six-eight, a verse form that alternates lines of six and eight syllables. The poem has been translated into more than 20 languages.

The work's original title was Đoạn trường tân thanh. It means a new cry of gut-wrenching grief.

That is the title a man gave his work after living through every layer of suffering, loss and human kindness. It is less a name chosen for literature than a name for an understanding of life.

And this ground is where that story began.