Jun and M'Lieng Villages

Visitors to a village in the Central Highlands may wonder whether they are seeing living culture or culture put on display. At Jun and M'Liêng, two villages beside a lake, the answer is still being written every day by the people who live there.

Buôn Jun lies in Liên Sơn town. That is in the Lắk area, in Đắk Lắk Province. It has 117 households and 450 people, and about 95 percent of them are M'Nông. The M'Nông are one of the peoples of Vietnam's Central Highlands. At the end of 2024, the village was officially announced as a community tourism destination. For many years before that, the villagers had been doing this work on their own. They took guests in to sleep in longhouses, took them out on boats, and played gongs for them to hear.

Today the village has 8 longhouses that welcome overnight guests, 2 restaurants, 5 places selling souvenirs, and 2 gong troupes. Those numbers show that tourism here was not a model pressed on the village from above. It grew from the hands of the villagers themselves.

One thing is worth keeping in mind on entering Buôn Jun. This is a village that is alive, not an exhibition. Behind the longhouse roofs are family meals, children's voices, and the ordinary rhythm of the day. A visitor comes as a guest invited into a home, not as a viewer walking through a gallery.

From the landing near Buôn Jun, a visitor can step into a dugout boat, one hollowed from a single tree trunk, and drift out onto Lắk Lake. The water opens wide, the forested hills lie reflected in it, and the small boat parts the surface without a sound. Some days the lake is as flat as a mirror. In the windy, rainy season, waves rise and rock the boat. Sitting in a dugout in the middle of the lake, a person sees how closely the M'Nông have lived with the water and the forest.

Buôn M'Liêng is about 5 kilometers from the center of the Lắk area. It lies in Đắk Liêng commune. It is an old village of the M'Nông Rlăm. It still keeps its longhouse ways, its community customs, and the sound of gongs handed down through the generations. In 2006, a project to preserve traditional cultural villages began at M'Liêng. In 2011, the village was chosen as a place to protect the gong cultural space.

Preserving does not mean that everything stands still. More than 90 percent of the houses in the village are still M'Nông longhouses. Only the materials have changed, because forest timber grows scarcer each year. People still have to replace a roof when it leaks, and they use new materials when old timber is gone. What is kept is not only the outer shape. It is the community way of life, the way the villagers live, hold their rituals, and sing together.

In the grounds of the community cultural house in M'Liêng stands an old banyan tree. In 2017, it was given a plaque for the protection of ancient trees. Standing in its cool shade, a visitor can understand why the M'Nông regard the tree as sacred, a support for the whole village between earth and sky.

Then there are the gongs. On November 25, 2005, UNESCO inscribed the Space of Gong Culture of the Central Highlands as an intangible cultural heritage of humanity. Listening to the gongs on an evening in the village, a visitor can remember that this is a living heritage. The true value of the gongs lies in the festivals, and in the bond between people, their ancestors, and the spirits. It is more than a sound made for guests. A performance cannot stand in for the whole ritual life of a community. Still, it is a precious chance to hear real sounds and meet real gong players, in the middle of their own village.

Jun and M'Liêng are not places to stop for a photograph and move on. They are places to sit down, share a meal with the villagers, and listen to them tell the stories of their village. Culture in the Central Highlands is not a glass case of costumes and instruments. It is the way a community has chosen to live beside the lake and the forest, together, through many generations. Beside Lắk Lake, the gongs still ring, and the villages still breathe at their own pace.