Ke Go Lake

On March 26, 1976, tens of thousands of people from Hà Tĩnh headed for the land southwest of the city. The country had been unified for less than a year. They did not come as visitors. They came to build a lake.

Some works are made with money and machines. This one was made with people. They dammed the Rào Cái River, raised an embankment, dug canals and leveled the hills. For four years they worked with their hands, their shoulders, their hoes and their wheelbarrows.

On March 26, 1980, exactly four years after work began, Kẻ Gỗ Lake was officially complete.

The lake lies about 20 kilometers southwest of Hà Tĩnh city. It spreads across three areas of the province. Two of them are Cẩm Xuyên and Kỳ Anh. The third is Hương Khê. Its designed capacity is 345 million cubic meters of water. The irrigation system fed by the lake secures water for more than 26,000 hectares of farmland. It also supplies water for homes and industry, and it helps reduce floods downstream in every rainy season.

It is the second largest irrigation reservoir in Hà Tĩnh.

But Kẻ Gỗ is more than an engineering work. Around the lake, and spreading west from it, lies the Kẻ Gỗ Lake Forest National Nature Reserve. The Prime Minister established it in 1996, and it covers 24,801 hectares. State tourism sources describe the reserve as rich and varied in plants and animals.

Looking out from here, the water spreads wide and open. Green hills wrap around it, with secondary forest and shrubs on the slopes, and the sky is reflected in the lake. It is a typical natural scene of a reservoir region in central Vietnam.

The lake has also entered Vietnamese poetry and music. One song is called "The People Who Went to Build Kẻ Gỗ Lake". It is tied to the memory of how the people of Hà Tĩnh built the lake after unification.

Kẻ Gỗ is a place where three things meet. One is the history of shared labor by the people of Hà Tĩnh after unification. Another is the daily work of an irrigation system that feeds tens of thousands of hectares of rice. The third is the beauty of the water and the green forest around it.

Not many spots in central Vietnam hold all three in one setting. And this one was built by hand, by people of Hà Tĩnh who had barely rested after the war before they took up their hoes again to raise a dam. The water today is calm, green and wide, but beneath it lie four years of sweat from tens of thousands of people.