Linh Phuoc Pagoda

In the courtyard of a pagoda at Trại Mát, 12,000 bottles cling to the body of a dragon. The dragon is 49 meters long.

By rights they should have been thrown away long ago. Yet there they lie, each in its own place, pressed close against the next. They have stayed that way for many years.

The dragon winds through a courtyard called Long Hoa Viên, outside the center of Da Lat. Its body wears a coat of scales made from bottles. A dragon that long cannot be taken in at a glance: the only way to see it whole is to walk beside it, from the head to the tip of the tail. When the highland sun shines down, each bottle catches a little light and throws it off in its own direction. The whole dragon glitters as if it had just waded through water.

The place is Linh Phước Pagoda. It also goes by another name, shorter and plainer: chùa Ve Chai, the Bottle Pagoda.

Twelve thousand is hard to picture, but there is one way to do it. Say a household saved 10 bottles every month, without missing a single month. In a year that makes 120 bottles. To gather 12,000, the household would have to keep saving for 100 years without a break. That is longer than a human life.

And all of that is just enough to make the scales of one dragon.

The dragon's back is not smooth. It is rough and uneven. Seen from the side, each bottle stands out, one leaning this way, another leaning that way, and no two exactly alike. Every scale is a bottle gathered from somewhere around this area.

Linh Phước Pagoda was founded in 1949. More than four decades later, in 1990, the Venerable Thích Tâm Vị led a major restoration.

A restoration needs materials. The material he and the monks of the pagoda chose was something every home has and every home throws out: broken pieces.

The monks went to homes around the area to ask for them. They wanted shards of stoneware, shards of porcelain and pieces of bottles that were no longer any use. Then they went to the glass bottle workshops, the factories and the pottery kilns of the region to collect more. It was not done in a single morning. One place gave a few pieces, another gave more, workshop after workshop, kiln after kiln. Bit by bit, what people called rubbish found its way to the pagoda.

Even then the pieces could not be used straight away. Each one first had to be scrubbed clean. After washing, it had to be cut, because a broken piece has jagged edges everywhere and will not fit the line of a pattern or the shape of a dragon scale. After cutting, it had to be ground down, until every piece took its own shape and sat snugly wherever it was placed. No machine did this work for them. Every piece passed through human hands, and each one took as much effort as the last. From the moment a piece was picked up to the final grinding, it was all done by hand.

Only then could the pieces be set in place. And they went everywhere. At Linh Phước Pagoda, the shards of stoneware and porcelain are not a little decoration set in one corner to please the eye. They are the skin of the whole pagoda. The columns are covered in broken pieces. The walls are covered in broken pieces. Most of the patterns and motifs in the pagoda are pieced together from them too. And the body of the dragon in the courtyard, of course, is made the same way.

Up close, each piece shows on its own. Here is a piece of glazed porcelain, there a piece of rough stoneware, over there a piece of clear glass. The wall is not flat. It bulges and dips, and one piece rises a little over the next. From a few paces back, the pieces vanish, leaving only the picture: the patterns, the motifs, and the winding dragon. Only now does the name Ve Chai show its full meaning. It does not name one corner. It names the whole pagoda.

The light here comes from the way the pieces are set. Thousands of tiny curved surfaces sit close together, like thousands of little mirrors. Take one step to the side, and a patch of wall that was soft a moment ago flares bright. Even without a step, a single cloud passing over the sun is enough to soften the whole wall again. The pagoda almost refuses to keep still.

Look up from the dragon's back and there stands Linh Tháp, the bell tower. It rises straight into the sky over Trại Mát. It is so tall that visitors must tip their heads right back to see the top floor. The pagoda is recognized as having the tallest bell tower in Vietnam. On that top floor hangs a great bell weighing 8,500 kilograms. When the bell rings, its sound spreads over the grounds below, where monks and Buddhist followers come and go every day. Then it drifts off into the highland mist.

Little by little, in that same piece-by-piece way, 300 Buddhist followers and 30 artisans set everlasting flowers, one at a time, onto a statue of Quan Thế Âm Bồ Tát. Quan Thế Âm is the bodhisattva of compassion. Flower pressed against flower, until the whole statue was covered. After 36 days, the last flower was set in its place.

Every piece on those walls once had another life. Perhaps one was a bowl that held rice for some family. One may have been a vase that held flowers, another a bottle that sat in a kitchen corner. Then one day they broke, or they were left behind, and ordinarily that would be the end of the story. Here it was not the end. Here they were picked up.

So anyone standing before the dragon at Trại Mát need not hurry to count the bottles. There are far too many to count.

The 12,000 bottles on that dragon's body also mean 12,000 times that a hand reached down and picked up a bottle. Twelve thousand times a bottle was scrubbed clean. Then 12,000 times a bottle was set down in exactly its place, pressed gently, and held still until it stuck fast. The dragon lies there, glittering in the Da Lat sun.

It is not made of bottles. It is made of all those times someone bent down.