Lord Nguyen Phuc Khoat

It was the first morning of Tết, the Lunar New Year festival in Vietnam. A little girl stepped into the courtyard in a brand-new long dress. The soft panels of the dress swayed with every step. The dress she wore had been traveling for several hundred years. Its story begins with a lord of Hue, who laid the foundation for that flowing shape.

The lord was Nguyễn Phúc Khoát, whom later generations call Võ Vương. He was born more than 300 years ago, and he lived from 1714 to 1765. He was the eighth of the Nguyễn lords, a noble family who ruled southern Vietnam from the 16th to the 18th century. He ruled the southern lands called Đàng Trong.

In those days the country was divided into two regions. Đàng Ngoài lay in the north and Đàng Trong in the south, and each had its own ways. From 1738 Lord Nguyễn Phúc Khoát ruled the south from his capital at Phú Xuân. That is the Hue region of today.

The year 1744 was a special one. In that year he became the first Nguyễn lord to declare himself a king, and he took the title Võ Vương. He had palaces built beside the Perfume River at Phú Xuân, on the scale of a royal court. He wanted Đàng Trong to look like a realm of its own.

Yet the people of Hue remember him less for palaces or titles than for a piece of clothing.

When he declared himself king, Võ Vương reformed the clothing worn across Đàng Trong. He set out a style of long garment for men and for women alike, so that the dress of the south would have its own look, easy to recognize. From those rules a new shape slowly formed. The garment was made of five panels of cloth sewn together, with buttons fastened neatly to one side, and it was worn with flowing long trousers. Later people called it the áo ngũ thân and saw it as the forerunner of the Vietnamese áo dài. The áo dài is a traditional Vietnamese long tunic.

A single rule from the old court, and over several hundred years it opened into countless soft dresses. One of them was the dress the girl wore that morning to wish everyone a happy new year.

The historian Lê Quý Đôn left a line in a book called Phủ biên tạp lục. He wrote that Lord Nguyễn Phúc Khoát had written the first pages in the history of the áo dài. It was a short note, but it shows that this familiar shape had a beginning, and that someone had laid its foundation.

People do not say that he alone thought up the áo dài. He drew the first line. After him, many hands in many generations carried it on, and each age embroidered another touch of beauty, until the dress grew softer and more graceful by the year.

To this day, Hue holds a ceremony to honor Lord Nguyễn Phúc Khoát. It remembers the man who laid the foundation for the Vietnamese áo dài. At every important occasion and every returning spring, Vietnamese people everywhere put on the áo dài, as if holding on to a quiet thread that links them to the people of long ago in Hue.

So on that first morning, the little girl skipped about the courtyard in her new dress. On her shoulders the dress floated lightly in the spring sun, carrying a story that was very far away and very close.