Lord Trinh Sam

Above the entrance of a great cave in northern Vietnam, five characters are cut deep into the rock. The strokes are large and firm. They read Nam thiên đệ nhất động, which means the most beautiful cave in the southern sky. Hundreds of years of sun and rain have passed. The man who carved them is long gone, yet every stroke still stands sharp in the stone. The one who set those five characters on the wall was a lord who loved books and loved beautiful scenery. His name was Trịnh Sâm.

He was born in 1739. His father was Trịnh Doanh, who held the title Minh Đô Vương. He grew up in a family busy with the affairs of the country. Yet what people remember best about him from his boyhood is simple.

The old histories say that from early childhood he was a bright boy who loved learning. Every day he practiced his writing, read books, and trained in the martial arts as well. Some days he sat over a book so absorbed that he forgot the hour of the meal, and he read on until dark, when a lamp had to be lit. That love of reading stayed with him all his life.

He took over from his father and became lord in 1767. He was the ninth of the Trịnh lords, with the title Tĩnh Đô Vương. A lord stood beside the emperor and supported him, but he was not an emperor. In those days the country had both a Lê emperor and a Trịnh lord, each with a role of his own.

But this story is not about the affairs of state. It is about a lovely passion of his. He was in love with the mountains, rivers and caves of the north.

Trịnh Sâm was also a poet. Wherever he found a fine mountain, a clear lake or a deep cave, he stopped to look, and then he wrote a poem about the scene. He loved the cool, damp breath that comes out of the mouth of a deep cave. He loved a wide lake in the middle of the capital, calm as a mirror that held all the clouds and sky. And he had one unusual habit. He did not keep those poems to himself. He had them carved into the rock wall right where he stood, so that the scenery and the verses would stay together for a long time.

Carving verse into stone is not easy. A craftsman had to chisel stroke after stroke, and sometimes a single poem took days of steady work. But that is why the words are not carried off by the wind or washed away by the rain. From one generation to the next, anyone passing by can read them.

In 1770, on a trip to the Hương Sơn area, he visited Hương Tích Cave. It is a sacred cave that people have sought out with reverence for generations. He stood at the mouth of the cave, deep, cool and grand, and he was so moved that he wrote five characters there. They were Nam thiên đệ nhất động, the same five characters we began with.

His brush left marks in many other beautiful places. In the Tràng An area of Ninh Binh, he left poems carved in Luồn Cave. He left two large characters, Bích Động, on a mountain wall, and he wrote a poem on Hồi Hạc mountain. In the region known as xứ Thanh, he also left poems and carved characters at many scenic spots. Among them are Từ Thức Cave and Xuân Đài mountain.

Here was a man who loved beauty so much that he wanted to gather it up in verse and entrust it to stone, a gift for people not yet born. People remember him as the boy who loved books. He grew into a man who loved fine scenery, traveled across the land and left his poems on stone.

On the cliffs of Tràng An and around Bích Động, a stroke darkened by time may be one of his. It may be the words of a man who loved mountains and rivers, lying quietly on the stone for hundreds of years.