Mac Citadel of Lang Son

In Tam Thanh ward, on the same limestone ridge as Tam Thanh Cave and Tô Thị Mountain, a military work stands half hidden. Most visitors look at it without grasping all that it means.

The Mạc Citadel.

The name sounds simple, but it holds a stormy chapter in the history of the Mạc dynasty on the northern border of Vietnam.

To see why the citadel stands here, it helps to know what came before. In 1592, the Trịnh lords helped the Lê dynasty drive the Mạc out of Thăng Long, the city now called Hanoi. The Trịnh lords were a noble family who dominated northern Vietnam.

The Mạc lost their capital but not everything. Their remaining troops and royal family members withdrew to the northern border provinces. Cao Bằng and Lạng Sơn were among them. Thái Nguyên and Tuyên Quang were two more. There they set up bases and kept up their resistance to the Lê and Trịnh rulers for decades.

Lạng Sơn is a mountainous province in the northeast of Vietnam. There Mạc Kính Cung took hold of the land. He had a citadel built on the mountain of Vệ Sơn Đông Kinh, where the Mạc Citadel stands today.

The strategic aim was plain: to control the one road linking Vietnam and China. Whoever held that road controlled the traffic, trade and military movement across the border region.

The builders did not raise a neat square citadel on a plain. They studied the land and let the land do most of the defending. The provincial department of culture, sports and tourism describes how the citadel uses two mountain slopes to form a broad basin, and walls close off both ends. Mountain on either side, stone wall at each end, and inside, room enough to station troops and hold a defense.

This was a very practical and clever way to build. It suited the land of Lạng Sơn, and it suited the Mạc, who no longer had the resources to raise great capitals as they had in Thăng Long.

Two stretches of wall remain today, about 300 meters long. The top of the wall is about 1 meter wide, and it is built of large blocks of stone. Loopholes still pierce the wall, rectangular gaps through which defenders could look out and shoot without putting their heads outside. They show that this citadel was built to fight, not to decorate.

About 100 steps climb the mountainside to the gate. Each step up brings a visitor closer to the view that Mạc soldiers once watched over, through many decades of guard duty.

From the top, looking outward, it is easy to see why this is a strong defensive position. The defenders look down, and attackers below have to climb. There is no way around the slopes on either side. That is why the citadel was built here and not somewhere else.

Beside the great capitals, the citadel is not large. That does not lessen its worth. At a scientific seminar on the Mạc dynasty, Doctor Đỗ Thị Thùy Lan observed that the citadel in Lạng Sơn is one of the most intact Mạc strongholds among those that remain in the provinces today. In other words, it is one of the rare physical traces, still readable, of a dynasty that ruled Vietnam for more than 60 years.

People in Lạng Sơn have a legend that calls it the citadel built by immortals. The Lạng Sơn newspaper explains that this legend is a cultural way of reading this very citadel, not a story about some other, mythical building. The name may bring a folk tale to mind. But the historical truth is that ordinary stonemasons built these walls, with sweat and effort, at a time when their dynasty was in decline.

On those mossy stone steps, it is easy to picture a Mạc soldier looking through a loophole at the valley below, in the border fog, waiting for his dynasty to rise again. The Mạc did not win. But their stone wall still stands here.