Mount Bai Tho

In Ha Long, one mountain is a book written on stone. It is Mount Bài Thơ.

Bài Thơ means a poem, and the name speaks of verses, of a cliff face, and of the emperors and lords who came here and left their words behind.

The mountain was not always called Bài Thơ. The Quang Ninh newspaper reports that its old name was Rọi Đèn. In Chinese characters it was written Truyền Đăng Sơn, the mountain that passes on the lamp. The name goes with a story of warning fires at the sea gate of the northeast. Flames on the summit told boats far out at sea where they were and what lay ahead.

Then in 1468, Emperor Lê Thánh Tông patrolled the waters of the northeast. He ruled from 1460 to 1497. He looked up at the limestone mass jutting out from the edge of the bay, then down at the green water below, and he had a poem carved into the rock face. It was not the first time he had done this. He is famous as one of the emperors who honored poetry and literature most in Vietnamese history. When he left his verse on this cliff, the mountain received a new name.

More than 200 years later, in 1729, Lord Trịnh Cương answered the emperor's poem with one of his own and had it carved in the stone as well. The Trịnh lords were a noble family who dominated northern Vietnam. From then on, the cliff held two poems from two different eras.

This is what makes the mountain more than a block of stone. It is a place of literature. People of the past used nature like a sheet of paper, and they left writing that hundreds of years have not erased.

The historic and scenic site of Mount Bài Thơ is ranked as a national-level monument. It includes the inscriptions carved on the mountain, Long Tiên Pagoda, and the temple of Đức Ông Trần Quốc Nghiễn. The whole site lies in the heart of Hồng Gai, facing the bay.

One more layer of history lies on the mountain, and few people know it. The list of monuments kept by the city of Ha Long names the main communications center of the Quang Ninh post office, from 1964 to 1975, as a separate national-level monument. It is tied to the work of the postal service during the war, in the years of air attacks. It is also tied to Nguyễn Thị Lạt, a staff member who died on June 9, 1972. So on one mountain there are both an emperor's poem and the memory of war.

From the Hồng Gai side, the mountain stands apart. It is a block of limestone rising from the middle of the city, facing straight out to Ha Long Bay. UNESCO describes the bay as a karst landscape of limestone towers worn by the sea, with more than 1,000 limestone islands. Mount Bài Thơ is part of that landscape. The difference is that it sits right beside the city and carries poems cut into its rock.

Its sheer gray-blue face draws a straight line between the city and the sky. Somewhere on that cliff, the poem of Emperor Lê Thánh Tông is still there, whole, after more than 500 years.