Mua Cave

Ninh Binh has plenty of places to look at scenery, but only one gives a view over the whole Tam Cốc area from high above. It sits at the top of Múa Mountain, at the end of a long white stone staircase.

The place is called Hang Múa. It lies in the hamlet of Khê Đầu Hạ, in Ninh Xuân commune, Hoa Lư, inside the core zone of the Tràng An Landscape Complex. The national tourism administration puts it about ten kilometers from Ninh Binh city. On a map it does not look far. From the summit, looking down, it is easy to see why so many people come.

First, the name. The national tourism administration and the Ninh Binh tourism promotion center both repeat a local legend. In it, Emperor Trần Thái Tông came to the Hoa Lư area to found the Thái Vi hermitage. He went to the cave at the foot of the mountain to listen to singing and dancing. From then on the cave was called Hang Múa, and múa is the Vietnamese word for dance. Trần Thái Tông belonged to the Trần dynasty, which ruled Vietnam from 1225 to 1400. The story is a folk legend. It gives the place a touch of culture, but it is not an event proved by original records.

The heart of Hang Múa is not the small cave at the foot of the mountain. It is the climb. The tourism promotion center and the national administration both record 486 stone steps up to the top. Seen from the base, the white steps wind along the slope in one long line, and the eye struggles to find where it ends. Many travel articles compare it to the Great Wall in miniature. That comparison comes from local tourism writing and is not an official name, but anyone who looks at that line of steps can see why people say it.

On both sides of the steps are dragons and phoenixes, carved or molded as decoration in the language of traditional art. As the path climbs, the air grows cooler and the view opens up a stretch at a time. At the top of Múa Mountain, also called Ngọa Long Peak, there is a statue of Quan Thế Âm. She is the Buddhist bodhisattva of compassion. A stone dragon stands there too, and a tower rises at the highest point.

Still, what holds people longest at the summit is not these buildings but the view below. The tourism administration's own website describes a river winding between rice fields and limestone mountains. The Tam Cốc rice fields and the Ngô Đồng River spread out to the west. Limestone mountains follow one after another in every direction. The whole scene looks like a picture painted from the imagination of Ninh Binh, yet it is completely real.

In May or June there is one more layer: the lotus season. The Ninh Binh tourism promotion center records June as the month when the lotus blooms most strongly at Hang Múa, and early morning, from six to nine o'clock, as the time when the flowers look their best. The lotus pond at the foot of the mountain holds the reflection of the mountain and the flowers at the same moment.