Ngang Pass in Ha Tinh

A famous poem about this pass begins: "Stepping up to Ngang Pass, the sun is low and slanting."

Anyone who has learned the poem Crossing Ngang Pass by heart is unlikely to forget that first line. Its author, Bà Huyện Thanh Quan, was a gifted woman poet of Vietnam. She stood at this pass one afternoon and looked down. She felt the emptiness of someone far from home. Out of that feeling she wrote what became one of the best-known poems about loneliness in Vietnam's classical literature.

The same stretch of pass is still here today, and a visitor can stand on it.

Ngang Pass lies in the Hoành Sơn range. It is the natural boundary between Hà Tĩnh and the old Quảng Bình province, now part of Quảng Trị. The Hoành Sơn range reaches out from the Trường Sơn mountains to the sea. Here it presses nearest to the shore and leaves only a narrow gap, rugged and hard to cross. The road over the pass is about 6 kilometers long and rises about 250 meters above sea level. It has many bends and many steep stretches.

At the top stands an old stone gate, with three Chinese characters carved above it: Hoành Sơn Quan. It was built in 1833, the 14th year of the reign of Emperor Minh Mạng. The Hà Tĩnh Museum draws on a chronicle, the Đại Nam thực lục. According to it, the court sent 300 soldiers from Quảng Bình and Hà Tĩnh to build the gate. The work took one month. Afterward a squad leader and 20 soldiers from Quảng Bình were posted to guard the gate, and they changed shifts every month.

Emperor Minh Mạng belonged to the Nguyễn dynasty. It was Vietnam's last royal dynasty, and it reigned from 1802 to 1945. He had the gate built to control the people who passed along the great road between north and south. The Nguyễn records give its purpose as questioning wrongdoers and serving as a guard post. This was no border between nations as we know them today. It was an important point for watching the traffic on the road that ran the length of the country.

Looking from the gate toward Hà Tĩnh, you see the Kỳ Nam area below: fields, hills, and far away the sea. In the other direction lies wide land to the south, where the former Quảng Bình begins. For many centuries, anyone traveling from north to south, or from south to north, had to pass this spot and stop at the gate.

Many of those travelers felt something close to what Bà Huyện Thanh Quan felt. Standing here, they looked at the endless mountains and sea. They felt small, they felt far from home, and they felt something that had no name.

Today most modern traffic does not climb the pass at all. It goes through a tunnel. The road tunnel at Ngang Pass was officially opened on August 21, 2004. The whole route is 2,156 meters long, and the tunnel section is 495 meters. Because of it, traffic no longer depends on the weather or on the steep ground of the pass.

Ngang Pass has nothing grand about it, and it is not a crowded tourist spot. Anyone who stops once at the summit, beside the moss-grown stones of Hoành Sơn Quan, and looks across the mountains and the sea on both sides will see why this small pass entered poetry and history. It has stayed in people's hearts ever since.