Nguyen Trung Truc Communal House

People in Rạch Giá have their own short name for this place. They call it the tomb and the communal house, in one breath, because the two stand in the same grounds. The communal house is where he is worshipped. His grave lies inside it.

The man is Nguyễn Trung Trực. People across the south have remembered him with gratitude for more than a hundred and fifty years, and here they have kept him in one place.

According to the Kiên Giang newspaper, two feats are most often tied to his name. In 1861 he commanded the burning of the French warship Esperance at Nhựt Tảo. In 1868 he led his men in taking the Kiên Giang post. That same year he was captured and died.

In 1869, the next year, the fishing families of Rạch Giá built a small wooden house with a leaf roof to worship him. They were not allowed to set up a stone tablet or hold a large ceremony. Still, they kept him in their memory in their own way, quietly and firmly.

He had only just died, and the French still held the whole region. Yet the people built the house anyway. It was more than respect. It was a way of speaking without words.

Today the communal house has a main hall, with an east wing and a west wing. It stands on the bank of the Kiên River, close to where the river meets the sea at Rạch Giá. In 1988 the Ministry of Culture ranked the tomb and communal house a national historic and cultural site.

The grounds also hold an exhibition house on his life and work. Objects, keepsakes and stories about his life are kept there, so that people who come later can see them with their own eyes and not only hear them told.

There is one more detail. Since 1989 the grounds have held a free clinic of thuốc Nam, a name meaning Southern medicine, Vietnam's own herbal medicine. People come to collect remedies and to have acupuncture, and they pay nothing. The clinic has kept going for many years. It is another layer of meaning in this place. This is not only somewhere to remember a man. It is somewhere people keep looking after one another.

Then there is the festival. On the twenty-sixth, twenty-seventh and twenty-eighth days of the eighth lunar month each year, Rạch Giá holds a festival at the communal house, and people gather from all over. In 2019 there were more than 1,200,000 visits for the 151st anniversary of his death. In 2023 the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism added the Nguyễn Trung Trực Communal House Festival to the national list of intangible cultural heritage.

Incense smoke rises from the main hall, and the sound of the Kiên River drifts in from the direction of the sea. The place has lasted more than a hundred and fifty years, and no one ordered it. The people of Rạch Giá chose to keep him, generation after generation, quietly and steadily, like the river that keeps on flowing.