Nom Village and Pagoda

About 30 kilometers east of Hanoi lies a village that has kept what many places have lost.

This is Nôm village, in Đại Đồng commune, Hưng Yên. In 2020, the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism ranked the village's group of monuments as a national historic site of architecture and art. But people loved Nôm long before that title. They loved it for what is still here: the old village gate, the banyan tree, the communal house, the pagoda, the stone bridge, the market and the ancestral houses of the clans. Together they make a whole village of northern Vietnam.

Start at the gate. Passing through it, you enter a place that still keeps the structure of a traditional village. Beyond the gate are a bridge, many clan ancestral houses and the homes of the villagers.

The first stop is the Tam Giang communal house. It honors Saint Tam Giang, described as a general from the time of the Trưng Sisters. The Trưng Sisters were two sisters who led an uprising long ago, and they are honored across Vietnam as heroines. The house keeps 18 royal decrees, handed down through the dynasties. They are solid proof of how old the village's faith is.

After the communal house comes the place many visitors remember best. It is the stone bridge over the Nguyệt Đức River. It has nine spans. Its deck is laid with slabs of blue stone, and along both sides the parapet has stones carved with patterns. The bridge joins the village to the Nôm market and the Nôm Pagoda on the far side. It was never built for photographs. For many years it served the daily life of the whole village, linking the place where people lived with the place where they traded and the place where they worshiped.

Across the bridge, the market and the pagoda stand side by side. The market is for trade. The pagoda is for the Buddha. The village lives on one side, and livelihood and spirit sit on the other. One stone bridge joins them all. It is a way of planning a village that the Vietnamese have followed for many centuries.

The Nôm Pagoda is also called the Đại Đồng Pagoda. Its formal name is Linh Thông Cổ Tự. No record gives the exact date it was founded. According to legend, it began as three small bays in the middle of an ancient pine forest. In 1680, under the Later Lê dynasty, the pagoda was rebuilt on a larger scale. After that it was restored in several rounds under the Nguyễn dynasty. The first founding is unrecorded, but the year 1680 stands on firm historical ground.

The pagoda today follows the plan of the character Quốc, a central block surrounded by corridors. The front hall has seven bays. The upper hall has four. Two rows of corridors run along the sides, ten bays on each side. There are also the Mother Goddess house, the Patriarch house and several smaller buildings.

But what people mention most about the Nôm Pagoda is its clay statues. According to the records, the pagoda keeps hundreds of Buddha statues of fired clay. It is an old collection of unusual richness and rare artistic value.

The statues stand in the worship halls and along the two corridors. They are terracotta, not red lacquer and gold leaf. Their color is earth brown, plain and humble, and that is what sets this pagoda apart. Terracotta statues were once common in the pagodas of northern Vietnam, but many places have replaced them with other statues. At the Nôm Pagoda, the old clay statues are still kept.

In the pagoda grounds stands the Quan Âm pavilion, reflected in the water of a pond. Quan Âm is the bodhisattva of compassion. A garden of old stupas stands quietly among the green trees.

The pagoda was ranked a national monument of architecture and art in 1994. Every year its traditional festival is held on the 10th, 11th and 12th days of the first lunar month. There are rites of offering and incense, and folk games: quan họ singing on boats, old-style chèo, human chess and rooster fights. Quan họ is call-and-response folk singing from Bắc Ninh. Chèo is a traditional form of Vietnamese theater.

The worth of Nôm village lies in what has stayed whole as much as in its buildings. The village gate is still there to walk through. The stone bridge is still there to cross. The market is still there to stop at. The pagoda is still there for offering incense. In many places those things were lost long ago. Here they remain, and that is rare.