Pac Ta Temple

A boat glides down the Tuyên Quang reservoir. Water spreads away on every side, and the green mountains reflect in it like an upside-down world. Suddenly the boat comes to a place where one mountain rises with a very special shape.

This is Pác Tạ Mountain. In the Tày language, Pác Tạ means the breast of the sky. The Tày are one of the peoples of northern Vietnam. People in the area also call the mountain Xa Tạ, or Núi Voi, which means Elephant Mountain. From one angle on the lake, it looks like an elephant standing beside a wine jug. That is how the Tày of Na Hang have named and explained their landscape, generation after generation.

A legend tied to the mountain is told across the region. Long ago, it says, an elephant went to war and drank wine until it was drunk. It died on its feet and turned to stone, together with the wine jug beside it. This folk memory has traveled with the land through many generations, and the strange mountain is said to be the living proof of the tale.

At the foot of the mountain stands Pác Tạ Temple. In 2009, it was one of ten relics around the Tuyên Quang reservoir that the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism ranked as historic sites of national level.

The story of the temple belongs to legend and folk belief as well. The Trần dynasty ruled Vietnam from 1225 to 1400. The tale centers on one of its generals, Trần Nhật Duật. In the tale, his consort went with him on an inspection of the lands along the Gâm and Năng rivers. On the way back she met with disaster, and she was buried on the riverbank at the foot of Pác Tạ Mountain. The people built a temple to remember her, a woman who has no name in the histories but lives on in the heart of this land.

Trần Nhật Duật held the title of Prince Chiêu Văn and was a famed general of his age. In 1285, he did great service in the second resistance against the Yuan, the Mongol dynasty then ruling China. Local tourism sources link the temple to that time, when he held command of the Tuyên Quang region and led the defense against the enemy coming down from Yunnan. This historical background has a basis. The details about the person worshipped in the temple still belong to local legend.

The temple's own history has been full of upheaval. At first it stood on a spit of land on the right bank of the Năng River. It was a hall of three bays with two side wings, built of thatch, bamboo and leaves. Then, local belief says, a great storm one night swept the roof away to a strip of high ground at the foot of the mountain. The people took this as the will of the Holy Mother, the woman honored there, and they built the temple at the new place.

In 1959, a fire from a slash-and-burn field burned the whole temple down. Only the old foundation remained. Later the temple was rebuilt on the very ground where, the people believed, the Holy Mother had made her choice.

Arriving by boat, one finds the temple on high, flat ground, with its door facing south toward the Gâm River. Its back rests on the mountain, and its front opens onto the water. An old phrase calls such a place one of marvelous mountains and graceful waters. The people of old did not choose it by chance. It was a choice full of spiritual meaning.

The reservoir, also called the Na Hang and Lâm Bình ecological lake, spreads over more than 8,000 hectares of water. The temple is only one stop on that long trip across the water. Yet it is a stop where nature and spiritual belief meet, where the beauty of the lake meets the legends that have lived here since the Trần dynasty.

When the boat returns to the lake after the visit, Pác Tạ Mountain still stands there, its shadow falling on the deep blue-green water. The elephant turned to stone with its wine jug, the unnamed woman honored for centuries, the roof that flew across the river on a stormy night. All these stories lie quietly in this land of mountains and wide water.