Prince Ly Long Tuong

Salt wind lashed the prince's face. Ahead of the bow there were only waves, rolling on to a gray horizon. On a large ship leaving the shore, a prince stood silent, his robe whipping in the wind, his eyes fixed on a place no one aboard had ever set foot. He was Lý Long Tường. Behind him, the shore of home was slipping out of sight.

The story begins in the capital of Đại Việt, an old name for Vietnam. Lý Long Tường was the seventh son of Emperor Lý Anh Tông, who reigned from 1138 to 1175. He belonged to the Lý royal family, and the Lý dynasty ruled Vietnam from 1009 to 1225. He held the rank of prince. Like the princes of his day, he had surely known since childhood the drums of the capital, the pages of books and the roofs of the familiar palaces.

Then the fortunes of the Lý family began to change. In 1226, Lý Long Tường and some others of the royal family decided to cross the sea, looking for a peaceful place to keep their line alive. A small fleet of boats carried relatives, books and many memories of home. It slipped quietly away from the coast of Đại Việt.

Some nights there was only the slap of waves against the hull and the sound of the wind. Some mornings the whole company faced the rising sun and wondered what the new shore would be like. At last they landed in a country across a great stretch of sea from home. It was called Goryeo, and today its land lies on the Korean peninsula. Goryeo was a Korean kingdom founded in 918 that lasted until 1392.

To the Vietnamese of that time, Goryeo was an entirely new world, with a different language, different customs and even a different kind of cold. But Lý Long Tường was no passing visitor. He stayed, learned the language, came to understand the people and grew attached to the land called Ung Tân. Whenever pirates came to trouble the villages, he stood with the villagers to protect their hamlets. The people there came to love the general from a land far to the south.

One story is still told there. In 1253, Mongol troops marched into Goryeo. Lý Long Tường was old by then, nearly 80, but he still helped the people hold their town and village. Folk tradition says that each day he rode a white horse along every road, encouraging everyone. His robe and the white horse amid the smoke of fires made such a fine sight that people fondly called him the White Horse General. In gratitude, the king of Goryeo renamed the land where he lived Hoa Sơn, which means flower mountain, and made him the Hoa Sơn General.

Yet Lý Long Tường never forgot the place where he was born. According to the State Committee for Overseas Vietnamese, the Lý Hoa Sơn clan was the first clan of Vietnamese origin to settle in Goryeo, and he became its founding ancestor. The clan still has descendants there today. Generation after generation, they remember that their ancestors came from a land called Vietnam, and every year they hold a ceremony to honor the founding ancestor.

The two ends of that long root met again. In March 1994, a descendant of the 31st generation named Lý Xương Căn came back from Korea. He burned incense at the temple dedicated to the Lý dynasty, after almost eight centuries apart. The temple is in the village of Đình Bảng, in Bắc Ninh province.

A fleet of boats leaves its harbor. About 800 years later, one of the family comes home and bows before the incense of the old house. That is the story of Prince Lý Long Tường, who went very far, yet whose heart still turned toward a single home.