Princess Le Ngoc Binh

One morning in the palace, in a brick courtyard still wet with dew, someone spoke very softly. It was only a question, a few kind words, yet the people hurrying past slowed down and turned to look. The speaker was a girl in a silk gown, who walked so lightly that she seemed afraid of disturbing the morning. She was Princess Lê Ngọc Bình.

She was the youngest daughter of Emperor Lê Hiển Tông. He was a ruler of the Lê dynasty, and he held his court in Thăng Long, the city now called Hanoi. As the youngest in the family, she grew up among her brothers and sisters, and the whole palace cherished her as the smallest and dearest of them.

Among those brothers and sisters was an elder sister whom everyone respected. This was Princess Lê Ngọc Hân, a gifted woman, skilled in poetry and letters, whom later generations still remember. The two sisters lived under one palace roof. They shared the same mornings of listening to the bell and the same walks beneath shady trees. But where Ngọc Hân often bent her head over a page, Ngọc Bình was remembered for something else.

People of old said that Ngọc Bình was very beautiful.

Folk memory hands down that she was as lovely as a painting, soft in speech and graceful in her bearing. But beauty of the face grows familiar to the eye. What stayed longer in people's hearts was the way she treated everyone around her.

Think of a morning when she crosses the courtyard. A maid is carrying a heavy stack of cloth, her face creased with tiredness. The princess stops, lends a hand, and asks a few gentle questions. That is all, yet the maid feels her shoulders grow lighter. The palace was full of urgent business then, with hurrying footsteps and sharp instructions. Still, wherever she passed, the air seemed to settle.

Think of another time, when the child of a servant was crying, lost from its mother in the wide courtyard. She sat down at the child's height, spoke its name, and comforted it. She told it a little made-up story until the tears stopped. This is how the people of the palace came to love her, from the maids to the youngest servants. They loved her not because she was a princess, but because meeting her warmed the heart a little.

In the Thăng Long palace of that time there were many princesses in silk and gold. Yet people remembered Ngọc Bình not because she was high born. They remembered a caring word, and the way she lowered her voice for those beneath her, as if anyone standing before her deserved to be treated gently. Strangely, a hush seemed to follow her through the palace. Instructions came less sharply, footsteps less hurriedly, and everyone softened with the calm that flowed from her.

Each of the two sisters, in her own way, left something of her own. The elder is remembered through verses that still ring out. The younger is remembered through one very soft word, the word that once slowed someone's steps in a courtyard at morning. They were like two flowers in one garden, one showing its color and the other giving its fragrance, and each of them lovely.

The old capital has become the Hanoi of today, with its streets, its green trees and its cool mornings. More than 200 years lie between the city now and that brick courtyard wet with dew. Yet somewhere in the heart of the city, it is as if the shadow of a gentle princess still lingers, sitting beside a clump of flowers, humming one very soft line.