Put Luong Makes Earth Beautiful

In the lap of a Then singer, a lute lies still. Its sound box is round and smooth and polished, like a dried gourd turned upside down. From that gourd rises a long, straight neck of mulberry wood. Along the whole length of the neck run just three strings. Not four, not five. Exactly three.

The Tày of Bắc Kạn and Cao Bằng have a name for this lute. They call it the đàn tính, or tính tẩu. It goes with Then, a ritual practice in the spiritual life of the Tày. Before the singer lifts a voice, the lute simply lies there, silent, as if keeping a very old story to itself. The reason it has exactly three strings goes back to a time when heaven and earth were still brand new.

The Tày tell that in those days there was a very great god named Pựt. In some places people reverently call him Pựt Luông. It was Pựt who gave life to all creatures and to human beings. He raised the mountains and the streams, and he even made the beauty of this earth. Pựt had many daughters. His ninth daughter loved the human world more than any of the others.

She looked down at the world below. The earth was already green with trees, already full of birds and fish. People already knew how to grow rice and how to weave cloth. Only one thing was missing. The whole wide world was without song. People worked, ate and went to sleep. No one knew how to sing a single line for joy. No one knew how to speak to another through a tune.

So the ninth daughter asked her father for leave, and she stepped down to earth.

She went from one village to the next, and she taught everyone she met. She taught people to sing songs that rose from deep in the chest, warm as breath. She taught them lượn, the call and response singing of the Tày. One side sings out a line, the other side answers with a line, and that is how they come to love each other. She also taught them to blow into a bamboo tube and make the sound of a flute. That way, someone climbing alone to the hillside fields would still have a friend along.

Little by little, singing, lượn and the flute spread through every village. Yet to her it was still not enough. She wanted to leave the people of earth a lasting gift, something that would keep sounding even after she had gone back to heaven.

She went looking for a very old gourd. She left it out until it was bone dry, hollow inside, with a tough shell. She turned the gourd over to make the sound box. She cut a length of mulberry wood and shaved it straight, to make the neck that stands on top of the gourd. For the strings, she used something precious that was hers alone. She drew one fragrant hair from her own head. She twisted it over and over until it was tight and strong, and she stretched it out to make the strings.

That lute was the very first đàn tính in the world.

When she laid her hand on it and plucked, the sound that rose was unlike anything the human world had ever heard. It was clear as a stream at its source, and warm as a kitchen fire on a winter night. It rang on and on, slipping through the cliffs and spreading across the valleys. Whoever heard it once could never forget it.

Something strange happened next. Wherever the đàn tính sounded, people dropped everything. Those plowing left their buffalo standing in the middle of the field. Those weaving left their looms. Those carrying water set their buckets down by the road. Everyone who heard it stood spellbound. Their feet followed the sound, and they sat down to listen. They forgot that the sun was already high. They forgot the meal that was still waiting to be cooked.

Day after day, the hillside fields began to run wild. No one tended the rice. No one gathered firewood. The whole village did nothing but listen to the lute, lost in it.

Up in heaven, Pựt looked down and saw it all. He knew that the lute his daughter had made was too beautiful, so beautiful that it made people forget how to live. A gift that turns the people who receive it lazy, he thought, needs to lose a little of itself.

So Pựt acted. He cut away the strings of the đàn tính, one after another, until only three were left. Just three strings.

Yet three strings were still enough. The sound was still clear, still warm, still ringing long, just as before. It was still enough to carry a song, to carry the lượn, to carry everything the ninth daughter had taught. Only one thing was different. After listening, people got up and went back to the fields, back to their looms. The lute became a companion that walked beside their lives, instead of pulling them away from life.

From that day on, the đàn tính had only three strings, like the three-stringed lutes the Tày still play today.

For the Tày, the đàn tính has never been just an object. The Tày of old believed it was the daughter of Pựt herself, in another form, the one who brought song down to the human world. Its sound goes together with Then singing, a sacred kind of singing. The Tày have kept it through many generations. So have the Nùng and the Thái. In 2019, UNESCO inscribed the practice of Then by these three peoples in Vietnam as intangible cultural heritage of humanity.

Still, this tale is only one of many ways the story is told. The Tày of Cao Bằng tell a different tale. The Thái tell yet another one. Each region has its own version of how this beloved lute began. No single version is the only true one. What they all share is a love for the three-stringed lute. Everyone treasures it as dearly as the voice of their own heart.

Whenever a Then singer sits down and holds the đàn tính close, it looks much as the story tells. The sound box is round like a dried gourd. The neck is long, made of mulberry wood. The strings run the whole length of the neck, three on some lutes, two on others. When the singer's fingers touch them, the sound comes out clear and warm. That is why the Tày say that in those small strings, the voice of the ninth daughter still rings. She came down to earth only to teach people how to sing.