Restored Le Emperor Hien Tong

In the palace at Thăng Long, an old emperor sat by the veranda, his hair gone white. Thăng Long is the city now called Hanoi. He walked slowly, and his eyes were kind. Each morning he listened to the wind pass over the curved roof tiles, and he smiled, very gently. Everyone in the palace knew that figure. He had been on the throne so long that hardly anyone could remember a time before him. This was Emperor Lê Hiển Tông.

His birth name was Lê Duy Diêu, and he was born in 1717. He belonged to the Restored Lê, the line of emperors that rose from Thanh Hóa. That is the land beneath Lam Sơn mountain. At the foot of that mountain, the Lê ancestors had built their dynasty, so people called it the place where the Lê began.

In 1740, Lê Duy Diêu climbed onto the throne, and he sat there for 46 years, longer than any other emperor of the Lê. A baby born in the year he took the throne would have grown old, with graying hair, while he was still emperor.

In all those years he used only one reign name. A reign name is a fine title given to the years of an emperor's rule, and his was Cảnh Hưng. For his whole life as emperor he kept that single name. The two words carried on through a very long stretch of time.

There is one more rare thing. He was also the longest-lived of the Lê emperors, and he died at the age of 69, a precious span for people of that time. Living so long, he saw his children and grandchildren grow up around him. Among them was a princess whose name the whole country would later know. She was Princess Lê Ngọc Hân.

Lê Ngọc Hân was born in 1770, a daughter of Emperor Lê Hiển Tông. Her mother was the consort Nguyễn Thị Huyền, from the village of Phù Ninh. On one such morning in the palace, the old emperor sits by the veranda, and his small daughter tiptoes up to tug his sleeve, then stands quietly in the morning sun. She grew up among peaceful mornings like that, beside a gentle father.

Perhaps the father never guessed that his little girl's name would travel far across the land. She grew into a gifted woman of letters, and she left behind verses in Vietnamese that people still remember. But that is another story, and it belongs to her alone.

The morning comes back one last time. In the palace at Thăng Long sits a kind old emperor, and the years of Cảnh Hưng stretch on and on. They are as quiet as the shadow of Lam Sơn mountain, his family's home. Each morning he smiles at the sound of small feet running across the brick courtyard, as if he heard his whole peaceful life go by in those footsteps.