The Hundred Column House

Outside the door of Nhà Trăm Cột, the Hundred Column House, three characters are inlaid in mother-of-pearl. They read Thiện tối lạc, which means that doing good brings joy. Those characters welcome everyone from the very first step.

The name sounds simple. But inside, nothing about it is simple at all.

The house stands in Cầu Ngang hamlet, in Long Hựu commune. Today the place belongs to Tây Ninh province. Its older name was Long Hựu Đông commune. That was in the Cần Đước area of Long An province. Since 1997 the house has been a national monument of architecture and art.

First, the name. It promises a round number of columns. In fact the house has 120 of them. Of these, 68 are round and 52 are square. Several sources record the same count, including the National Museum of History. The number in the name has an easy explanation. In everyday speech it can simply mean very many, an impressive number that makes a crowd of columns easy to picture. That was how people long ago gave names. And the name stuck, until it became the house's trademark.

The man who built the house was Trần Văn Hoa, a village notable of Long Hựu. His village lay in the old canton of Lộc Thành Hạ. In those days the canton belonged to Chợ Lớn province. The Nhân Dân newspaper quotes his descendants, who say he once held a seat on a regional council and built his wealth by clearing land for rice. The house went up between the end of the 19th century and the start of the 20th, and it was finished around 1903.

What makes the house most special is the meeting of two building traditions. Its frame follows the xuyên trính structure of the rường houses of central Vietnam, and the mark of Hue architecture is easy to see. But the decoration is deeply southern. Beside the traditional four sacred creatures, the four seasons, and the blessings of fortune, wealth and long life, the bao lam and the ends of the rafters are carved with fruit. There are mangosteens, bình bát and mãng cầu, the familiar fruits of the southern land.

Reports name the prized woods used here. They are cẩm lai and mun, and also gõ đỏ. The house covers 882 square meters, and it sits in a garden of more than 4,000 square meters. The roof is made of yin and yang tiles. The base is stone, 90 centimeters high, and the floor is paved with hexagonal bricks. The front faces northwest. The plan takes the shape of the character quốc, with three bays and two side wings.

The front part is a space for receiving guests and for worship. The rear is for living. According to one report, the rear also holds a place to store rice and a storeroom. This is the home of a family descended from Trần Văn Hoa, not a state museum. For more than 120 years they have lived in these rooms, among rows of cẩm lai columns as glossy as on the first day.

In the southern Vietnam of the 19th century, some families gathered more than land. They gathered taste, craft and memory too. This house is the proof that remains.

120 columns. More than 120 years old. And still standing.