Tomb of Hai Thuong Lan Ong

A man born into a family of examination scholars had served in the army. He could have stayed in official service and lived on its salary and favors. Instead, he chose the mountains of Hà Tĩnh. There he learned to be a physician, treated the poor and wrote books. Later the ruling house summoned him to Thăng Long, the city now called Hanoi. He went, treated the sick, and then asked leave to go home. He did it for neither money nor fame.

That man was Lê Hữu Trác, the great physician of Vietnam. His pen name was Hải Thượng Lãn Ông. This is the Hương Sơn area of Hà Tĩnh, where he lived most of his life and where he still rests today.

He was born in 1724 in the old region of Hải Dương, which is now Hưng Yên province. But his mother came from Hương Sơn, in Hà Tĩnh. In 1746, after his eldest brother died, he asked to leave the army. He went back to his mother's home to care for her in her old age, and for his nephews and nieces. That was when he set out on a path no one had expected, the path to becoming a physician.

He fell seriously ill and was treated by a physician named Trần Độc, who also passed the craft on to him. From then on he gave himself to medicine. He practiced, taught students and did research. Over several decades in Hương Sơn, he completed a work often called "an encyclopedia of traditional Vietnamese medicine". It is the "Hải Thượng Y tông tâm lĩnh". It runs to 28 volumes, divided into 66 books.

In 1782, a summons came from the court of the Trịnh lords, a noble family who dominated northern Vietnam. He was to travel to Thăng Long and treat the lord's heir, Trịnh Cán. He was also to treat the lord himself, Trịnh Sâm. He went. On that same trip, he wrote down what he saw of life in the capital, in a journal called "Thượng Kinh Ký Sự". It is a valuable historical record of Vietnamese society in the 18th century. When the treatment was done, he asked leave and returned to Hương Sơn. He kept up his familiar work there until he died, on the full-moon day of the first lunar month in 1791.

The full-moon day of the first lunar month. That is why, every year at that time, the people of Hương Sơn and visitors from far and wide come here for the Hải Thượng Lãn Ông Festival. They offer incense at his tomb and make offerings at his ancestral hall. At Tượng Sơn Pagoda, they pray for the peace of his soul.

The heritage complex here stretches for nearly 8 kilometers. It has three main clusters. The first is the memorial area and ancestral hall of Lê Hữu Trác in Bảo Thượng hamlet, his mother's home village. It covers 13,500 square meters. Inside are the ancestral hall, a courtyard for ceremonies, a stele house and a peach orchard. There is also a garden of native medicinal plants, with more than 60 valuable species. In the herb garden, part of the physician's daily work comes easily to mind. It always began with things that grew out of the earth.

The second is Tượng Sơn Pagoda, built in the early 18th century. It was founded by his grandmother on his mother's side. He spent most of his time at the pagoda from 1760 to 1786. He opened a clinic there and finished many of his works. The small pagoda on the mountain was a place of religious practice, and it was also where he sat and wrote, looking out over the valley and thinking of the sick.

The third is the tomb and the monument, at the foot and on the summit of Minh Tự Mountain. They lie about 7 kilometers east of the memorial area. After his death, the Lê family and the local people built his tomb as he had wished. It sits in a dry stream gully at the foot of the mountain, on the bank of the Ngàn Phố River. What stands out is that through many restorations, the tomb's position, direction and form have all been kept as they were.

On the summit of Minh Tự Mountain stands the marble monument of Hải Thượng Lãn Ông. It is 16.91 meters tall and weighs 350 tons. It was inaugurated in 2013. Behind the statue, reliefs are carved with his teachings on the ethics of medicine. At its foot lies a single block of stone weighing more than 17 tons. It is carved with the words "Đức lưu quang", which means virtue that shines on and never fades.

On November 26, 2024, the Prime Minister ranked the Tomb and Memorial Site of the Great Physician Hải Thượng Lãn Ông as a Special National Monument. That is the highest rank in Vietnam's system for classifying heritage sites. It came late, but it was a fitting recognition for a man who gave his whole life to the sick and to the medicine of his country.

Seen from below, among the forested mountains of Hương Sơn, the statue's place on the summit makes sense. It was not put there for show. It was put there so that it could look down over the valley, the rivers and the villages. It looks down on the people he spent his whole life healing, and for whom he left his books.