Tomb of Han Mac Tu

Ghềnh Ráng is where the sea and the mountain meet. Rock runs right down to the waves, and the waves strike the rock. High on the slope above it all lies the grave of a poet whose lines Vietnamese readers have gone on reading since the last century.

This is the tomb of Hàn Mặc Tử.

The scenic area lies about three kilometers southeast of the center of Quy Nhơn. Under the names Ghềnh Ráng and Tiên Sa, it has been ranked a national scenic landmark since 1991. By one account the name Ghềnh Ráng comes from seafaring. Where boats had to pass shoals of rock and reef, fishermen would "ráng", which here means to ease off the speed to avoid danger. Over the years the word became the name of this stretch of coast.

Tiên Sa is something else, a layer of folk legend that people of the area have set into the meeting of mountain and sea. It is the story of the silhouette of a beautiful girl, glimpsed now and then. Hear it as a way of placing feeling in a landscape. It is not an event that any record can confirm.

The way up to the tomb passes the Mộng Cầm slope, then climbs a stepped path to Thi Nhân Hill. These are steps over rock, among trees and sea wind, and they lead to the place where many people come to stand silent for a while beside a poet's grave.

The poet was born in 1912 in Lệ Mỹ, in Đồng Hới. He grew up in Quy Nhơn and became one of the most distinctive voices in modern Vietnamese literature. He fell ill with leprosy and ended his life in the leprosarium at Quy Hòa. According to the Tuổi Trẻ newspaper, he died there on November 11, 1940. His grave was moved to Ghềnh Ráng and set on the hill, on a high mound with its back to the mountain and its face to the sea.

From the tomb the view opens out. The sea lies below, then the curve of the coast, and farther off the shape of the city of Quy Nhơn. This calm, open feeling is what many visitors mention when they leave. There is only a pause between mountain and sea, and the story of a man whose life was short and who left so much behind.

Near the tomb is a space belonging to the artisan Trương Dzũ Kha and his art of bút lửa, a way of writing poems onto wood with heat. He writes the poems of Hàn Mặc Tử this way. The strokes of the letters rise from a small flame and are pressed into the wood, verses that people still read after more than 80 years.

The area also holds Bãi Trứng and the Nhà Thờ Đá, or Stone Church, along with many places on the mountain slope to look out at the sea. Wherever one goes here, there is the soft heaviness of a place both beautiful and sad, both quiet and wild and full of the memories of the Vietnamese people.