Tran Ngoc Du Ancient House

In 1900, Trần Ngọc Du took charge of building a house on the bank of the Đồng Nai River.

He was a local magistrate, yet this was no government office and no temple. It was a family home, built on land that the clan kept for ancestor worship. He did not build it the ordinary way, either. The timber was prepared with the rituals for cutting wood, breaking ground and raising the ridge beam. The work took two years, and carpenters were invited from Bình Dương. The result is a building that people still come to see and study, more than 120 years later.

The house stands in the Tân Vạn ward of Biên Hòa city. It is in an alley off Bùi Hữu Nghĩa Street. It faces the river, where a footpath once ran along the bank and linked the trading points on the way to Chợ Đồn market.

Originally the layout had three parts: an upper house, a lower house and a kitchen. They were arranged in a style called nhà sắp đọi, or nhà chữ nhị, which is common in southern Vietnam. The most important part left today is the upper house, about 232 square meters on a plot of 1,200 square meters.

The upper house has three bays and two side bays, a roof of yin-yang tiles and a brick floor. Its finest feature is the timber frame, with 36 columns of căm xe wood in six rows. The columns, beams, rafters and every other part of the frame lock together with linked mortise-and-tenon joints, and no iron nails. This is a traditional carpentry technique. The carpenter must calculate very exactly from the start, because once the parts fit together, changing them is very hard.

Fine carving covers the decorative panels and the altar pieces. The motifs recorded include bamboo and sparrow, a flowering branch and bird, chrysanthemum and rooster, pine and deer, bats, cranes among clouds, and a repeating pattern called hồi văn. In folk art, every image carries its own meaning, like a quiet wish that the craftsman sent into each cut of the chisel.

Inside, the space divides into an inner part for worship and an outer part for guests. It matches the three bays, which hold three altars to the ancestors and a worship shrine. This is the traditional way a southern Vietnamese family arranged the space for worship, and it reflects the ideas of filial duty and respect for ancestors.

The house has a second tale to tell, about preservation with help from abroad. In 2002, the Japan International Cooperation Agency and Showa Women's University of Japan gave 800 million dong for repairs. A team of Japanese experts led by the architect Akiyoshi Ejima restored the parts to their original form. They used no varnish, so that the wood would keep the color that time had given it. It was a deliberate choice. The old color of the wood is not a sign of decay but a memory kept in the material.

In 2005, the chairman of the Đồng Nai Provincial People's Committee ranked the house as a provincial heritage site, under Decision 3524. It was the first privately owned house in Đồng Nai to be ranked this way.

The house of Trần Ngọc Du was built not only to keep off the rain and sun. It was built to honor the ancestors, to receive guests and to leave the descendants something more than a roof.