Vu Nhu To, Master Builder

On a wooden table stood a tiny palace. Roof rose after roof, and when anyone counted them all, there were 100. Every post was small, every step was small, and every curve of every roof was made of bamboo, shaved thin and fitted together without a gap. It looked like a castle that had walked out of a fairy tale. The man who made it was a craftsman named Vũ Như Tô.

According to old records, Vũ Như Tô was a gifted master builder who lived in Vietnam in the early 16th century, in the reign of Emperor Lê Tương Dực. His home was the Cẩm Giàng area, in the old Hải Dương province, now part of the city of Hải Phòng. People said that his hands were uncannily skilled, and that whatever they touched became beautiful.

A master builder is the best craftsman on a site, the one who runs a whole great building project. He leads hundreds of other workers and tells each one what to do: who saws the wood, who grinds the stone, who raises the posts, who lays the roof. Skilled hands are not enough for that work. The mind must also be able to see a great building long before it exists.

And Vũ Như Tô could see a very great one. Around 1512, the records say, he sat down and patiently built the little model from the start of this story. It was a palace of 100 roofs, shrunk down and made entirely of bamboo. He fitted the thin strips together the way people lay out toothpicks, with care and patience, day after day.

When the tiny palace was finished, everyone who looked at it stopped still. Its roofs curved up like the wings of a bird. The 100 little roofs were small, yet complete, balanced and majestic. It is said that even the emperor was amazed when he saw it. He had never imagined that human hands could make something so fine.

So from that small bamboo model, a great dream was placed in his hands. The old documents say that Vũ Như Tô was put in charge of building a magnificent structure inside the Imperial City of Thăng Long, the city now called Hanoi. People of later times gave it a lovely name, Cửu Trùng Đài, which sounds like a nine-tiered tower from a fairy tale.

The palace that had been small enough to sit on a table now had to be built for real, vast and high, in the heart of the capital. The slender curves of the roofs had to become real wood and real stone. The 100 tiny roofs had to rise into 100 real tiled roofs, with their outlines against the blue sky. The old histories record that this building was extremely magnificent, among the grandest of its time.

To raise a building like that, the master builder had much to work out. Which post holds up which spot. Which stone sits under the foot of which post. How one roof could rest on another and one tier lift the next, while the whole building still stood firm and stayed as beautiful as the bamboo model he had labored over. It all began with a dream of beauty in the heart of a craftsman.

His skill was so fine that people loved him and told of him as one tells a fairy tale. They said he could carve an ivory elephant, with a trunk, tusks and all four legs, out of a single grain of rice. That is only a folk tale. People of the old days told it to praise the wondrous skill of a craftsman's hands, and it did not really happen.

Yet even as a tale, the grain of rice that became an ivory elephant says something lovely. It says that people believed Vũ Như Tô was that skilled. In the hearts of the people, he was the finest picture of a Vietnamese craftsman, someone who could use his own two hands to turn even the seemingly impossible into something real.

Those hands once sat fitting small strips of bamboo together, holding a dream of a tower as lovely as a fairy tale. Through many seasons of rain and sun, the hands and the dream of beauty have stayed on, warm, in the stories that grandparents tell one another.