The Hung Kings' Commemoration: From Village Festival to National Rite

The last three episodes ended on a rather brutal note. The Nguyen dynasty's national history demoted Kinh Duong Vuong and Lac Long Quan to a note, Ngo Thi Si pointed out where earlier writers had misread their source, and Tran Trong Kim put a question mark after the figure 2879 BCE.

And yet today the Hung Kings' commemoration is a holiday on which the whole country stops work, Den Hung receives millions of people every year, and the worship of the Hung Kings is on UNESCO's heritage list.¹

How did that happen? The answer is not in the old histories. It is in the paperwork of roughly the last hundred years — a dispatch from 1917, a decree from 1946, an act from 2007, a dossier from 2012. This episode reads those papers.

Before the twentieth century, Den Hung was not looked after by the court.

In the account usually given, the monarchies handed the temple straight to the local people to tend, to repair and to make offerings at, holding the memorial day of the eighteenth Hung king on the eleventh day of the third lunar month; in return the local people were exempt from land tax, from compulsory labour service and from military service.²

That was a very practical arrangement, and it says a good deal. The court did not send an official to perform the sacrifice. The court paid for the worship in the coin the villagers needed most: exemption from tax and from conscription. Put another way, the Hung Kings' commemoration was then a village festival with a tax privilege, not a national rite.

The limits of this section need stating plainly: we reached the details above only through secondary sources, and could not open the original documents.² This is a place to read as a widely repeated account, not as something we have checked ourselves.

The tenth day of the third month — the date every Vietnamese knows — is not an ancient one. It has a year of birth, and that year is very recent: 1917.

In the second year of the Khai Dinh reign, the governor of Phu Tho, Le Trung Ngoc, sent a dispatch asking the Ministry of Rites to fix the tenth day of the third month each year as a day of "quoc te" — that is, a rite of the state, at which provincial officials in full court dress were to go up to Den Hung and perform the sacrifice on behalf of the court at Hue.²

The most striking detail lies in the explanation that came with it. The stele "Hung Vuong tu khao" at Den Thuong, composed by Bui Ngoc Hoan, vice-minister and deputy governor of Phu Tho, records that the tenth was chosen because it fell "one day before the memorial day of the eighteenth Hung king, the eleventh day of the third month, kept by the local people".²

Read that sentence closely and something subtle appears. They did not simply take over the memorial day the villagers already had. They placed the state rite on the day before. Two layers of ceremony side by side, not on top of one another: the officials' rite first, the people's rite the day after.

A note is needed here about the stele itself. The original was lost only about ten years after it was raised, leaving nothing but the base; the stele standing at the temple now is a 2010 reconstruction.² Which means that the wording on it, however often it is quoted, has been through one round of copying.

After 1945 the commemoration passed through three documents, each widening its reach by one step.

In 1946, the government of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam issued a decree placing the tenth day of the third month among the official holidays of the country; civil servants had the day off on full pay.²

In 2001, a decree set out how the Den Hung festival was to be organised on a cycle: round years and even years by the central government together with Phu Tho province, odd years by Phu Tho province alone.² From then on the festival had an administrative timetable.

In 2007, an act amended Article 73 of the Labour Code, making the tenth day of the third lunar month a paid holiday for all workers, not only for civil servants as in 1946. It was also first applied in 2007.²

Sixty-one years to go from "civil servants get the day off" to "everyone gets the day off".

And here we have to be honest. We could not open the full text of any of the three documents. The official legal portals either block automated access, or have a search interface that ordinary tools cannot use; every detail above comes from secondary sources quoting them.² The numbers and the dates agree across several sources, but we have not read the full content of the provisions ourselves.

Setting that down here is not a complaint. It is a fact with a meaning of its own: even for legislation currently in force, getting to the original text in Vietnam is harder than people suppose.

There is a sentence attached to Den Hung that almost every Vietnamese knows: "The Hung Kings had the merit of founding this country; Uncle and his nephews must together keep hold of it."

Where was it spoken, and when?

The earliest record we could trace that carries a named author is the memoir of Colonel Nguyen Khac Tiep, a reporter for the army paper Quan Doi Nhan Dan, who was there in person. By his account, at around nine in the morning on 19 September 1954, at Den Gieng within the Den Hung complex, Ho Chi Minh met cadres of Division 308 on their way to take over Hanoi after the Geneva Accords. He sat on the doorstep, asked the men whether they knew what place this was, and then said the sentence above before giving them their orders for the capital.³

Two things need saying alongside it.

First, this is a memoir written afterwards, published as a book in 2014 — sixty years after the event — and not a record made on the spot.³

Second, the wording is not consistent between sources. The version in the memoir has the word "cung", meaning together: "Bac chau ta phai cung nhau giu lay nuoc". The stele at the temple, meanwhile, is transcribed as "Bac chau ta phai nhau giu lay nuoc", missing exactly that word.² One word, and two different versions, on a sentence so famous that everyone is sure they know it by heart.

The last step of this process took place in Paris.

At the seventh session of the Intergovernmental Committee of the 2003 Convention, held at UNESCO headquarters from 3 to 7 December 2012, file number 00735 was approved by the decision numbered 7.COM 11.36. The decision reads: inscribes the Worship of Hung kings in Phu Tho on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.¹

One point that the Vietnamese press often gets wrong needs correcting. That list is called the Representative List, not the "Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity" — the older name was dropped in 2008. They are two different lists, and many articles still use the old one.¹

What was inscribed also needs reading correctly: UNESCO inscribed the worship, that is, a practice of a living community — not a ruling that the Hung Kings were real. Those are two entirely different things, and the two are very often run together.

When a local devotion is raised into a national symbol, what does the community it came from gain, and what does it lose?

The anthropologist Oscar Salemink is in a rare position to answer: he attended the Den Hung festival in the 1990s, and attended it again in April 2011, just as the campaign for the UNESCO file was under way.

The first time, by his description, it was still largely a local affair: run by the temple keepers of the villages around Mount Nghia Linh, with those attending mostly people of Phu Tho — many of them young, treating it as an occasion to meet and to court.⁴

The second time was different. He visited several temples in the surrounding villages, places that had taken on part of the ritual and kept some of the ritual objects, and he recorded that the local ritual committees had not only been stripped of their role but had lost some of their old ritual objects as well; in some places the old objects had been replaced by new ones, so the village kept the originals but could no longer use them in the ceremony. Villagers were still expected to be present at the festival, but — in his words — more like props in a performance staged by outsiders than the masters of the rite.⁴

This is one researcher's observation and judgement, not a conclusion that has been agreed. But it comes from someone present at both moments, and it points to a real mechanism: when a festival becomes a matter of state, the people running it are no longer the people who have kept it going for generations.

Salemink also picks out a detail few Vietnamese notice: the Hung Kings' commemoration is Vietnam's first national holiday reckoned by the lunar calendar.⁴

On a wider view, the researcher Edyta Roszko observes that the Vietnamese state selects only a very small number of local commemorations to raise to national level, most of the rest remaining local — and that the state takes a hand in shaping the ones it selects along several routes: research papers, provincial conferences, the fixing of sites, and the design of the events themselves.⁵

Put together, the timeline is clear enough: a village festival traded for tax exemption, then a dispatch in 1917 creating the tenth day, then the decree of 1946, the decree of 2001, the act of 2007,² and the UNESCO file of 2012.¹

Not one of those milestones proves the Hung Kings were real. All of them are the business of later generations — the business of the living deciding what they will remember, on what day, and who gets to stand up and perform the rite.

Perhaps that is the thing most worth saying about Hong Bang. Ngo Thi Si pointed out the error in the eighteenth century; the Nguyen dynasty's national history demoted it to a note; Tran Trong Kim put a question mark on it. The story has still not gone away, because what holds it in place has never been accuracy. What holds it in place is the need of living people to know where they came from — and that need is real, even if the genealogy is not certain.

The next episode really does put the books down, and goes looking for what the ancients left in the ground: from pottery to bronze, by way of the old villages of Phung Nguyen, Dong Dau and Go Mun.