by Jim Goodman
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| limestone hill and pagoda on the way in to Hoa Lư |
In 938 Vietnamese forces
expelled the Chinese, vanquished a naval counter-attack and re-claimed
independence. Their leader Ngô Quyền
established the former ancient capital of Cổ Loa as the new state’s capital and
founded a new dynasty.
Unfortunately, he died in 944, igniting a power struggle among a dozen
or more princes that lasted 24 years. The fledgling state’s sovereignty remained
intact, as China was involved in its own succession crisis, but stability
proved elusive.
Finally, in 968 Đinh Bộ Lĩnh
emerged victorious and founded a new dynasty. He also moved the capital to his own hometown at Hoa Lư,
about 90 km south in present-day Ninh Bình province. Just outside of the flat Red River Delta plains, surrounded
by protective limestone hills, it was a more secure location than Cổ Loa. In reaction to the anarchy and
violence common to the land since Ngô Quyền’s death, Đinh Bộ
Lĩnh ruled with a firm hand, laying down laws and strictly upholding them. He is said to have kept a cauldron and
a caged tiger at his court, vowing that anyone who broke the law would be
boiled in the cauldron and eaten by the tiger.
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| temple to Đinh Bộ Lĩnh in Hoa Lư |
A Court eunuch assassinated
both Đinh Bộ Lĩnh and his eldest son in 979, leaving a six-year-old as heir. Seeking to reassert control, Song
Dynasty China launched an expedition against Vietnam. The Court and Queen Mother then offered the throne to Lê Hoàn,
the state’s top general and then acting Regent. He married the widow and founded a new dynasty, but one of
his opponents fled to the Chăm state of Indrapura and persuaded its king to
mount an expedition to install him in power. The Chăm navy got nearly all the way to Hoa Lư
when a sudden storm destroyed the entire fleet. The Vietnamese pretender and many Chăm warriors
drowned. Only the king’s ship got
away and returned home.
Lê Hoàn then
took his army north and repelled the Chinese invasion. Following that, in 982 he mounted a
campaign against the Chăm. In
their very first engagement the Vietnamese forces defeated the Chăm, killed the
king and marched on Indrapura. The
new king fled and the Vietnamese looted the temples and palaces of their
treasures and razed the city to the ground. They also captured and took back to Hoa Lư
100 palace maids and an Indian monk.
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| rice planting in Tràng An Scenic Area |
Hoa Lư reverted to a village
and its palaces and other ancient buildings disappeared. Over a thousand years later it has
become a major tourist destination, mainly because it lies adjacent to one of
the most scenic areas in the country, known today as ‘Hạ Long Bay on Land’ for
the limestone pillars and steep hills that jut up from the rice paddies. This becomes evident right after the
turn-off to the ancient city a little north of Ninh Bình. A stately, multi-tiered pagoda stands
in the saddle of a limestone hill typical of the area. As a reminder of contemporary
symbolism, though, a little further down the road another hill features a
concrete hammer and sickle on its ridge.
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| rowing with the feet |
No attempt has been made to recreate Hoa Lư’s ancient city,
other than the entry gate and a few pavilions, but at the south end stand
temples to the founders of the two dynasties that ruled here. Both compounds were reconstructed in
the 17th century. The
temple to Đinh Bộ Lĩnh is a little larger and includes a pond in the
courtyard. That to Lê Hoàn stands
nearby. Đinh Bộ Lĩnh’s tomb lies
high up the Mả Yên Hill opposite his temple. Lê Hoàn’s tomb is at the foot of this hill. .
One has a good view of Hoa Lư
and its surroundings from up Mã Yên Hill, but it’s just a foretaste of the more
spectacular views further south. The entire karst landscape area, from Hoa Lư
through the Tam Cốc area south and as far west as the massive Bái Đính Buddhist
temple, comprises the Tràng An Scenic Area. In 2014 it won admission to the list of World Heritage
Sites.
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| boats on the Ngô Đồng River |
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| entering the first of the Tam Cốc caves |
Just before the entry gate, a
road bends around Hoa Lư and turns south.
Whether traveling by car, motorbike or bicycle, this is one of the most
enchanting rides in the province.
To the east everything is flat, but in all other directions limestone
hills, not particularly high, at most a few hundred meters, but steeply sided
and in often arresting shapes, dominate the landscape.
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| exiting a Tam Cốc cave |
The most popular way to enjoy
this scenery is by taking a boat trip on the Ngô Đồng River. The area is called Tam Cốc, which means
Three Caves, and refers to the three caves in the hills through which the
journey passes. Because its such a
popular tourist adventure, passengers can find themselves besieged by local
people in small boats, which they sometimes row with their feet, trying to sell
them snacks for the ride or a drink for their pilot. They also hawk embroidered
napkins, pillowcases, tablecloths and t-shirts, produced by the village next to
the docks (where there’s a better selection at cheaper prices).
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| taking cattle to graze |
This kind of harassment only
characterizes the first part of the journey, however. It ceases when the boats begin to enter the first of the
caves. From then on passengers can
relish the scenery without distraction.
The boats glide into caves at the foot of tall, sheer cliffs for lengths
of 127, 70 and 40 meters, and emerge through low exits that may require
passengers to duck their heads. Altogether the ride takes two to three hours.
But the river journey is not
the only way to appreciate the surroundings. One can also rent a bicycle or motorbike and explore sites
not accessible by boat, as well as follow roads deeper into the hills. Besides different perspectives on the
multitude of oddly shaped hills, the spaces in between feature hamlets,
temples, rice fields and groves.
Farmers may be planting or cropping rice, taking their cattle along the
dikes to their grazing grounds, or standing in small boats that they pole along
the river. It’s rural scenery and
serenity at its best.
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| Tràng An countryside oagoda |
A few km north of the boat
landing a road leads west to Đền Thái Vi, a small but attractive temple, built
in 1258 during the reign of Trần Thái Tông to celebrate Vietnam’s defeat of the
first Mongol invasion. A
two-tiered gate stands at the entrance, flanked by a stone horse on each
side. The temple itself is a
rather modest single-story stone building at the end of the pathway. But on its right stands am elegant,
two-story pavilion with thick wooden pillars and curved, tiled roofs. It is one of the oldest extant wooden
buildings in the country.
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| Tràng An limestone scenery |
The limestone hills of Tràng
An also include a few impressive caves.
Local people have traditionally believed these spots to be sacred. They set up religious shrines inside,
such as at the small cave on the way in to Hoa Lư, or turn them into Buddhist
temples, like Chùa Bích Động, a few km west of the boat landing. The temple compound dates its origin to
1428, the year Lê Lợi restored native rule after 20 years of Chinese occupation
and founded the Lê Dynasty. Two
wandering monks discovered the caves here, at the base of a large hill flanking
a long stretch of flat rice fields.
Stone steps, passing buildings mostly commissioned by the Trịnh Lords in
the 18th century, lead to three separate caves and their array of
Buddha images and small shrines in the walls.
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| Thái Vi Temple |
Other Buddhist monuments lie
scattered throughout the Tràng An Scenic Area. These include the massive Bái Đình Temple, sited on a mound
to the southwest and enlarged with new buildings earlier this century to become
the biggest Buddhist compound in Vietnam.
Smaller temples, some embedded in the hillside, grace every village,
while pagodas stand beside ponds and up in the hills.
On the other side of Highway
1A, however, south and east of Ninh Bình city, the land is devoid of hills and
completely flat, intersected with canals along the rice fields. Rather than pagodas, the steeples of
Catholic churches dominate the landscape.
This is one of the most heavily Catholic areas in the north and has been
ever since the Portuguese missionary Alexander de Rhodes first preached here in
1627.
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| entrance to CHùa Bích Động cave temple |
Nearly all the village
churches look like they were plucked from the French countryside and set up in
Ninh Bình province. A couple look
like smaller, more modest versions of Notre Dame in Paris. The outstanding exception is Phát Diệm
Cathedral in Kim Sơn village, 30 km south of Ninh Bình city. Built in the late 19th century,
it combines European and Sino-Vietnamese elements in a unique style and has
become popular with Vietnamese tourists, mostly non-Catholic.
Besides the cathedral
compound, Kim Sơn also features another architectural gem—an 18th
century covered wooden bridge.
Supported by two pairs of thick pillars, fenced on each side and with a
tiled roof, it spans the stream near the churches and is one of a handful of
such bridges in the country. Kim
Sơn would be worth a visit just for this beautiful old bridge, but of course it
is Phát Diệm Cathedral that is the main draw.
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| French-style Catholic church east of Ninh Bình |
It’s in the shape of a basic
Gothic church, but the tiered roofs of its cupolas, with upturned corners,
suggest local pagodas grafted onto the building. Trầm Luc, also known as Father Six, designed it and oversaw
its construction. The stone blocks
of the buildings came from quarries in Thanh Hóa province, 200 km distant. To install the enormous, two-ton bronze
bell in the tower behind the pond and in front of the cathedral, workers built
an earthen ramp to lug it to the top.
Afterwards they packed the earth around the base of the church, raising
the ground level by one meter and offering some protection against floods. Carvers also added low-relief
sculptures of Christian imagery on the exterior walls.
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| Phát Diêm Cathedral belltower |
Inside the cathedral 52
ironwood pillars, one meter thick, some of them eleven meters high, support the
vault. The lacquered and gilded
granite altar, made from a single stone, sits at the rear. The wall behind it displays the
portraits of around thirty missionaries, mostly European, but the side walls
contain not only angels and saints, but also such distinctly Oriental images
like dragons, turtles and phoenixes.
Behind the cathedral stand a
couple more churches. These lean
even more heavily to the native style, seemingly modeled on the compound gates
of Nguyễn Dynasty temples and communal houses. Only the crosses on top and the statues make it clear these
are churches and not Buddhist temples.
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| Phát Diêm Cathedral |
After 1945, when the Việt Minh
stepped up the campaign against French colonialism, the Vietnamese Catholic
Church was a powerful political force, virtually free of French administrative
control. Phát Diệm’s bishop at the
time was an avowed anti-French nationalist, but also opposed to the
communists. Hoping to take
advantage of the latter sentiment, French authorities allowed the bishop to
maintain an armed militia of 2000 men to guard against Việt Minh infiltration.
In December 1951 the Việt Minh
assaulted the village and captured it with suspicious ease. Though French paratroops arrived to
repel them, the guerrillas escaped with a large cache of weapons. Grahame Greene reported the battle for Life magazine, observing it from the
bell tower of the cathedral. He
later wrote it up again in his novel The
Quiet American.
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| subsidiary church in the Phát Diêm compound |
With the end of the war and
the division of the country in 1954, French missionaries spread the word that
the Blessed Virgin was moving south and persuaded the district’s Catholics to
do the same. The cathedral,
abandoned by its priests and congregation, shut down. In August 1972 an American bombing raid destroyed its
western wall, two former convents and a school. Over time, local residents
painstakingly repaired everything, such that no traces of the bombing remain.
Nowadays, with a more relaxed
policy on religious expression, Phãt Diệm Cathedral is active again. In fact, all the churches in the
district are thriving and fill with devotees every Sunday service. But for the throngs of non-Catholic
Vietnamese tourists who come to admire it, it’s not so much a religious edifice
that makes the impression, but the fact that here is one foreign institution—a
church—that reflects the dominance of native Vietnamese style over the
European.
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| covered bridge in Kim Sơn |
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