Red River Rituals in Vietnam

                              by Jim Goodman                                 

 

ritual boats on the Red River at Thô Khôi

      The Red River originates in central Yunnan, southwest China, flows southeast through the province and enters Vietnam at Lao Cài.  From here it continues running southeast all the way to the Gulf of Tonkin.  The alluvial plain alongside it, straddled by many tributaries, is the heart of ancient Vietnam.  Ancestors of its contemporary inhabitants tamed the mighty river, prone to flooding, with dikes, canals and irrigation channels, turned the land into prosperous farms and created a civilization to go along with the achievement.

dancing at the  Thô Khôi đình

       Such incidents were rare, however.  The river and its biggest tributaries also provided a transportation route for the movement of goods and people, knitting scattered and remote settlements together into a social whole and laying the foundations for a nation.  Waters drawn off from the river system nourished the crops that fed the people.  When the French conquered Vietnam they named it the Red River, after the reddish brown color of its water, a name which persisted after Independence.  But to traditional Vietnamese in the Delta it was Sông Cái—the Mother River.  And the aspects of the material life enabled by the river’s exploitation, like wet-rice cultivation and fishing, would be replicated along other rivers, further south, as the Vietnamese community gradually expanded out of the Red River Delta.

all dressed up for the Thô Khôi festival  

       It was inevitable that the river, so essential to everyday material life, also acquired a sacred character.  Whether ancient animist Vietnamese had a divine name for the river, or believed it the dwelling place of supernatural beings, is not known, for the mythology has not survived.  But even today people still believe in the sacred character of the river.  Water from the middle of the Red River is considered the most efficacious for any kind of ritual act requiring some kind of ‘holy water’.

       Ancient Vietnamese traditions include a ritual designed for collecting such water.  Called mộc dục, it involves taking a large jar aboard a boat that heads out for the middle of the river, where the officiating priests collects water from the river and pours it into the jar.  Back on land, people will then use this water to bathe images, ancestral tablets and gravestones.  In theory, any organized party can carry out a mộc dục rite for their own private purposes, but if it were ever a widespread occurrence, it is not at the present time.  Nevertheless, it remains the central feature of two major festivals each year, at the riverside villages of Thô Khôi and Chèm.

stately  procession of the guardian deities

girls bearing one of the 'reluctant' deities

      Thô Khôi is in Gia Lam, on the other side of the river from Hanoi, about 16 km south, on the way to Bát Tràng ceramics village.  The village đình and its temple sit behind a pond a little below a bend in the embanked main road.  Houses and fields stretch out behind.  Together with four associated villages, Thô Khôi stages its annual festival for three days in the latter half of the second lunar month. 

boys carrying one of the 'fickle' deities

       The first day is rather sedate, with no scheduled activities.  Five palanquins which will be used to carry images of the tutelary deities stand in the temple yard and devotees occasionally come to venerate them.  In front of them stands the rack with the very large blue and white porcelain jar, with dragons on the side and little animal heads near the brim, which will be used to store the water.

       On the second morning participants dressed in bright costumes arrive at the đình.  While one woman beat a large drum, a group of women perform dances around the parked palanquins.  After they conclude, bearers pick up the palanquins, six to each, to take the deities on a procession, along with the water jug, to a point on the riverbank just north of the Vĩnh Tuy Bridge.   Their purpose is to invite the deities to witness the mộc dục ritual.

boarding the boat with the vessel for mộc dục 

       Three of the palanquins proceed in a slow and solemn march along the 2 km or so of paths to the riverbank.  But two of the deities are reluctant to leave Thô Khôi, one borne by young men and one borne by young women.  They do not follow the others in a measured and stately straight line.  Instead they dart back and forth, move in circles and loops, go zigzag and back and forth, careen and teeter wildly.  Crowds have to jump out of their way.

      Yet despite coming precariously close, they never fall over or hit anyone.  No director stands in front of either palanquin to guide the movements.  The bearers themselves claim that they have no control over their bodies once they pick up the palanquin.  The deity makes them go forward or backward, bend down or straighten up, lean this way or that and run or walk.  The bearers cannot make conscious decisions of their own and the deity manages to control the movements of all six bearers, simultaneously and in synchronization.

after the duck in Thô Khôi

chèo theater performers

gathering of forces--chèo theater

       Eventually the reluctant deities arrive at the bank with the others.  The water jug goes aboard, robed and mitered priests climb on and the boat sails off to the middle.  There a priest uses a long-handled scoop to collect river water and pours it into the special jug.  That done, the boat returns to the shore, where the palanquin bearers and dancers have been taking a break, and when all are ashore, the bearers pick up  their loads and the long procession back to the đình begins.  The same antics performed by the bearers of the troublesome deities prevail and after some wild diversions from the route the two finally wind up joining the others in the đình courtyard.  They stay there for the rest of the festival.

dragon on the prowl at Chèm

       The ritual part of the festival is over, but the very definition of lễ hội, Vietnamese for festival, implies more.  Lễ is the ritual and hội is the entertainment.  The hội for the second afternoon is quan họ, a special style of romantic singing, in solo or duets, a well known tradition of nearby Bắc Ninh province.

women's rituals at Chèm

       The entertainment for the third morning is competitive duck-catching.  Four ducks are set loose in the pond and when they have swum out to the middle five youths jump in the pond to catch them.  On the occasion I witnessed one boy quickly grabbed two ducks and after a few minutes another boy caught one after cornering it.  That left one duck and three hunters.  The last duck continued to elude them so long that one boy tired and left the pool.  The other two tried to corner it, but when they dove under the water to grab it, the duck popped up several meters away.  The crowd began to cheer for the duck.  It managed to stay free several more minutes.

       The evening hội was chèo theater, a dramatic tradition dating back to the tenth century   Đinh Dynasty.  The cast can be rather large, and the stories somewhat involved, but the costumes are attractive and the dialogue is both sung and spoken.  They are usually dramas of good and evil and the good guys win in the end.

mộc dục on the river at Chèm

tổ tôm điếm booth

       Later in the year, during the three days around the full moon of the fifth lunar month, an even bigger mộc dục ritual takes place in Chèm, a riverside village just west of the Thăng Long Bridge.  Sited on the south bank of the river, the đình’s layout and architecture date from an early 19^th century renovation.  But the original construction was in the Tang Dynasty years and the village is quite old. It is reputedly the birthplace of the hero Lý Thang, a general employed by China’s first Qin Emperor in the 3^rd century BCE. to fight Xiongnu invaders.  After vanquishing the enemy he was given the emperor’s daughter in marriage and invited to stay. 

 

after the duck, blindfolded

      He declined because he wanted to return home to take care of his sick mother.  The emperor gave permission and the princess accompanied the warrior to Vietnam.  The Qin Emperor allegedly then had a big statue of Lý Thang erected on his northern defense lines to try to fool the Xiongnu into believing their menace was still around.

       At Chèm the mộc dục ritual boat goes out on the river all three mornings, accompanied by a dragon and lion.  Supported by a team of energetic young men, the dragon writhes and prances all over the courtyard and then marches along the dike with the lion to the landing pier.  The pair descends the steps and clambers aboard the boat, which is a little bigger than the one at Thô Khôi.  Priests in ceremonial robes follow, along with other ritual participants and some of the festival crowd. 

cockfighting at Chèm

       After a dragon dance on deck, the boat departs for its short journey to the middle of the river.  Apparently the need for the sacred water is greater for the five villages participating in the ritual, for the priest fills three large porcelain jars with it each morning, not just one. When this is completed the boat returns to the pier and the dragon, lion, ritual participants and spectators disembark. The dragon dances back to the đình and salutes the guardian deity with a couple bursts of fiery breath.  That’s it for the dragon and lion performances, but activities in the compound persist.

taking positions for human chess

       The main temple is busy with rituals involving two groups of elders, one male, one female, who take turns lining up inside in ranks facing each other, while the group leader in front center makes the bows to the image and leads the prayers.  The men wear long silk coats, usually blue, black miters on the head with cloth tails hanging down the back and fancy shoes with upturned, pointed toes.  The women dress in matching pink silk jackets and skirts. Sometimes the participants twirl banners or make slow and stately candle processions, but for a show with more action, spectators can turn to one of the festival’s entertainment programs.

       The program will always include a quan họ performance at least one of the afternoons.  There may be a cockpit, where gamecocks go after each other while the observers (and owners) anxiously await the outcome.  A different mood entirely pervades the Chèm version of duck-catching.  Instead of a pond, they release a single duck into an enclosed corral and just one lad, blindfolded, goes after it

human chess participant

dragon descending to the pier

       Another entertainment venue in the compound will be an area for tổ tôm điếm, a unique Vietnamese card game.  Unlike Western playing cards, those used in tổ tôm điếm are much bigger, long and narrow, with 120 cards to a deck.  The obverse side features traditional portraits in the center and Chinese ideographs above and below depicting the card’s rank and suit.  The dealer operates from a booth and the players sit in front at a narrow table.  Players draw and discard until they have a set of 21, the value of which depends on how many cards are identical, of a progress in a suit, whether of the same rank, etc. Unless they’re also aficionados of the game themselves, spectators are unlikely to decipher what’s going on,, or whether the player whose cards they can see has a good set or not.

men's rituals at Chèm

       In some years the đình also sponsors a performance of human chess, wherein people play the parts of the chess pieces.  This is an easier event to follow, even for those who don’t play chess.  The participants, one side of boys dressed in red silk and one side of girls in yellow silk, hold staffs with a Chinese character identifying the ‘piece’ they represent and after a ceremonial entrance they take their assigned spots on the chessboard painted on the ground.

       The two players carry pennants, walk around to survey the set and then indicate a movement by flagging one of the pieces and leading its move, either to another spot or off the board altogether.  Because they are operating at the same eye level as the ‘pieces’ and not bent over a board, it is more difficult to judge which moves to make.  Meanwhile a singer narrates the progress of the game, suggests moves and makes comments.  Like the mộc dục ritual itself and the tổ tôm điếm card game, human chess is yet another unique aspect of Vietnamese festivals, still part of the culture many centuries after their creation.

leaving the pier at Chèm for  the mộc dục ritual

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To Pray and To Play: Attending Vietnamese Festivals

                                                               by Jim Goodman

festival procession, Hanoi

       Rising prosperity and increasing modernization have not undermined religious traditions in Vietnam.  To the contrary, religion appears to be enjoying a national revival. It never really disappeared during the decades of war and austerity, just went private.  Now in the more relaxed atmosphere of contemporary Vietnam, along with material improvements in their lives, people are freer to indulge in their religious beliefs and customs, to spend money on temple donations and making their annual festivals bigger and better than the oldest villager can remember ever having witnessed.

       Devotees throng the temples on these dates, dressed in their very best clothes and jewelry, bearing offerings for their deities, murmuring prayers and making requests for divine assistance of one kind or another.  Village elders, costumed in rick silk robes, carry out rituals.  And in the courtyard stalls hawk incense sticks, flowers, woodcrafts, statues, mobiles and pendants, snacks and drinks, toy birds made from real bird feathers,  colored rice dough figurines, paper turtles and caterpillars on strings, cotton candy and other items.  The crowd consists mainly of religious-minded local folks, but also includes both residents and visitors whose interest in religion is token at best.  There have come for the same reason the devotees linger around the area after performing their rituals—because festivals are fun.

The dragon salutes the deity at the đình in Chèm village. 

        The Vietnamese word for festival, lễ hội, like the event itself, has two parts—the rituals (lễ) and the entertainment (hội).  Besides the scheduled hours for the formal rites carried out by village authorities, the festival program will also announce the entertainment, which sometimes might occur simultaneously with the rituals.  The nature and type of entertainment varies from place to place, as well as from year to year, perhaps depending upon whether it was a good year for agriculture that year.  It could include one or more kinds of participatory games and contests and/or a show staged for the festival audience.

       Actually, the rituals are a show as well, especially the processions.  Long lines of devotees march through the village or on the roads leading to it, bearing offerings, beating drums and playing musical instruments, carrying an ornate sedan chair housing an emblem of their deity, brandishing spears, lances, halberds and other weapons used to fight nefarious spirits.  Sometimes dragon dancers lead the way.  Sometimes the sedan chair-carrying sector proceeds to the river and boards a boat to collect water further out, to be used in the mộc dục ritual back at the temple.

Thổ Khối's recalcitrant deity

       The most interesting mộc dục procession is that conducted by Thổ Khối village, across the river from Hanoi in Gia Lâm, 8^th day of the 2^nd lunar month.  Five deities, each housed in a separate palanquin carried by six bearers, participate in the long walk to the river.  Two of these deities are petulant, reluctant to go and make trouble the whole way.  A group of young women carry one and young men shoulder the other.  While the other three palanquins march in a stately manner, these two sway, tilt at such an angle they appear bound to topple, straighten up, then suddenly run backwards and forwards and scatter people out of their way. 

       Nobody stands in front of the palanquins and directs their movements.  None of the bearers stumbles or loses control.  Their unpredictable, erratic turns and tilts are in total synchronous coordination, as if they had rehearsed everything for weeks in advance.  But in fact they hadn’t.  They had just been selected for the task a couple days prior.  One of the bearers, a university student who spoke good English, told me there was no plan, no rehearsal and he himself didn’t understand why no one ever fell in spite of the chaotic movements.  “I want to go this way and something makes go another way.  I had no control over my movements.  Something else made me do what I did.”    He also claimed the other bearers felt the same way and no one could explain it.  He concluded that perhaps the spirits really did exist.

village elders conducting rituals

       Compared to the excitement of a Thổ Khối procession, or even the pomp and color of village contingents making their way to the festival site, the rituals at the temple are rather sedate.  A group of elderly men in long, embroidered silk tunics, shoes with upturned toes and tall, tasseled miters on their heads walk slowly and solemnly to the main altar, bow or kowtow, raise their arms in supplication, recite prayers and then basically repeat the procedure a few more times.  Then it’s the turn of the women, also in splendid silk attire, more solemn prayers and rites. The garments are all quite photogenic, of course, but without a special interest in the proceedings it’s a bit tedious to watch for very long.

quan họ singers o teh pond at Chùa Thấy

       All this takes some time, but the action is not confined to the temple altar.  Outside other shows may be taking place.  A local or visiting water-puppet troupe may be setting up a pavilion for a show in a nearby pond.  Quan họ singers from Bắc Ninh, popular at many northern festivals, could be performing in the vicinity. Sometimes they sing from a designated place.  Other times they sing while riding a boat in the temple compound’s pond, dressed in what used to be the traditional northern clothing. A stage might be in place for historical skits, the performance of Chinese-style tuồng opera or a drama from the indigenous chèo tradition.

evening stage show at a Hanoi festival

       Elsewhere the festival activity features contests and games.  Besides the games of skill and chance offered at the market area, this could include the very complex traditional card game called tổ tôm diếm, with an emcee sitting in a booth and an assistant handing out cards to several players seated next to a rack to hold them.  Another popular game, requiring no prior knowledge, is that of trying to whack a hanging gourd with a stick while blindfolded.  Participants pay 5000 đồng to try, for a reward far greater if they succeed.  But rare is the one who does succeed.

festival market at Cổ Lễ Pagoda

      Chess is another popular festival game.  Players pair off against each other along one of the paths with portable sets.  The host đình (communal house) may have a chess field for either stick chess or a performance of human chess.  It may erect a small corral for cockfights, a popular rural amusement.  Owners spend years raising and training their birds.  The long-necked black ones are known for stamina and tenacity.  The white cocks are hot-tempered and quick to attack.  The multi-colored ones are warier and more flexible in their fighting tactics. At the festival in Chèm near Hanoi, the corral is used for catching a rooster while blindfolded.
       Less frequently than cockfighting, festival organizers will arrange fights between smaller birds, the arena being a table with a pair of adjoining cages.  The contestants are laughing thrushes.  The two cages sit flush to each other, with a thin slab of wood separating the openings in each.  When the emcee withdraws the slab the two thrushes fly up and peck at each other.  The fight goes on until one succeeds in noticeably wounding the other.

wrestling at the festival

       As for the contests, the participation ranges from just a pair, such as a wrestling match, to a large number of villagers, like a tug-of-war.  The tug-of-war could be between two neighborhoods of the host village, between the boys and the girls, or between the youth and the older generation, as at Tích Sơn in Vĩnh Phúc province.  In the latter case, it’s less of a contest and more of a ritual.  Villagers believe if the older men win the crops will be bounteous.  The youth are expected to put up a respectable fight, but lose, out of respect for the tradition.

       Some đình compounds have a pool that may be used, besides for floating quan họ performers, to stage contests in the water.  Lê Mât’s festival includes a fishing contest, while Thổ Khôị’s pool is the venue for a duck-catching contest.  Organizers release four ducks into the pool and a minute later five youths jump into the water to catch them.  The onlookers cheer on their favorites, who get to keep the duck they capture and it usually doesn’t take long. 

boat-racing team at Cổ Lễ Pagoda

       At the event I witnessed scarcely two minutes had passed before one lad emerged with a duck in hand and left the pool.  A few minutes later another contestant grabbed two ducks.  But the last duck somehow managed to elude its three pursuers for over fifteen minutes.  One boy tired of the effort and withdrew.  By this time the crowd began cheering on the duck.  It would appear to be cornered, dive under the water as the boys reached for it and emerge in the middle of the pool, far from its pursuers, to hearty applause, until captured at last.    

boat race at Thanh Toàn, near Huế

       Since many villages lie near streams or rivers, boat races might be on the festival program.  They could be boats with teams of rowers, like that held at Quan Lan Island’s festival, where teams practiced their skills in the days preceding the festival.  In the climactic encounter one side of the island competes against the other, in boats modeled after those used in the 13^th century battle against the Mongols.  Or they could be races of several individuals paddling small boats, as at Thanh Toàn, near Huế, or basket boats as at Cát Bà Island.  Other places will hold swimming races, with lines of long floating bamboo poles separating the lanes.       

nón-making contest, Thanh Toàn

       Contests also take the form of competition making something.  At the Chùa Long Đôi Sơn festival, 18^th day of the 4^th month, the adjacent village of Đội Tam, a craft village specializing in drum manufacture, stages, naturally, a drum-making contest.  Pairs compete assembling the components of a large temple drum and fastening on its cowhide head.  In Thanh Toàn teams of women race each other to make the traditional conical cap (nón la) popular all over rural Vietnam.  In these kinds of contests speed cannot be achieved at the price of skill.  Emcees inspect the results before announcing the winner.  The drum has to sound right.  The conical cap must be perfectly put together.

cooking contest, Thanh Toàn

       Several northern villages include cooking contests in their festival programs. The competitors are usually young, unmarried women and the spectators are largely older women with marriageable sons, on the lookout for a prospective daughter-in-law.  Contestants are rated both according to how skillfully they keep the fire going as well as how good the rice is at the end—fully cooked, nothing raw on top and no burns on the bottom.

       Rules and conditions vary.  At Tư Trang in Thanh Hoá the contest is held on bamboo boats and the designated fuel is dried sugar cane, which is more difficult to keep burning.  At Tích Sơn in Vĩnh Phúc the competitors first boil the rice over a wood fire in a copper pot and then empty it all into an earthen pot and finish the cooking over charcoal.  At Chuông, the conical hat village south of Hanoi,  the women cook while carrying a 6-7 month-old baby at the hip and simultaneously prevent a frog from leaping our of the chalk circle drawn around them.

cooking contest, Hai Bà Trưng festival, Hanoi

       At the Hai Bà Trưng festival in Hanoi the 8^th and 9^th days of the 2^nd month contestants first start preparations on the ground, lighting the fire under the pot.  Then they suspend the cooking pot and the fire from a shouldered pole, stand up and walk around.  They have to keep the fire going while in motion and not let the rice boil over.  And of course, in the end the rice has to be perfectly cooked.

       In another location it might just be how fast competing teams can prepare a certain local dish, with all its peculiar garnishes.  The race could end in a tie, with both results as tasty as required.  But no real disappointment follows.  The point of the contests is entertainment; thrilling for the participants and amusing for the spectators.  Like the shows and the games, they demonstrate that Vietnamese religious festivals are not just dour ceremonials but also embrace the secular enjoyments of life.  Religion doesn’t have to be a strictly serious affair.  It can also involve a lot of fun.

traditional quan họ singer at Chùa Thấy

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