Spaced out
Hundreds of cultural and religious sites in the capital city are suffering under the weight of an expanding population.
As usual, Nguyen Thi Dieu, a clothes seller, hangs her products in front of the door of the communal hall in Yen Thai commune located between West Lake and Thuy Khue street. “I have sold clothes at this place for eight years and no one has ever moved me on,” says the 37-year-old.
Tens of shops and stalls like Dieu’s surround the hall. It’s not a problem, she says, as nobody comes here to see who the hall is dedicated to. “I don’t know anything about this building at all,” says 45 year old Bui Thi Thuy, who is selling fish under the windows of the hall. Yen Thai hall is dedicated to Thai Luan, who under the Le dynasty in the 15th century taught the village to produce paper.
The paper was used by royal courts to write imperial decrees and so the village prospered. The village’s craft even inspired poetry and songs. Pham Thi Bac, Thuy’s daughter is hanging shorts, brassieres and underwear on the hall’s old gate posts. On each post there are two parallel sentences in Chinese script. “I don’t know what they mean. No one notices them!” she says, laughing at my line of questioning.
Down the well In Cao village, also by Hanoi’s West Lake, I meet 62-year-old Tran Van Minh, who is trying to complete the welding of an iron lid over an old well. The well is 200 years old and located by the village’s communal hall, which has been recognised as a national historical site.
Over the past few years, the well has been filled with rubbish dumped by surrounding shops and households, while part of the hall has been used to dry clothes by nearby households. Tran Van Minh says that some 10 years ago, all Cao villagers still came to the old well everyday to draw clean water.
“Our communal house is dedicated to Than Nong King, who taught the villagers how to plant paddy rice. It is sacred and in ancient times the well was believed to be the village’s eye, which could determine the villagers’ health,” he says. “But when people’s lives improved, each household invested in their own well, so the village’s well was abandoned and gradually became a rubbish container.
There was no local management board set up to protect local cultural sites,” says Do Xuan Dau, head of the village’s cultural site management board. The rapid urbanisation and booming population in Hanoi has placed a strain on cultural sites such as the well in Cao village and Yen Thai communal hall. All across the city cultural or historical sites are ingloriously accommodating services such as car washes, food stalls, or even rubbish dumps and building materials.
The custodians Thich Dam Vinh, a monk at the Hai Ba Trung Temple built in 1142AD, says the temple has been impeded by one company for nearly 40 years. “Though we have reported the case to the local authorities many a time, the company has somehow been provided with a land-use certificate and built a high building within the temple’s area,” Vinh says.
“The company has sneered at the law and the temple which is a recognised national historical and cultural site.” The temple is dedicated to Trung Trac and Trung Nhi, better known as Hai Bai Trung (The Two Ladies Trung), the national heroes who led an uprising against the Chinese rulers early in the first century AD.
Pham Van Manh, a retired government cadre who lives near Hanoi’s Kim Lien communal hall in Dong Da district, says the hall is surrounded by traders from early in the morning till late at night. “We should not put up with these violations. Most of them don’t come from our locality but somehow they can continue trading here,” says Manh.
Manh has a personal attachment to the hall which he helped repair before leaving for the south to struggle for national dependence in the 1960s. The hall was built under the Ly dynasty to worship Cao Son Dai Vuong, one of the 100 children born from the union of Lac Long Quan and Au Co, the first ancestors of Vietnamese people.
“The history of the hall has been ignored,” he says pointing to the large pond in front of the hall, which has been filled with rubbish. Public houses According to Bui Ngoc Quy, a member of Thang Long Cultural Heritage Association, when Hanoi was being attacked by the French and the US, the public often had to evacuate and seek refuge in religious sites such as temples, pagodas and communal houses.
But after the war ended some families never moved out. Six years ago, an investigation of Hanoi’s historical and cultural sites was launched. It was found, for just some examples, that Quang Minh pagoda was home to 24 households, Dong Quang pagoda had 42 households, Kim Co pagoda had only one household but it encroached nearly half of the pagoda’s original area, and Truong Thi communal house had 30 households. “Kim Ngan communal hall in Hang Bac street is now home to 17 households,” says Pham Vu Hai, a resident living in the street.
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