Preserving Han Nom heritage: Preserving for future generations

(Baonghean)Han Nom heritage is an indispensable part of the cultural life of the community, expressing the quintessence of tangible and intangible culture, a unique feature of Nghe An from the past to the present. However, over time, this body of documents is facing the risk of loss and oblivion. The issue of preserving and promoting Han Nom heritage is of interest to many people...

Dust off and find gold

One day in the beginning of the new year, we visited the home of teacher Thai Huy Bich - Chairman of the Association of Former Teachers of Hung Nguyen District, the initiator of the project to collect Han Nom heritage in the district. Sipping a cup of hot tea at the beginning of the spring, the retired teacher and his friend who shares the same passion for the Han Nom heritage treasure - Mr. Nguyen Dinh Van, former technical officer of Hung Nguyen Brick and Tile Company (who had studied in China) who was present that day excitedly told... The collection work started around the beginning of September 2009, with the main goal of discovering, photographing, and translating Han Nom heritage scattered in relics, family temples, and households, including: steles, royal decrees, certificates, parallel sentences, large characters, genealogies, tablets, and books.



Phuc Quang pagoda stele, Hung Khanh commune, Hung Nguyen district.

The journey to find the roots is not simple, because the heritage is scattered among the people in all communes. Every year, teacher Thai Huy Bich and his colleagues in the Association of Former Teachers travel to all 250 hamlets, to each family temple in the communes in the district, to find any place where they hear of Han Nom heritage. The most pitiful thing is that there are steles found in the bushes, or the owners have used them to make washing tables, to make pond bridges with rotten royal decrees that no one cares about. However, there are also cases where the owners consider Han Nom heritage as "generational treasures" that are carefully kept, very difficult to access if they do not create trust, such as the royal decree of the Ngo family in Hung Phu commune, which was given to 3 people to keep 3 keys for the inner door, the outer door and the royal decree box. When opening the decree, there must be the presence of 4 people, including the clan leader and 3 key keepers... Finding it was difficult, the translation process was even more difficult, there were some steles with blurred letters, decrees, and parallel sentences that were not well preserved, damaged by termites, and took a whole month to piece together and decipher.

The meaningful work of the Hung Nguyen Former Teachers Association has discovered many additional historical issues such as: The year of establishment and the scale of Hung Nguyen Palace in Hai Do and Nguyet Tinh areas; the Le Khoi royal decree at the ancient Xuan An village temple; the discovery of royal decrees at Xuan Hoa temple; Hai Voi temple and many other temples; or through the exploitation of Trung Kien communal house steles, it shows that in the 17th century, in Hung Nguyen land, there was a famous boat-building village in the country that built dragon boats for the king... Besides, thanks to the collection and translation of royal decrees and genealogies, many families have found their origins and backgrounds.



The title of high-ranking mandarin of the Ngo family in Hung Phu commune (Hung Nguyen) during the reign of King Minh Mang

The collection work was carried out methodically and elaborately: from taking photos, classifying, to translating, printing... The teachers carefully annotated the materials found in each locality and created each file in the computer. In the conference to accept the results after 2 years of implementation, the leaders of Hung Nguyen district as well as the provincial Han Nom Club acknowledged and highly appreciated this project. From that success, the district's Department of Culture and Information registered a district-level scientific topic "Preserving and promoting the value of Han Nom heritage in Hung Nguyen district". The project was approved by the province. After 3 years of collection and research (including the time of implementing the project and the scientific topic), up to now, the Hung Nguyen Former Teachers Association has collected and translated 22 steles; 361 royal decrees, 90 degrees, 3 parallel sentences, 149 horizontal lacquered boards, 454 parallel sentences, 183 tablets, 190 books, 70 genealogies... Dozens of families have been discovered to be keeping many valuable documents. Among them, there is a family in Hung Long commune keeping nearly 100 ancient medical books, or a family living on the banks of Lam river is keeping 43 royal decrees of many villages in the commune. The stage of collecting Han Nom heritage is basically completed, the Management Board continues to research and evaluate the heritage to write 8 topics, currently 3 topics have been completed: stele text, theory, royal decree.

Apply digital technology

Talking about preserving, maintaining and promoting the value of the province's Han Nom heritage, we cannot fail to mention the role of the Nghe An Province Han Nom Club (under the Nghe An Provincial Library) established in 2004...

Currently, Nghe An Library is preserving over 300 Han Nom books, tens of thousands of documents, genealogies, sacred stories (stories of worshiped gods), the contents of 1,700 royal decrees, parallel sentences of Nghe An, steles in Nghe An... In particular, the 26-volume collection of Vietnamese steles, donated by the French Far Eastern Archaeological Institute to Nghe An Library for preservation. In addition, there are 2 sets of woodblocks (including 50 wooden boards cut from the fig tree and engraved with words) titled "Tran Dai Vuong Chinh Kinh" and "Tu sinh thuyen chan Kinh". This is a rare set of Chinese scriptures from the Nguyen and Duy Tan dynasties donated by Mr. Tran Hieng (80 years old) in Cong Thanh commune, Yen Thanh district. In fact, in recent times, the work of preserving these intellectual heritages has encountered many difficulties. With documents carved on stone, due to the impact of time, rain and sun, they gradually fade away. With documents written on paper, they are threatened by climate and termites. Not to mention that people's sense of preservation is not always careful everywhere. Currently, there are many sources of documents among the people, but they are mainly preserved by traditional experience, usually by rolling up documents and putting them in the kitchen or putting them in boxes, and taking them out to dry 1-2 times a year.

On the other hand, not everyone can read, translate, and fully understand the semantics of Han and Nom characters. The number of people who know and are good at Han - Nom characters in the province can be counted on the fingers. Determining that, in the current context of development and integration, conservation along with research, exploitation, and promotion of the value of Han Nom heritages is of great significance, contributing to the preservation of national cultural identity. In addition to promoting the process of collection and preservation, our province has invested 10 billion VND to build a digital electronic library for long-term preservation using information technology through documenting and digitizing rare documents. Instead of having to hand-copy Han Nom documents as before, now the originals are photocopied and stored in computers. This is an advanced, modern, and convenient way of preservation and storage for research and exchange. Starting from mid-November 2012, Nghe An Provincial Library will apply digital technology to preserve Han Nom heritage. The Provincial Library will collect, photocopy, and digitize tens of thousands of Han Nom documents, forming a Han Nom data bank to serve readers and long-term research work.

Mr. Dao Tam Tinh - Director of the Provincial Library, Chairman of the Han Nom Club of Nghe An province, said that in order to promote Han Nom heritage, the province needs to have a policy of training and encouraging those who work in management, research, and collection of Han Nom culture, especially the young generation!.

Khanh Ly