Interesting ancient house report: Lost treasure

13 years ago, artist Nguyen Thuong Hy measured and drew special ancient houses in Quang Nam, then traveled throughout the Central provinces but could not find any larger and more beautiful relics. Now those treasures have been lost…

"Sculpture" in a deserted neighborhood

At that time, after surveying many ancient houses along Quang Binh, Quang Tri, Thua Thien-Hue, Da Nang, Quang Ngai, Binh Dinh..., painter Nguyen Thuong Hy still could not find any larger ancient house. It far exceeded the size of the common wooden houses which were only 14.5 m long with upper and lower beams, 2 packing rooms (where belongings and rice were stored). The owner's anti-theft method was also very careful with a large ironwood bar as a threshold to prevent the threshold from being dug up, or installing 9 thick armrests right above the packing room to prevent thieves from removing tiles and rafters to sneak down...

A businessman in Ho Chi Minh City ordered workers to complete a project in the style of a Hue traditional house. Hearing rumors about the most beautiful ancient house in Quang Nam, he immediately came to admire it and admitted that he was unlucky when he learned about this relic too late. The exterior is simple with a patch of sweet potato leaves planted in the front yard, a simple bamboo fence... but the house of Mr. Ngo Van Sy in Que Xuan 1 commune (Que Son district) preserves many treasures. Pushing the door to step inside the 3-room, 2-wing house, visitors will see a plethora of elaborate architecture. Nguyen Thuong Hy once wrote down in his notebook the beautiful structures and called them sculptures. The hammocks in the worship room. The stylized three-layer panels with dragons, crossbows, pheasants, and eight precious stones. The stylized three-layer rafters with twisted leaf patterns. The crossbow ends are carved with openwork...

Drifting talent

Few people expected that the horizontal plaque engraved with the 7th poem in the Eight Autumnal Poems by the Chinese poet Du Fu, which was hung solemnly in the middle of Mr. Si's house, had been lost from a previous owner in Hoi An. Nguyen Thuong Hy found this "trace" and then had to ask many people who were knowledgeable in Chinese characters for help to find the origin of the poem. Let's re-read the last 4 very heroic lines of the Tang poem engraved in the soaring cursive style through the translation of Le Nguyen Luu: The girl sank, the waves drifted, the gray clouds blurred/The lotus fell, the dew fell, the pink powder was cold/The border gate was high, the birds opened the way/A fisherman lived everywhere in the world.

The Japanese architects were also surprised that behind the flower garden of Mrs. Tran Thi Thao in Dai Nghia commune (Dai Loc district), there is an ancient house with many strange architectures. At first glance, this house, which is over 200 years old and has been through 6 generations, is quite simple, but a careful examination of the traces from the jagged walls, stone bases for columns... revealed that the building used to be 7 rooms wide. Due to bombs during the war, the owner had to "cut" 2 rows of columns in 2 double wings (usually each wing has only 1 row of columns, this house has double), leaving 3 main rooms and a thatched roof. With the architecture of three rooms and four lower rooms, Mrs. Thao's house had to restore a total of 108 columns to return to the original. The Institute of Architectural Research (Ministry of Construction) has a reason to classify this relic as type 1. A closer comparison of the two special ancient houses reveals many "differences": Mrs. Thao's house is larger (17.42 m long) but the usable space inside is smaller than Mr. Sac's house (0.28 m less in length).

But the most surprising thing has not stopped yet, when these once brilliant architectures have now "drifted" in different styles. Mr. Sac's house was sold in 2005 for less than 100 million VND, but the owner of the old house business who repaired and rebuilt it had a customer asking for billions of VND. Mrs. Thao's house was dismantled from the old garden 2 years later and seemed "luckier" when it was restored at the Vietnamese House Space in Dien Ban District. Located in a solemn position right behind the main gate, this 108-column relic immediately won one of the 5 national records that the VietKings Center announced for the Vietnamese House Space on October 18, 2014.

At the time Mrs. Thao’s house was elevated to the national record, Mr. Ngo Van Sy’s most beautiful house in Quang Nam was still struggling with a scientific dossier. These days, painter Nguyen Thuong Hy is busy writing a descriptive article according to the “order” of the Institute for Monuments Conservation (Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism). “Mr. Hy advised me many times to make a dossier for the monument. I also really like to renovate the house because it leaks in many places, but I am powerless. I will probably have to knock on the doors of the management agencies soon,” Mr. Si confided.

Youth Source