COLLECTION
Explore the stories, beliefs, and extraordinary beings of this tradition.
A district magistrate pays for a broken peony with his coat, walks into a mountain in the sea and marries a fairy. A year later he comes home to find that more than eighty years have passed on earth, or sixty, by the dates his own story gives.
Read story 11 min readA woodcutter found the tree whose leaves bring back the dead, and it carried him off to the moon. The oldest written telling, from 1886, never calls its hero Cuội, and the oldest Cuội we have found, in a dictionary of 1651, is a liar with no moon at all.
Read story 10 min readA daughter of the Jade Emperor let a jade cup fall, was born in a village of Nam Định and died at twenty-one, then kept coming back until the court that had tried to drive her out gave her a temple and a king's title. The fullest telling was written in the 1730s by a woman scholar, who, scholars broadly agree, reshaped a cult that already existed.
Read story 13 min readKilled by her stepmother's household, Tấm comes back as a bird, two trees, a loom and a fruit until the king finds her again. The tale is often called a Vietnamese copy of Cinderella, yet its oldest written version, printed in 1886, names the heroine Cám, and its second half has no place in Perrault or Grimm.
Read story 13 min readA fisherman nets a blade, a rebel finds its hilt in a banyan, and after the war a golden turtle takes the sword back into a Hanoi lake. The 15th-century chronicle tells only how the sword was found, and the oldest stories of the lake, from around 1800, end with a lost sword and a king draining the lake to find it.
Read story 11 min readA Hùng king promised his throne to the son who brought the best offering for the ancestors, and his poorest son won it with two cakes of glutinous rice, one square and one round. In the oldest text a spirit dictates both cakes, and the square one stands for more than the earth.
Read story 9 min readEvery year on the 23rd of the twelfth lunar month, Vietnamese families send their kitchen gods to heaven on a carp, with two men's hats and one woman's. Their tale, a wife and two husbands who died in one fire, was already written down in 1659, but the gods' names, their number and even the meaning of Ông Công have shifted since.
Read story 12 min readA golden turtle gave a king its claw to fire his crossbow, and his daughter married the son of his enemy. The oldest version, written in China, has no turtle, no goose feathers and no pearls: only a princess in love and a crossbow sawn through.
Read story 15 min readA man so poor that he and his father shared one loincloth hid in the sand, and the princess who found him there made him her husband. In the oldest full telling they become merchants and Buddhists, and their city rises in one night and vanishes in another, leaving a marsh behind.
Read story 12 min readA servant who said his wealth was his own was left on a sandbank to starve, until a white bird from the west dropped the seeds of an unknown melon. In the oldest text he never carves his name on a melon or sends one out to sea: the king simply remembers him.
Read story 9 min readA three-year-old who has never spoken asks the king for an iron horse, grows into a giant, routs the invaders and rides into the sky. The two oldest notices of him have no child and no horse, and the 15th-century texts arm him with a sword, not bamboo.
Read story 12 min readTwo spirits asked a Hùng king for the same daughter. The Mountain Spirit brought his gifts first, and the Water Spirit has attacked his mountain every year since. The famous nine-tusked elephant is not in the old texts.
Read story 9 min readHow Vietnam tells its own beginning: a dragon lord from the water, a fairy from the mountains, one sac of a hundred eggs, and a parting that founded the realm of Văn Lang.
Read story 6 min read
