Red River bank collector pieces history together

Minh Thu - 

For decades, the image of an old man picking up broken pieces of ceramics on the sandy bank of the Red River has been a familiar sight for people in Ha Noi's Gia Lam District. In that time, many have said they considered Nguyen Viet Hong as a "nerdy"man who had nothing to do but idle away his retirement.

It wasn't until the Viet Nam Institute of Archaeology and the Vietnamese Government recognised the ceramic pieces he has collected as national legacies that people began to understand the value of his long and quiet work.

Knocking on Hong's door just as he and his wife finished their final batch of pottery on a Friday afternoon we found ourselves almost dazed by hundreds of ceramic and porcelain pots, bowls, plates and vases.

Hong led us to the bustling Kim Thuong wharf on the Red River. He is quite familiar with the site because he has spent his afternoons here for years in search of ancient relics.

"Sometimes it's just not fair. Had the river been consolidated, many more precious Kim Lan relics would have been saved from the flow," he says.

He proudly shares that he has collected enough ancient coins to fill dozens of jars and thousands of ancient ceramic and porcelain fragments from the 11th century. All were collected along the river.

He also walks us through his small museum, a 30sq.m room filled with ceramic and porcelain legacies spanning the length of the region's history: the Duong Dynasty in eighth and ninth centuries, the Tran Dynasty in the 14th century to the Le and Mac dynasties in the sixteenth century.

His vocation as a collector came to Hong as a surprising coincidence. In 1996 he overheard one of his nephews talking about some of the neighbourhood kids who had found a jar full of bronze coins while swimming in the river and exchanged it for candy. Hong felt nostalgic for the ancient relics and decided to find the jar.

As he looked at the rusty coins, he realised that they dated back thousands, even tens of thousands of years. He laughed happily as tears of joy fell from his eyes in front of the strange stares of other villagers. Since then, the village children know they can exchange the pottery fragments or coins they find along the river for money to buy candy. He has explained the deeper historic value of each of the fragments to the children.

Day after day, he follows the footsteps of the children to the river, his "archaeological team" of Kim Lan Village. Bystanders can watch the grey-haired old man and a small flood of kids chattering behind him.

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