At a calligraphy class in Hanoi, Hoang Thi Thanh Huyen slides her brush across the page to form the letters and tonal marks of Vietnam’s unique modern script, in part a legacy of French colonial rule.
The history of romanized Vietnamese, or Quoc Ngu, links the arrival of the first Christian missionaries, colonization by the French and the rise to power of the Communist Party of Vietnam.
It is now reflected in the country’s “bamboo diplomacy” approach of seeking strength through flexibility, or looking to stay on good terms with the world’s major powers.
Photo:AFP
A month after Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) visited, French President Emmanuel Macron arrived yesterday.
Huyen, 35, takes weekly calligraphy classes alongside six others at her teacher’s tiny home as “a way to relax after work.”
“When I do calligraphy, I feel like I’m talking to my inner self,” she said, her head bent in concentration.
Macron is today to visit Hanoi’s star attraction, the Temple of Literature, whose walls and explanatory panels are decorated with calligraphy in both traditional Chinese-influenced characters and Quoc Ngu.
Colonization led to the widespread use of Quoc Ngu — which uses accents and signs to reflect the consonants, vowels and tones of Vietnamese — but it was created two centuries earlier on the initiative of Catholic priests. When the Avignon-born Jesuit Alexandre de Rhodes published the first Portuguese-Vietnamese-Latin dictionary under his own name in 1651, it was primarily intended for missionaries wishing to spread their religion in what was then called Dai Viet.
The French then spread the Latin alphabet while training the civil servants who helped them govern Indochina, said Khanh-Minh Bui, a doctoral student at the University of California, Berkeley, specializing in 19th and 20th-century Vietnamese history.
Another motive was “severing connections with an older civilization, which has greatly influenced the elites,” in this case China, she added.
Compared with the characters that had been in use for centuries, Quoc Ngu was far easier to learn. Its adoption fueled an explosion in newspapers and publishing which helped spread anti-colonial ideas that ultimately led to the rise of the Communist Party of Vietnam.
“Quoc Ngu carried the promise of a new education, a new way of thinking,” Minh said.
When Ho Chi Minh proclaimed independence in 1945, it was “unthinkable” to turn back the clock, she added.
Today, a Western tourist lost in the alleys of Hanoi can read the street names, but would have a hard time pronouncing them correctly without understanding the diacritics used to transcribe the six tones of Vietnamese.
Calligraphy teacher Nguyen Thanh Tung, who has several young students in his class, said he has noticed rising interest in traditional Vietnamese culture.
“I believe that it’s in our blood, a gene that flows in every Vietnamese person, to love their traditional culture,” he said.
Calligraphy in Quoc Ngu offers more artistic freedom “in terms of color, shape, idea” than that using characters, he believes.
“Culture is not the property of one country, it’s an exchange between regions,” added Tung, 38. “English and French borrow words from other languages, and it’s the same for Vietnamese.”
BACKLASH: The National Party quit its decades-long partnership with the Liberal Party after their election loss to center-left Labor, which won a historic third term Australia’s National Party has split from its conservative coalition partner of more than 60 years, the Liberal Party, citing policy differences over renewable energy and after a resounding loss at a national election this month. “Its time to have a break,” Nationals leader David Littleproud told reporters yesterday. The split shows the pressure on Australia’s conservative parties after Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s center-left Labor party won a historic second term in the May 3 election, powered by a voter backlash against US President Donald Trump’s policies. Under the long-standing partnership in state and federal politics, the Liberal and National coalition had shared power
NO EXCUSES: Marcos said his administration was acting on voters’ demands, but an academic said the move was emotionally motivated after a poor midterm showing Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr yesterday sought the resignation of all his Cabinet secretaries, in a move seen as an attempt to reset the political agenda and assert his authority over the second half of his single six-year term. The order came after the president’s allies failed to win a majority of Senate seats contested in the 12 polls on Monday last week, leaving Marcos facing a divided political and legislative landscape that could thwart his attempts to have an ally succeed him in 2028. “He’s talking to the people, trying to salvage whatever political capital he has left. I think it’s
Polish presidential candidates offered different visions of Poland and its relations with Ukraine in a televised debate ahead of next week’s run-off, which remains on a knife-edge. During a head-to-head debate lasting two hours, centrist Warsaw Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski, from Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s governing pro-European coalition, faced the Eurosceptic historian Karol Nawrocki, backed by the right-wing populist Law and Justice party (PiS). The two candidates, who qualified for the second round after coming in the top two places in the first vote on Sunday last week, clashed over Poland’s relations with Ukraine, EU policy and the track records of their
UNSCHEDULED VISIT: ‘It’s a very bulky new neighbor, but it will soon go away,’ said Johan Helberg of the 135m container ship that run aground near his house A man in Norway awoke early on Thursday to discover a huge container ship had run aground a stone’s throw from his fjord-side house — and he had slept through the commotion. For an as-yet unknown reason, the 135m NCL Salten sailed up onto shore just meters from Johan Helberg’s house in a fjord near Trondheim in central Norway. Helberg only discovered the unexpected visitor when a panicked neighbor who had rung his doorbell repeatedly to no avail gave up and called him on the phone. “The doorbell rang at a time of day when I don’t like to open,” Helberg told television
RSS