Hung Kings' Temple

Picture a day in the first part of the third lunar month, when the whole country has the day off. That holiday is not tied to an event but to a real address: Nghĩa Lĩnh hill, 175 metres high, in Hy Cương commune, Phú Thọ province. The hill has carried other names over time — Hùng Vương sơn, Núi Cả, Nghĩa Cương, Hy Sơn, Bảo Thiếu Lĩnh — and the site around it spreads across several communes rather than sitting inside one fenced plot.

The Hill Behind a Day Off for the Whole Country

Visiting here means walking uphill, and the walk has an order to it. First the main gate, built in 1917: an arched structure of two storeys and eight roof tiers, its front face moulded with two armoured warriors, one holding a spear, the other a battle axe; across the middle of the first storey runs the inscription "Cao sơn cảnh hành", usually translated as "Climb the high mountain, see far and wide". Then đền Hạ, the Lower Temple, said by legend to be where Âu Cơ gave birth to a sac of a hundred eggs that hatched into a hundred children — fifty following their father to the sea, forty-nine following their mother to the mountains. Beside it stands Thiên Quang pagoda, with two monks' stupas whose tops are moulded as lotus flowers, and in front of its door a three-crowned cycad with a leaning trunk, estimated by researchers at around 800 years old. Another stretch of slope brings you to đền Trung, the Middle Temple, where a plain stone table with eight seats still sits in the yard, its surface darkened by time. At the summit is đền Thượng, the Upper Temple, whose classical name "Kính thiên lĩnh điện" means a hall for worshipping heaven — simple truss framing, no carving, built across four terraced levels.

Are you curious what a place like this still does today? It remains a working place of worship rather than an object on display: groups who wish to offer incense register in advance with the site management board and wait for confirmation, and the site still receives donations towards restoration. Around the grounds there are guides, electric shuttle carts, places to buy offerings, souvenirs, food and lodging. The heritage here has not stopped growing either: the temple to Mother Âu Cơ on Vặn hill was inaugurated at the end of 2004, and the temple to Lạc Long Quân on Sim hill in 2009 — both works of this century, added to a complex that was already centuries old.

Some things here say plainly that time has passed through. To the left of the Upper Temple stands a stone oath pillar just over a metre tall; the one standing there now is a newly made agate version, while the older pillar, found during a survey in the 1960s, has been moved into the Hùng Vương Museum. The bell hanging in Thiên Quang pagoda's bell tower carries no casting date, only the old administrative names of this very spot: "Đại Việt quốc, Sơn Tây đạo, Lâm Thao phủ, Sơn Vi huyện, Hy Cương xã, Cổ Tích thôn cư phụng". In the same museum sits the Hy Cương bronze drum, its face 93 cm across, the largest Đông Sơn drum yet known in Vietnam and now a national treasure. Lower down is đền Giếng, the Well Temple, whose rear chamber still holds the round Ngọc well, stone-lined, its water clear and cool all year — by legend the place where the two princesses Tiên Dung and Ngọc Hoa came to comb their hair by their own reflection.

The forest on the hill still keeps its many-layered shape, and the path is still the old path: up in stages, pausing at each temple. A day off that a whole country has kept for so long — would you like to find out where it began, by climbing that slope yourself once?

Enough to decide whether to go

What it is

Hung Kings Temple Historical Site — a complex of four temples, one pagoda and one tomb on and around Nghĩa Lĩnh hill

Where

Cổ Tích hamlet, Hy Cương commune, Phú Thọ province

The route

Main gate → đền Hạ and Thiên Quang pagoda → đền Trung → đền Thượng at the summit → down to đền Giếng

Ranking

Special national relic site since 2009

UNESCO

The worship of Hung Kings in Phú Thọ was inscribed as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2012 — the practice was inscribed, not the temple buildings

Festival

Hung Kings' commemoration on the tenth day of the third lunar month; the festival runs through the first ten days of that month, with palanquin processions from village communal houses up to the temples, Xoan singing and bronze-drum playing