Rough Guide to Vietnam - Jan Dodd [265]
The fifth and final courtyard housed the National Academy, regarded as Vietnam’s first university, which was founded in 1076 to educate princes and high officials in Confucian doctrine. Later the academy held triennial examinations to select the country’s senior mandarins (See "The Temple of Literature"), a practice that continued almost uninterrupted until 1802 when Emperor Gia Long moved the nation’s capital to Hué. In 1947 French bombs destroyed the academy buildings but they have now been painstakingly reconstructed, including an elegant two-storey pavilion housing a small museum and an altar dedicated to a noted director of the university in the fourteenth century, Chu Van An. Upstairs, three more statues honour King Ly Thanh Tong, the founder of Van Mieu; Ly Than Tong, who added the university; and Le Thanh Tong, instigator of the stelae. The exhibits are mostly post-eighteenth century, including 1920s photos of the temple, and students’ textbooks, ink-stones and other accoutrements, such as a wine gourd for the fashion-conscious nineteenth-century scholar. Recitals of traditional music are held in the side-pavilion according to demand.
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Hanoi and around | The City | Ho Chi Minh’s Mausoleum and around | The Temple of Literature |
Becoming a mandarin
Examinations for admission to the Imperial bureaucracy were introduced by the Ly kings in the eleventh century as part of a range of reforms that served to underpin the nation’s stability for several centuries. Vietnam’s exams were based on the Chinese system, though included Buddhist and Taoist texts along with the Confucian classics. It took until the fifteenth century, however, for academic success, rather than noble birth or patronage, to become the primary means of entry to the civil service. By this time the system was open to all males, excluding “traitors, rebels, immoral people and actors”, but in practice very few candidates outside the scholar-gentry class progressed beyond the lowest rung.
First came regional exams, thi huong, after which successful students (who could be any age from 16 to 61) would head for Hanoi, equipped with their sleeping mat, ink-stone and writing brush, to take part in the second-level thi hoi. These national exams might last up to six weeks and were as much an evaluation of poetic style and knowledge of the classic texts as they were of administrative ability; it was even felt necessary to ban the sale of strong liquor to candidates in the 1870s. Those who passed all stages were granted a doctorate, tien si, and were eligible for the third and final test, the thi dinh, or palace exam, set by the king himself. Some years as few as three tien si would be awarded whereas the total number of candidates could be as high as six thousand, and during nearly three hundred exams held between 1076 and 1779, only 2313 tien si were recorded. Afterwards the king would give his new mandarins a cap, gown, parasol and a horse on which to return to their home village in triumphal procession.
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Hanoi and around | The City |
West Lake
Back in the mists of time, a gifted monk returned from China, bearing quantities of bronze as a reward for curing the emperor’s illness. The monk gave most of the metal to the state but from a small lump he fashioned a bell, whose ring was so pure it resonated throughout the land and beyond the mountains. The sound reached the ears of a golden buffalo calf inside the Chinese Imperial treasury; the creature followed the bell, mistaking it for the call of its mother. Then the bell fell silent and the calf spun round and round, not knowing which way to go. Eventually, it trampled a vast hollow which filled