Ba Chua Kho Temple - Duong O Paper Village

Last weekend, a friend and I took a quick trip on a motorbike the the area around the town of Bac Ninh, just north of Hanoi. After coffee in the park for a little planning, we headed to the Ba Chua Kho temple, on a hill just the other side of the railroad tracks. It felt like the whole village, which really formed an arm off of Bac Ninh itself, was waiting for our arrival. Trying to stay assertive as we were enthusiastically encouraged to buy offerings ranging from platters of food and drink for our ancestors in the afterlife, we settled on some incense and fake paper money. The temple was beautiful, partly for its setting on a hill near a lake. But the significance wasn't so much religious as historical: the temple had been built about 1000 years ago to honor a woman, remarkable in itself. She had been a poor woman who married well, a king's brother, and when she was tasked with managing the region's farms, she set up a grain storage system for about 75 farms. While this sensible move makes most of us nod approvingly, her claim to legend was that her prudence paid off by feeding Vietnamese troops fighting off one of the waves of northern invaders.

Our second stop was in the village of Duong O - Phong Khe, just off the highway south of Bac Ninh. Around Hanoi, there are groups of traditional handicraft villages, specializing in small-scale manufacturing: pottery, weaving, paper fans, wood-carving, etc. Just as U.S. farms are rarely a little self-sustaining plot of land with cows and chickens anymore, these villages are no living history park, either: many of these villages are fighting for survival, and have industrialized their specialty, sometimes with mixed results. The paper village we visited has diversified into everything from tissues and toilet paper to big rolls of paper for fake paper money offerings. Much of the paper is recycled from waste paper, though you might not like what it does to the water. But the town is thriving, evidenced by several new homes, and must not get many Western visitors: when we parked the bike on the corner, two older gentlemen advised us to park it inside one of their houses, never asked for a fee, and found it amusing that we were taking pictures of the alley around their place. At one of the larger processors, a woman gave us a quick explanation of her 24/7 operations without us asking at all.

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2009 1108 Ba Chua Kho Temple and Duong O Paper Village