Churches that Tell Stories in Russia, India, Vietnam, Portugal and the UK

Stories of Colonialism, Repression, a Long Christian Tradition, Natural Disaster, Commercial Exploitation and the Continuity of a Sacred Site

This post is an improved amalgamation of two older posts 'Three Favourite Churches' and...wait for it....'Three More Favourite Churches' - such originality.

Unlike Lynne, I am not a believer, but I am interested in religion and I do like churches. I like the architecture, I like the history they contain and the sense of community they embody. Building a church is somebody’s attempt at the sublime, sometimes for the greater glory of god, sometimes for the greater glory of themselves.

The six churches in this post all have stories to tell. and they are very different stories. From west to east they tell of colonialism, repression, an ancient Christian tradition in a place some find surprising, surviving natural disasters, commercial exploitation and the adaption of ancient sacred sites.

Colonialism

The Church of Giang Ta Chai, Lao Cai Province, Vietnam

The French ruled Indo-China for over a hundred years before independence in 1954 so it is unsurprising that there are many Vietnamese Christians – more specifically Catholics - and for a time, after independence and partition, there was a ruling Catholic elite in South Vietnam. Most Christians live in the urban centres; there are few churches in the countryside and they are particularly rare in ethnic minority villages in the northern highlands.

I cannot describe this church as 'sombody's attempt at the sublime', but it possibly has a rustic charm. It does not look like a Catholic Church, maybe it is an evangelical church, the work of more recent missionaries - a modern form of colonialism.

The Church of Giang Ta Chai, Northern Highlands, Vietnam

We passed the church of Giang Ta Chai, whilst trekking through the Muong Hao Valley in 2011. A village of the Hmong ethnic group, it has twenty Christian families. The photograph was taken in late March but the banner translates as The Church of Giang Ta Chai, Happy Christmas.

Repression

Cathedral of the Epiphany, Irkutsk, Russia

Cathedral of the Epiphany, Irkutsk

At the start of the 20th century the Siberian city of Irkutsk had two cathedrals and two other major churches clustered round one square. A decade of civil war and sixty years of communism saw them all either destroyed or converted to other uses. Since 1990 the Russian Orthodox Cathedral of the Epiphany has been reconsecrated, restored and repainted. Resembling an elaborate birthday cake it raises a smile in an otherwise rather dour city.

A Little Known but Ancient Christian Tradition

St Mary's, Thalassery, Kerala, India

Christianity is a minority religion in India, practised by only 2.3% of the population - but that is still 30 million people! In the 16th century Portuguese Catholic missionaries claimed many converts, paricularly in Goa while in the 18th century Protestant British and US missionaries worked in the north-east

St Mary's, Thalassery

22% of India's Christians live in Kerala, India's most southwesterly state, and few of them owe their Christianity to European missionaries. When asked, many Keralan Christians will describe themselves as 'Catholics', but most are not Roman Catholics but Syriac Catholics. According to tradition the church was founded by the apostle St Thomas who came to India about 40 CE and is buried in Chennai (formerly Madras) predating the arrival of European missionaries by more than a thousand years. The church above was photographed in 2010 at Thalassery (formerly Tellicherry) on the Keralan coast. Like Irkusk cathedral it could be mistaken for a birthday cake, but with very different icing; the light in India is different and demands strong colours.

Surviving a Natural Disaster

Igreja Matriz, Estômbar, Algarve, Portugal

Sitting on a low hill between the main N125 and the road to the ‘Slide and Splash’ water park, Estômbar has somehow remained aloof from the development that has gone on all around. Although it is now largely a dormitory village for the nearby city of Portimão, the tides of tourism have washed round the village not over it.

The light is different in Portugal, too. Although cooler than India the Algarve sees more sunshine than anywhere else in Europe and white and silver are the order of the day. Rows of whitewashed houses descend the hill from the central square which is dominated by the gleaming bulk of the Igreja Matriz (Mother Church).

The Igreja Matriz, Estômbar, Algarve, Portugal

Constructed in the late 18th century, a time of great prosperity in Portugal, it looks like a symbol of permanence and stability, but in 1755 a great earthquake and tsunami destroyed 85% of Lisbon's buildings, killing a quarter of its population, and inundating the Algarve. Estômbar's church was destroyed, except for the Manueline doorway, which the builders incorporated into their new church. The Manueline style was peculiar to late 15th and early 16th century Portugal and is exemplified in the Torre de Belem and the Jeronimo Monastry in Lisbon.

Commercial Exploitaton

St Bartholemew's Tong, Shropshire, UK

Built over an earlier Norman church in 1406 and remodelled in 1510, St Bartholomew’s is not an architectural masterpiece, though the octagonal tower is unusual. Much more interesting is the story attached to the church.

St Bartholmew's, Tong

Charles Dickens knew Tong well; his grandmother had been housekeeper at Tong Castle (the site now lies beneath the M54). The death of Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop was set in Tong and she was buried in a fictionalised version of St Bartholomew’s. The book's enormous popularity and Dickens' lecture tours in America, led to a spate of Americans coming to England to visit scenes featured in the story. Seeing an opportunity George Boden (or Bowden), the parish clerk, forged an entry in the parish register of burials, had a gravestone carved and charged visitors to see the grave of Little Nell. It did not seem to worry the visitors – and it certainly never worried George – that they were paying money to see the ‘real’ grave of a fictional character.

Ancient Sacred Site

St Margaret's, Bagendon, Gloucestershire, UK

St Margaret's, Bagendon

One of the delights of the Cotswolds is the way buildings can be so much part of the landscape they seem to have grown organically from it. The tiny church at Bagendon is a perfect example, and also an embodiment of two thousand years of Cotswold history. Although the earliest parts of the building are Saxon, Roman votive artefacts have been found in the churchyard suggesting the site was of religious significance in pre-Christian times. The tower is Norman, but the nave was rebuilt in the late fourteen hundreds. The enormous wealth brought to the Cotswolds by the wool trade at that time resulted in many churches receiving a Perpendicular Gothic makeover. Nineteenth century restorations and the addition of a porch in the 1960s were done so sympathetically it is hard to tell what is new.

see also...............

Taoist (or Daoist) Temples

Synagogues

Jain Temples

The Cu Chi Tunnels and the Cao Dai Great Temple: Vietnam North to South Part 17

The American War and a Uniquely Vietnamese Religion

10-Apr-2012

The Cu Chi Tunnels

The Road to Cu Chi

Vietnam

After two posts in which That War figured not all, this one returns to it with a vengeance.

We set off early towards Cu Chi some 50 km north of Saigon. Ten minutes from our hotel we passed an unremarkable crossroads with a small shrine on one corner commemorating Thích Quàng Đúc, the Buddhist monk who set himself on fire here on the 11th of June 1963. We first encountered Thích Quàng Đúc at his monastery in Hue where you can find the full story.

The shrine of Thich Quang Duc (far corner of the road)
Ho Chi Minh City

We drove north along a flat, straight road across land that had been forest before Agent Orange was sprayed all over it. The awful effects of that action we had seen at the War Souvenir Museum in Ho Chi Minh City.

Trang told us more stories of the trials and tribulation of his family through the long years of war. They were not dramas, there were no heroes or villains, they were just stories of how people’s lives are buffeted and blown off-course by the storms of war. I will not reproduced them here, they are Trang’s stories and I feel he has a right to tell them to whoever he wishes but I should not pass them on second hand and mutated by the fallibility of memory.

Roadside scene north of Ho Chi Minh City

We are Introduced to the Tunnels

The Cu Chi Tunnels are a major tourist attraction, so we arrived at a car park that already contained several buses. Trang paid our entrance fees and we walked through a long concrete underpass and emerged in a wooded area.

During the war, Cu Chi, mid-way between Saigon and the Cambodian border, saw intense Viet Cong activity among the large number of American bases.

For protection, the Viet Cong built an extensive network of tunnels, popping up to ambush the Americans whenever they could. The Americans, understandably, devoted considerable effort to smoking the Viet Cong out from their hiding places (often quite literally).

‘Can you see the tunnel?’ Trang asked as we stood beneath a clump of trees on a patch of leaf strewn grass. We could see nothing suspicious, but then a soldier arrived. Moving Lynne aside he brushed some leaves from where she had been standing to reveal a wooden hatch. He dropped down into the tunnel, lowered the hatch over his head and disappeared.

Into the tunnel, Cu Chi

The photograph above could almost be of a model, rather like the plaster dog’s backsides people put on their lawns to make it look as if a Jack Russell is disappearing into a hole it has dug. But this is not a model, it is a real person, the upper half is attached to a lower part and he really did slide through that tiny entrance.

Disappearing into the hole, Ch Chi

A continual game of cat and mouse had been played. The Americans liked to drop grenades into the tunnel entrances so the Viet Cong provided them with fake entrances. The Americans used dogs to detect the real entrances, so the VC put aniseed round the fake entrances, and so it went on.

Lynne by a real hole/fake hole/smoke hole for a distant kitchen?
Cu Chi

We were shown round the easily accessible parts, visiting underground kitchens, hospitals...

Hospital, Cu Chi tunnels

...andd command centres.

Trang takes command, Cu Chi tunnels

Making Sandals that Go the Wrong Way

We saw a man making sandals from used tyres....

Making sandals from used tyres

...putting the ‘heals’ at the front and the ‘toes’ at the back to confuse attempts at tracking.

Sandals with 'toes' at the back and 'heal' at the front

Conditions in the Tunnels

We drank the ‘tea’ they brewed from jungle plants and ate the boiled sago which was their staple diet. It was not unpalatable and a good source of carbohydrate, but I am sure I would quickly have tired of it.

Tea and sago at the Ch Chi tunnels

At one point we were invited to crawl along some the tunnels themselves. Of course they had been cleaned and swept so that we did not have to share them with the spiders and snakes the VC encountered, and they had been enlarged to accommodate our oversized western arses. The Americans formed a ‘tunnel rats’ unit, but in the confined spaces the larger Americans were always at a disadvantage against their smaller, slighter adversaries.

In the (enlarged) Cu Chi tunnels

It was all good fun in a Boy’s Own sort of way, and it was easy to see the VC as Robin Hood figures and the Americans as the Sheriff of Nottingham’s men, but there were some sections that made me feel uneasy.

Whay Happens to the Enemy

It started with a destroyed tank. A group of tourist were laughing and having their photograph taken beside it, then it was our turn and Trang took the picture below. As he did so I wondered about the tank behind us: had it been brought here, or was this where it had been destroyed? What about the men inside? Were tourist snapping photos and laughing in the place where young American conscripts had died?

Destroyed tank, Cu Chi tunnels

And then there were the booby traps. Bombs and mines are bad enough but there seemed to be something vicious and personal about the improvised traps on display. A soldier kicks open the door of a house and a plank swings down at him bristling with barbed iron spikes. It is easy to stop: he takes his rifle in both hands and holds it out in front of him. But there is an extra piece hinged on the bottom bearing another barbed skewer which then swings upwards into the soldier’s groin. I have difficulty understanding how anybody who could design or deploy something that would do that to another human being.

They showed off a line of booby traps buried in the ground, all of them based on the same barbed spikes. A wooden box with a spike in the bottom and four more angled down from the top corners was the simplest and in some ways the nastiest. Slip into that and as you cope with the pain from your impaled foot, you slowly realise that you are going to be trapped there for some time, possibly the rest of your life, and even if your comrades can get you out, it would probably be with one leg fewer than when you stumbled in.

Examples of booby traps
Cu Chi tunnels

I have no difficulty coping with the Un-Hollywoodlike idea that the Americans are the baddies and the Viet Cong the goodies, what I cannot comprehend is how you can dehumanize your foe enough to do that to them.

The Cao Dai Great Temple

We left Cu Chi in a thoughtful frame of mind and drove a further 40 km north, parallel to the Cambodian border and into Tay Ninh Province.

The Cao Dai religion was founded in the Mekong Delta in the 1920s when a superior spirit called Cao Dai (literally ‘High Place’) made himself known to a medium. Cao Dai had previously visited earth as Lao-tzu, Jesus Christ, Mohammed, Moses, Sakyamuni and Confucius (though not necessarily in that order) but was displeased by the outcome and had since being working through a series of saints – an eclectic group including Joan of Arc, Louis Pasteur and Winston Churchill. Emphasising prayer, veneration of ancestors, non-violence and vegetarianism, Cao Dai is a pick ‘n’ mix of major world religions and seems largely benign if distinctly odd. The estimated 2 or 3 million adherents mostly live in the Mekong Delta and in Tay Ninh where they have their headquarters.

We arrived at the Cathedral of the Holy See – the leader of Cao Dai likes to style himself ‘pope’ – in time for the 12 o’clock service. Odd or not, large sums of money have been made available to build a Cathedral midway in style between a church and a Buddhist temple, though the decoration - reminiscent of the Vinh Trang pagoda - is typically southern Vietnamese.

Approaching the Cao Dai cathedral, Tay Ninh

Along with many other tourists we were crammed onto a balcony. At midday the worshippers processed in, the leaders in brightly coloured robes, the rank and file in white.

The assembled faithful, Cao Dai Cathedral
Tay Ninh

They settled themselves down and chanted. For maybe ten minutes the chanting continued unchanged, then there was a minor, though well-choreographed change in seating plan and the chanting resumed.

Endless chanting, Cao Dai cathedral, Tay Ninh

Fifteen minutes later we realised nothing else was going to happen and the repetitive one-line chant was beginning to grate, so we made our exit. We were far from the first to leave.

Inside the Cao Dai cathedral, Tay Ninh

Lunch and Back to Ho Chi Minh City

Lunch was at a tourist feeding station; Trang apologised but there is nowhere else suitable locally. There was nothing wrong with the food, and there was plenty of it, but it was bland and designed to offend no one.

The Site of a Famous and Disturbing Photograph

Driving back towards the city down a long straight road through flat farmland we passed several smaller Cao Dai churches, one of them in the village of Trang Bang. In June 1972 the North Vietnamese took the village and a group of civilians and South Vietnamese soldiers who had been sheltering in the church made a run for the South Vietnamese lines just outside the village. Mistaking them for Viet Cong fighters the South Vietnamese air force napalmed them.

Cao Dai church, Trang Bang

Nine year old Phan Thị Kim Phúc tore off her burning clothes and ran down the road naked and screaming. Nick Ut’s photograph of this event shocked the world (it can be seen here). My photograph shows where it happened, though the road has been rebuilt and widened since 1972. It is difficult to believe that such terrible events could have taken place in such a banal setting.

A banal setting for terrible events, Trang Bang

After taking the photograph Huỳnh Công (Nick) Ut went to the assistance of Kim Phuc taking her and other injured children to hospital. Depite not being expected to survive, Kim did recover and went on to study at university in Ho Chi Minh City and then Havana. She married in 1992 and whilst on honeymoon she and her husband sought political asylum in Canada. They now live in Ontario and have two children. Kim is a UNESCO goodwill ambassador and has set up the Kim Phuc Foundation which aids child war victims. Ut was 21 when he took the picture having worked for the Associated Press since he was 15. Evacuated when South Vietnam fell, he is still an Associated Press photographer but is now an American citizen and lives in Los Angeles. He and Kim Phuc remain in contact.

Back in the city we said goodbye to Trang and our driver. We had spent a lot of time together over the previous week and had got to know Trang well. It felt like we were leaving a friend.

11-Apr-2012

Saying Farewell to Ho Chi Minh City and Vietnam

Weasel Coffee

The next day was our last in Vietnam. We did some shopping, walking up to the Ben Thanh market where we bought various presents, some tea to take home, and some ‘weasel coffee’, the beans having passed through the digestive tract of an Asian palm civet (not a weasel) before processing. This is the ‘most expensive coffee in the world’ selling, according to the ever reliable Wikipedia for US$750 a kilo. Ours was far cheaper, suggesting either it was from intensively farmed civets who are force fed coffee beans, or, more likely, a chemically simulated ‘weasel coffee’ - in other words, as genuine as my Ray-Bans. Civet Farms, I learned later, raise serious animal welfare concerns so I hope it was a fake. The Speciality Coffee Association of America describes weasel coffee as a gimmick and says ‘…it just tastes bad’. It may well be a gimmick but it has, we were to discover, a powerful almost rank flavour, which suits my taste better than the insipid coffees Americans seem to prefer.

Where to buy weasel coffee, Ben Thanh market, Ho Chi Minh City

Sri Mariamman Hindu Temple

Near the market is the Sri Mariamman Hindu Temple, one of several serving Ho Chi Minh’s small Hindu community. The gopura may be diminutive by Indian standards, but it stands out in Vietnam.

Sri Mariamman Hindu Temple, Ho Chi Minh City

Removing our shoes, we walked round the inside, and watched a steady trickle of worshippers coming and going.

Worshipper in the Sri Mariamman Hindu Temple, Ho Chi Minh City

Other Entertainments in the Park

We spent a little time watching life in the park. Several groups of young men were playing keepie uppie using a sort of elongated shuttlecock rather than a football. We had seen this game played in open spaces everywhere in Vietnam [update: a similar game is playedwith a rattan ball in Myanmar.].

We briefly watched the filming of a television drama. Two young women sat on a park bench having a quietly intense conversation while surrounded by an army of cameraman, soundmen, make-up artists and producers, not to mention a fair few onlookers. I was surprised by how low-key television acting is compared to the stage version.

In the park, Ho Chi Minh City

After attempting to photograph the cavalry charge of motorbikes whenever the traffic lights change we had our last Vietnamese meal of chicken and cashew nuts, prawns and peppers followed by a Franco-Vietnamese crepe stuffed with mango and smothered with chocolate sauce.

Motorcycles, Ho Chi Minh City

Shoe shine Boys and Battered Trainers

In the afternoon we eventually gave in to a pair of shoe shine boys and let them loose on our old and battered trainers. We agreed to be seriously overcharged and watched them sit on the pavement and make a determined assault on our footwear. After a further attempt to overcharge us for insoles, they returned our shoes several shades closer to their original white.

Cleaning our trainers
Ho Chi Minh City

After that there was a little time to kill before we set off for the airport for the long journey home.

Our thanks to Haivenu travel of Hanoi, and especifically to Phong, the branch manager in Ho Chi Minh City, who made all our travel arrangements with commendable efficiency. I was glad we were able to meet before we set off home.

Thanks

Thanks also to our excellent guides

Truong in Hanoi
Minh in Sa Pa
Vinh in Hue and Hoi An
Trang in Ho Chi Minh and the Mekong Delta

Also all our drivers who kept us safe in Vietnam’s sometimes challenging traffic.

And, finally, the families we stayed with in the northern highlands and the Mekong Delta.

Vietnam North to South

Prelude: Raybans in Heathrow and Saigon
Part 1: Hanoi (1) Ethnic Minorities, The Old City and Water Puppets
Part 2: Hanoi (2) Bat Trang, Quan Ho Music and Fighting Cocks
Part 3: Ha Long Bay
Part 4: Lao Cai, Coc Ly Market and Sa Pa
Part 5: Trekking from Sa Pa (1), Sa Pa to Ta Van
Part 6: Trekking from Sa Pa (2) Ta Van to Ban Den
Part 7: Trekking from Sa Pa (3), Around Ban Den then back to Hanoi
Part 8: Hanoi (3), The Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum and the Temple of Literature
Part 9: Hue (1), The Citadel, The Battle of Hue 1968 and Some New Things to Eat
Part 10: Hue (2), A Self-Immolating Monk, an Impotent Emperor and Imperial Dinner
Part 11: Da Nang
Part 12: Hoi An and My Son
Part 13: Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon)
Part 14: The Mekong Delta (1), Can Bei and a Cornucopia of Fruit
Part 15: The Mekong Delta (2), To Vinh Long and Can Tho
Part 16: The Mekong Delta (3): Cai Rang and My Tho
Part 17: The Cu Chi Tunnels and the Cao Dai Great Temple

THE END

The Mekong Delta (3) Cai Rang and My Tho: Vietnam North to South Part 16

Cai Rang, some 7 km upstream from Can Tho, is the largest floating market in the Mekong Delta. We were up bright and early and at the landing stage before 8 o’clock. Trang hired a boat and we chugged up the river, grateful for the cooling breeze as the morning sun was already hot.



A barge load of sand goes down the Mekong

The trip to the market took us forty minutes and the river was already busy. There was activity in the stilt houses along the waterfront and we passed barges carrying sand, a floating petrol station, rice barges and fishing boats, some - presumably Christian owned – with a cross prominently displayed on the roof of the wheelhouse.

 


A floating petrol station near Cai Rang

At Cai Rang the river was packed with boats piled high with fruit and vegetables.



Vegetable stall, Cai Rang

Larger boats had their produce in the hold, only a turnip or a papaya tied to the mast indicated what the sold, while smaller boats with long tailed outboard motors scooted amongst them and men and women in conical hats rowed heavily laden sampans, standing up and straining on oars crossed scissor-like in front of them.

 


Rowing a sampan, Cai Rang

We floated around peering at this and that in a boat far too large for three passengers.



The boatman may be smiling, but the boat is far too large for three passengers

Eventually we bumped up against a boat load of pineapples. I clambered onto the deck and watched a woman peeling a pineapple with a machete, trimming off the skin and then slicing a spiral groove round the fruit to removing the rest of the outer parts.



Sculpting a pineapple, Cai Rang

When she had finished she hacked it in four, giving a piece each to Lynne, Trang, the boatman and me. Holding it by the stalk, I ate it like a lollipop. I am on record as saying that the pineapples of Kerala are the finest in the world. This lacked their faint coconut-y flavour, but was the softest, sweetest, juiciest pineapple I have ever eaten. The central woody core we cut out of pineapples in England, did not exist, there was only soft luscious fruit right through to its heart.



As fine a piece of fruit as this world can supply
Cai Rang

As we left they started hauling up more pineapples from below.



Pineapple porn

I have long held the view that if some bizarre turn of events meant I could only eat one fruit for the rest of eternity, I would chose pineapples; now I know which pineapples and where to get them.



Spurned mangoes slink away

 

Pottering back downstream we diverted into a side channel and stopped off at a rice processing plant. We stepped onto the jetty, removed our shoes and walked, very gingerly across a ceramic tiled floor made as slippery as ice by a coating of rice dust.

Some types of rice are sold as grain, some ground into flour, but all are treated to the same process of husking and polishing. The venerable machinery rattled away as Trang described how the stalks and some of the husks are sold as fuel to the brickworks we had seen the day before, the softer husks are turned into cattle food and the grains are polished for human consumption.

 


Ancient rice polishing machine, or perhaps it's a dehusker - who knows?
Cai Rang

Impressive as this use of the whole plant is, the health and safety aspects of the factory were troubling. Apart from the hard, slippery floor, the moving machinery was unguarded and workers wore no masks though the air was thick with floating particles. To my untrained eye the conditions also looked right for a dust explosion should there be an unexpected spark in the wrong place. To call the working conditions Dickensian might be a slur on Victorian industrial practices.

We returned to Can Tho and watched a group embarking on a long decorated boat. It was, Trang told us, a betrothal party, a stage between engagement and marriage, and was traditionally attended by the groom’s family only. The bride-to-be wore a red dress of embroidered silk (well, I noticed it was red, Lynne recorded the other details), and the groom a white suit. Everybody, the future bride and groom included, wore beaming smiles and all seemed unfeasably happy.

Returning to the hotel we packed up, checked out and set off on the long journey back across the bridge to Vinh Long and then to My Tho where the main road from Saigon reaches the delta.

At My Tho we stopped in a scruffy street beside a set of iron gates which were opened by a man in a saffron robe. Trang had arranged lunch, he told us, at the Phuoc Long nunnery, but as all the people we saw there were men (though none except the be-robed door opener were monks) he may have meant monastery

Places had been laid for us at a long table in a room stuffed with heavy wooden furniture, old vases and Buddhist statues. At one end was a thangka in an ornate wooden frame, at the other a painting of a venerated Buddhist priest and an enormous decorated bell.

 


A framed thangka and Chinese vases, Phuoc Long
My Tho

As we were in a monastery the food was, naturally, vegetarian, but none the worse for that. We ate rice paper rolled round herbs and vegetables, fried spring rolls with bean sprouts, crispy yellow pancakes like those we had enjoyed at Hue, but here stuffed with beansprouts rather than pork and prawns, a mushroom dish that looked – and even tasted – like chicken’s feet, salad, fried rice, soup and dips. There was an enormous mountain of food, but we made a creditable dent in it and were careful to try everything.
 

Lynne, lunch, a venerated monk and a large bell, Phuoc Long
My Tho

Four places had been laid at the other end of the table and while we were eating a French speaking family – parents and a teenage son and daughter – arrived. The youngsters, particularly the daughter, were being sullen and difficult, poking at bits of food but eating almost nothing and rolling their eyes in horror at what they were being offered. I would like to say their parents were different, but they were not. The soup went untouched, the cling film was not even taken off the salad, and they picked at a spring roll and a rice paper wrap as though they were probably poisonous. It seemed so rude. ‘If that’s your attitude,’ I thought,’ best stay at home next year.’

After lunch a young man who lived there, though he was not actually a monk, showed us the rooms upstairs. He taught music, he said, and some English, and was also taking English lessons. He was preparing, as so many overseas students do, for examinations set by UCLES (University of Cambridge Local Examination Syndicate – though this is an unusual application of the word ‘local’) and complained that he was hampered by having an American teacher who did not quite speak the language the way UCLES thought was appropriate. We sympathised.
 

Dark, heavy furniture inlaid with mother-of-pearl and ivory
Phuoc Long, My Tho

The rooms were a treasure trove of Chinese pottery and old furniture, much of it inlaid with mother of pearl and ivory. One spectacular vase from the Ming dynasty was decorated with 11000 Chinese characters, all hand painted before firing. The artefacts had come from the royal palace in Hue when the monarchy was dissolved in the 1940s.



Vase with 11000 Chinese characters

In the small shrine we were invited to light a joss stick and ask for a blessing. We respectfully approached the Buddha and his two rows of supporters with incense sticks in hand. I always try to take these things seriously, but looking at the statue of Buddha and seeing Julian Clary staring back at me did not make that easy. (Non-British readers may find this link helpful).

 



Venerating Julian Clary
My Tho



 

There is, we presume, more of Phuoc Long and we only saw the ‘guest rooms’ but it is not a show monastery (or possibly nunnery). The same cannot be said of the Vinh Trang Pagoda nearer the city centre.

Where Phuoc Long was full of dark, almost sombre, furniture in curtained rooms, Vinh Trang was bright colourful and out in the full glare of the sun.

Originally completed in 1850, it was seriously damaged ten years later during fighting between French colonial forces and the army of Emperor Tu Duc, whose mausoleum we had seen in Hue. There was more major rebuilding in 1907 after a tropical storm.

The style is variously described as ‘like a rajah’s palace’ or ‘blending classical European and Asian architecture’ while others talk of Cambodian influences. To me it looked like a typical piece of southern Vietnamese exuberance, not entirely in the best of taste but always vigorous, even flamboyant.





Vinh Trang Pagoda behind its luxuriant garden
My Tho



 

In front of the façade is a garden of tropical profusion, while to the left sits an enormous ‘Happy Buddha’. I had been frequently greeted with the phrase ‘Happy Buddha’ when sitting down in restaurants, I have even had my stomach patted. The first time I was offended but I learned to go with the flow and even take it as a compliment. The Vietnamese consider being well-nourished a sign of prosperity; they do not (yet) live in our strange inverted world where obesity and poverty walk hand in hand.



Two Happy Buddhas
Vinh Trang Pagoda, My Tho

The temple also has a small artificial mountain (a touch of the Disney) and a courtyard lined with monks' cells beyond which are more courtyards, more statues and a hall, but Vinh Trang is not about inside, it is a place to be enjoyed outside.

We spent the rest of the afternoon driving back to Ho Cho Minh City where we checked into the Vien Dong Hotel for the third time. The doorman greeted us like old friends, which either indicates our tipping had been too generous, or not generous enough and he was hoping for more when we finally left for good. We shall never know.

That evening Lynne disappointed me by eating fish and chips; the fish may have been Vietnamese river cobbler, but it was still fish and chips. I am not sure exactly which part of Asia my chicken curry originated from, but at least it was Asia.

Vietnam North to South

Prelude: Raybans in Heathrow and Saigon

Part 1: Hanoi (1) Ethnic Minorities, The Old City and Water Puppets

Part 2: Hanoi (2) Bat Trang, Quan Ho Music and Fighting Cocks

Part 3: Ha Long Bay

Part 4: Lao Cai, Coc Ly Market and Sa Pa

Part 5:Trekking from Sa Pa (1), Sa Pa to Ta Van

Part 6: Trekking from Sa Pa (2) Ta Van to Ban Den

Part 7: Trekking from Sa Pa (3), Around Ban Den then back to Hanoi

Part 8: Hanoi (3), The Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum and the Temple of Literature

Part 9: Hue (1), The Citadel, The Battle of Hue 1968 and Some New Things to Eat

Part 10: Hue (2), A self-Immolating Monk, an Impotent Emperor and Imperial Dinner

Part 11: Da Nang

Part 12: Hoi An and My Son

Part 13:Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon)

Part 14: The Mekong Delta (1), Can Bei and a Cornucopia of Fruit

Part 15: The Mekong Delta (2), To Vinh Long and Can Tho

Part 16: The Mekong Delta (3): Cai Rang and My Tho

Part 17: The Cu Chi Tunnels and the Cao Dai Great Temple

THE END