Women of Huong Quang Phu Cau village

Quang Phu Cau incense stick craft village (Ung Hoa district, Hanoi) has a tradition of more than 100 years. This is a place that provides a large source of incense for the northern region.

Author Nguyen Thi Chieu Xuan with the photo series “Women of Huong Quang Phu Cau village”, lets the audience experience the beauty of women working in the village with the traditional profession of making incense. The photo series was submitted by the author to the Photo and Video Contest “Happy Vietnam”, organized by the Ministry of Information and Communications.

Right from the moment you set foot in Quang Phu Cau, the images that impress visitors are bundles of incense dried all over the streets, communal houses, house yards or any vacant lot.

What is special is that the incense bundles have many colors, in which red is the main color, making the scenery of the incense-making villages in Quang Phu Cau always dyed with brilliant colors. Right next to it are women working hard at dyeing, spinning, drying incense... The daily work of women here is also their daily joy. Although the labor of women in the incense village is hard, they bring bright, joyful colors to beautify and be useful to life. A whole “forest of incense” is also a “forest of flowers”. Some families dry incense layer by layer on high racks, creating a flower wall.

To get the brilliant colors of traditional fragrant incense sticks in Vietnamese families, the women who dry the incense sticks have to work very hard "selling their faces to the earth, selling their backs to the sky" to bring beauty and goodness to life.

Large bundles of incense are tied together at the base by women, with the top spread out to dry quickly. Each bundle of incense looks like a bouquet of colorful flowers.

If you come to the incense village on a beautiful sunny day, just walking around the village, tourists will encounter countless beautiful moments.

The best time to visit Quang Phu Cau incense village is on sunny days, when people take advantage of every space to dry incense. At the end of the lunar year, because people increase production to serve Tet and the festival season, the atmosphere is much more bustling and there are also more beautiful scenes.

Vietnam.vn