The procession departs from the ceremonial center to the Upper Temple.

Each time period passes, the wheel of history leaves more marks on the path forward. The history of each country often leaves behind evidence. Evidence can be seen, can be touched, but the original history has entered the consciousness of each person through the circulation of blood and exists forever in the resonance between the past and the present. As a Vietnamese, one can cry when waking up every morning, putting one's feet on the ground and listening to the deep source of history and culture from ancient times. History books and legends record: Vietnamese history and culture began from the era of the Hung Kings.

Many years ago, someone asked the question: Was there or was there not a Hung Kings era? In fact, over the past few hundred years and especially over the past few decades, historians, ethnologists, archaeologists and art scholars, with patriotism and national pride, have worked hard to lift the veils of history and gradually reveal the past, gradually reveal a reality of the National Ancestor from four thousand years ago.

History or legend? I was really interested to read the opinion of the late Professor of History Tran Quoc Vuong: “Legends cover the relics and famous places like a light mist, making the lines of trees and architecture fade away as if they were in real life”. And I also admire the famous Bulgarian female writer Blaga Dimitrova more when she visited Vietnam and commented: “In this country, it is difficult to distinguish between legend and history”. I would like to thank the late Professor Tran Quoc Vuong and female writer Blaga Dimitrova for their concise ideas that have enlightened a clearer view when contemplating the historical origins of the country…

Since my childhood, I have loved the story of the princess, the daughter of the 18th Hung King, because she made both the Mountain God and the Water God furious. I loved the love story of Tien Dung and Chu Dong Tu. I liked the dutiful prince Lang Lieu who knew how to offer his father the king a sticky rice cake symbolizing the square earth and round sky.

In my childhood dream, I had the image of the little boy Phù Đổng in Gióng village, who was three years old and could not yet speak or laugh, suddenly standing up to eat “seven baskets of rice, three baskets of eggplants, drinking water in one gulp to drain the river” and pulling up bamboo to chase away the Ân invaders to save the country. At that time, in my immature thinking, I could not distinguish what was real and what was fantasy, I only knew that it was an old story of my country. I was born, grew up and lived in such a source of emotional thoughts.

People go to Hung Temple festival

Westerners are rationalists but have created an extremely rich treasure of myths, the pinnacle of which is the kingdom of Zeus on Mount Olympia. Is that myth a shadow of their ancient nations in prehistoric times? Saying this as an impromptu association, without any intention of comparison…

History and legends of the Hung Kings era are interwoven and intertwined. The job of scientists is to “de-illusion reality” to reconstruct and recreate the objective truth of the Hung Kings era, while the ancient people internalize all historical experiences to reveal, through the perspective of legends or myths, oral stories that have been passed down for generations.

In an era of primitive ancestors, our ancestors were very romantic when they deified earthly powers, things that were “real” but not “real”. Between the history and legends of the Hung King era, the ancestral land of Phu Tho was viewed with such a view. Mother Tien Au, father Dragon Lac were the mythical couple of the Vietnamese people. But Au Viet from the hills and valleys combined with Lac Viet from the sea to become the nation of Au Lac was a reality.

Behind the veil of legend, the nation-building of the Hung Kings and the anti-expansionist work of the ancient Vietnamese people are historical realities. That history is vaguely hidden in the legend of the “water control” war between Son Tinh and Thuy Tinh, in the image of the boy from the village of Giong swinging an iron whip to chase the An invaders out of the country. That history can be touched by hand and seen by eye through hundreds of early stone, bronze and iron artifacts discovered and excavated consecutively over the past decades in the land of the ancestors.

When visiting the Hung Vuong Museum, I saw a bronze plowshare, a bronze sickle, an iron axe, a stone hoe, banyan spears, leaf-shaped and triangular bronze arrows... It was a treasure trove of artifacts that demonstrated a long history of several millennia BC of the Vietnamese people.

Not only Vietnam, the world is also increasingly listening to the echoes of the Hung Kings' era. An English professor, Mr. OWWohers, in a research work, summarized: The Van Lang country of the Hung Kings was a mysterious social space, where each Lac leader governed a region, a locality that people often called a "tribe".

Performing rituals at the death anniversary of National Ancestor Lac Long Quan

Transcending all regions is the apex of the Northern triangle, sandwiched between the Tam Dao-Ba Vi mountain ranges, with the Thao River flowing between them. The leader of that region, thanks to his talent, rose to become the supreme leader - King Hung. And Dr. K. Taylor, an American, in his thesis, proved that King Hung was the ancestor who started to build and defend the country of the Vietnamese people before the Christian era.

K.Taylor also developed further: The era of the Lac nobles was the era of forming the profound traditions of the Vietnamese people, never fading, forming a foundation of a unique village-country society following the Asian method. The thesis of Japanese Dr. I.Sakurai mentioned the very unique process of exploiting the Nhi River Delta with a system of dikes, ditches, ponds... starting from the era of the Hung Kings.

I would like to thank the genuine foreign scientists for having a sincere and authentic view of Vietnamese history. I would like to thank Dr. K. Taylor when he proved: “The era of the Lac nobles was the era of forming the profound traditions of the Vietnamese people, never fading away”. Pondering this idea of ​​his, I suddenly remembered the verse of the poet To Huu: “Four thousand years, we are still us”. Vietnam has gone through many hardships in history, thousands of years of Chinese domination, hundreds of years of Western rule, but we have not lost our identity, still exist as an eternal truth. The Vietnamese people and nation have and still find themselves in their history…

The Hung King era - history and legend are intertwined, dream but real, real but dream. That is the beauty and goodness in the mind of the pilgrimage to find the origin. Birds find their nests, people find their ancestors, if only on the 10th day of the 3rd lunar month all Vietnamese people around the world were present in the land of the ancestors to attend the community festival. We visit the Upper Temple, the Middle Temple, the Lower Temple, the Well Temple, we admire the majestic Bach Hac junction, the mountains and hills like upside-down bowls of the midlands. We seek the reality in the dream. We set foot on the foundation of the land of the ancestors so that our souls can blend in the mysterious and legendary incense smoke. We seek the origin to see everyone in us and ourselves surrounded by the flesh of our compatriots...

According to People