First published March 2025 | Words by Joshua Zukas
Joshua is a contributing writer for Vietnam Coracle. A freelancer whose body of work focuses primarily on travel & architecture, Joshua covers Vietnam regularly for Lonely Planet, Michelin Guide, Insider, Ink Global & many of Asia’s top inflight magazines. He also writes intermittently for publications such as The Economist, Wallpaper & Interior Design Magazine. He holds an MSc in sustainable tourism….read more about Joshua
The Story of Creation According to Vietnamese Legend
Illustrated with photographs from a 2024 performance of Ngày Xưa at ATH, a theatre and drama school in Hanoi, and artworks from two books published by Nhà Xuất Bản Kim Đồng: Thiên và Ác và Cổ Tích (2018), edited by Thủy Nguyên, and Lĩnh Nam Chích Quái (2019), edited by Trần Thế Pháp.
CONTENTS:
Vietnam’s Legendarium: A Primer
In The Beginning: Vietnam’s Creation Myth
Introduction:
Vietnam’s cosmogonic myth is one of celestial drama, primordial deities and lovestruck heroes. Though not as well-known as the stories of Hoàn Kiếm Lake or Hạ Long Bay, Vietnam’s story of creation is no less impactful. Indeed, according to legend at least, if it weren’t for the father of heaven, a dragon lord and a mountain fairy, the universe, the world and the Vietnamese wouldn’t exist. Vietnamese belief systems (like all belief systems) usually involve some mental gymnastics, not least of all because they have seemingly contradictory influences. For example, how can the cosmological cycle of Buddhism and the Taoist concept of universal creation coexist? Put in (slightly) less cosmic terms, how do the Vietnamese accommodate both reincarnation and ancestor worship? But just like elsewhere in the world, this spiritual dissonance hardly seems to matter. Human beings are relentlessly willing to harbour contradictory thoughts, and the Vietnamese are no exception. Besides, the beauty of mythology is that it can respond to influences, adapts with the times and cares little about trivial plot holes. This is also true of Vietnam’s creation myth, and just like all good genesis stories, it chronicles a narrative thread that begins with the creation of the universe and culminates with the birth of civilisation.
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Vietnam’s Legendarium: A Primer
I’ve been interested in myths for as long as I can remember. I grew up charmed by Disney’s Hercules (1997) and traumatised by Desmond Davis’ Clash of the Titans (1981). When I was older, I greedily devoured Homer’s epic The Odyssey and Sophocles’s lewd tragedies. More recently I’ve enjoyed the poignant retellings of southern European classical myths from feminist writers like Natalie Haynes, Madeline Miller and Margeret Atwood. The overlapping Greek and Roman legendaria, reinforced by contemporary reinterpretations, probably provide enough literary nourishment to last a lifetime, but when I moved to Vietnam I discovered that there was a whole new set of stories to unpack. Vietnamese myths, I gleefully realised, are like rice cakes: there’s always a new one to unfold and dissect.
I personally find Vietnamese myths especially compelling because they are all around us, all the time. The millennia-old Mediterranean myths of sun-blasted islands and bronzed heroes were a world away from the soggy English countryside where I grew up. While in Vietnam I can see the legends reflected in the history, geography, climate and culture of the country. They explain Vietnam’s brutal floods. They give us the origins of Hạ Long Bay’s ethereal geography. Some, like the legend of Hoàn Kiếm’s returned sword, only happened a few centuries ago and concern important historical figures that we know really existed.
But like the Greek and Roman stories of old, Vietnamese myths are malleable. Over millennia, storytellers have told and retold these myths, indulged artistic license, incorporated ideas from belief systems like Taoism and Buddhism, and stitched the stories together to weave a national legendarium. In-keeping with this tradition, here is my rendition of Vietnam’s own genesis, beginning with the creation of the world and concluding with the birth of the Vietnamese civilisation. Like all retellings, this is merely an interpretation based on books I’ve read, performances I’ve seen and conversations I’ve had. It does not claim to be canonical truth, if such a thing even exists.
In The Beginning:
In the beginning, there was chaos. The realms – and everything that would later exist within them – were a knotted tangle of pre-elemental threads. The first entity to emerge from this primordial disarray was Ông Trời, the supreme deity, who set the sequence of creation in motion by pulling apart heaven and earth. By separating the universe into the physical and the ethereal, Ông Trời infused the universe with its most fundamental law: everything must exist within a system of cosmic balance. Vietnamese mythology is heavily influenced by Taoism, and this concept of duality is perhaps best understood through the lens of the Taoist yin-yang symbol, which has two equal but antithetical halves, each containing an element of its opposite.
Curiously, despite being the supreme deity, Ông Trời is not as visible as other mythological figures and there seems to be few temples dedicated to him, but it is he who the Vietnamese appeal to when they exclaim ‘Trời ơi!’. It’s also worth noting that Ông Trời, though likely conceptualised by the Vietnamese, is sometimes equated with the Taoist gods Pan Gu, the creator of the universe, and the Jade Emperor, the king of heaven.
Ông Trời’s great separation is the reason the universe consists of light and dark, good and evil, life and death, masculine and feminine, and so on. But just like heaven and earth were pulled from the same primordial skein and thus contain traces of their opposite parts, so too does everything else in existence. In other words, Ông Trời’s actions structured the universe so that darkness exists within light, and good exists within evil. This theme of balanced duality is worth contemplating as it frames many traditional beliefs in Vietnam, from the components of a recipe to choosing a life partner.
Following the separation of the earthly and heavenly realms, the universe began to take shape. The five elements – wood, fire, metal, earth and water – emerged, adhering to the fundamental law of balance. From these elements, probably ideas borrowed from China, oceans were formed, continents were forged and forests were grown. Deities that emerged from the separation (and by some interpretations the divine children of Ông Trời), came to inhabit the physical world, imbuing the rivers, mountains and trees with life. These divinities manifested as supernatural beings, such as fairies, spirits and mythological animals, and this is why you might find shrines beneath ancient trees or next to water springs.
Two of the most well-known deities to spring from creation were the mountain spirit Sơn Tinh and water spirit Thủy Tinh (another duality), whose battle over a princess would result in Vietnam’s perennial floods. Another was Kinh Dương Vương, a great monarch who presided over the lowlands. Though a god of the terrestrial plain, when the time came for Kinh Dương Vương to find a wife, he set sail on the eastern seas. There he met and fell in love with Long Nữ, a water dragoness, and together they bore a son: Lạc Long Quân.
This child, the result of a tellurian and aquatic union, was clearly destined for greatness (or at least to produce it), for he inherited both his father’s royal blood and his mother’s dragon lineage. With these divine hereditary talents, the promising prince ruled over the vast coastal lands, bringing peace to his domain by slaying troublesome demons like the fish monster Ngư Tinh, which could swallow entire ships whole.
As Lạc Long Quân grew into a powerful dragon lord, he decided – just like his father – to embark on a quest to find love. However, unlike his father, Lạc Long Quân did not take to the ocean, but journeyed to the highlands, where he met and fell for Âu Cơ, a mountain fairy. Rather than return to the coast, Lạc Long Quân remained in the seductive embrace of the mountains, and Âu Cơ soon fell pregnant. But as the fairy’s belly swelled to a gigantic, rippling size, it became clear that this was no usual pregnancy.
When Âu Cơ finally went into labour, she did not give birth to a fairy or a spirit. Nor did she spawn a dragon or a giant. Instead, and presumably due to Lạc Long Quân’s reptilian ancestry, she laid a sacred clutch of 100 eggs. But this chimerical union was about to become even stranger. When these eggs eventually hatched, it wasn’t baby dragons that emerged, but beings that the world (or at least this corner of it) had never seen before: human children. Lạc Long Quân, a dragon lord, and Âu Cơ, a mountain fairy, had created the very first Vietnamese people. This is why the Vietnamese say, usually in jest, that they are the descendants of a dragon and a fairy.
Alas, the marriage between Âu Cơ, who belonged in the mountains, and Lạc Long Quân, who was born to rule the coast, couldn’t last. As their destinies pulled them apart, Âu Cơ and Lạc Long Quân admirably agreed on an equitable divorce custody settlement. Half the children would remain with their mother in the mountains and the other half would descend to the coast with their father. This is why many Vietnamese cities have streets named after Lạc Long Quân and Âu Cơ – and they always meet. The oldest son (or perhaps the first to hatch) became King Hùng Vương, the first in a line of 18 kings that would form Vietnam’s first dynasty. The king’s siblings and their offspring, now spread between the lowlands and highlands, would become his royal subjects, and this is how the Vietnamese nation was born.
*Disclosure: Vietnam Coracle content is always free and independent. Joshua has written this guide because he wants to: he likes Vietnam’s creation myth and he wants readers to know about it. For more details, see the Disclosure & Disclaimer statements and my About Page
Fantastic article! Where would we be able to see these shows in person? Is there a specific genre/style that they are called?
Hi Kellen,
The particular show that is featured in some of the illustrations in this article was performed at the ATH, a theatre and drama school in Hanoi. You might check with them so see if they put on regular performances.
Best,
Tom