Beautiful Vietnam » Hanoi
Seeking the aid of a former queen for prosperity
  • | dtinews.vn | March 09, 2010 10:25 AM

It may not look like it from the outside, but come springtime, Ba Chua Temple in Co Me Village, Bac Ninh Province, is a magnet for entrepreneurs who want to give their businesses a head start.

Ba Chua Kho, 20 km north of Hanoi centre, is a typical Le Dynasty temple, with a three-door gate, a big yard, and curved roofs. The building stands at the foot of Kho Moutain, which faces south and overlooks a field winding around the Cau River, a tributary of the Red River.

The façade may not be very different from other temples in the area, but there’s something special about Ba Chua Kho, a place that draws thousands of visitors every year.

According to legend, Ba Chua Kho was a queen of one of the Ly Dynasty kings. She was both beautiful and intelligent. During a war against the Tong people from China, the King asked her to look after the country’s food store during the wartime against the Chinese Tống enemy. After the enemy was defeated, she helped people to rebuild their lives and restore food production.

To do this, the queen called on local people to prepare an area of wilderness for cultivation. This piece of land she named Co Me Village. The queen finally met her end on the 12th of January, 1077, when she was killed by enemy troops while distributing food to local people.

Villagers in Co Me built a temple on the place where the food had been stored. They called her Ba Chua Kho, which means Lord of the food supply.

Ever since then, visitors have come to the temple to pray for good luck for their business plans. In their prayers, they tell her about their business idea and the sum of money they want to invest in it. At the end of the year, they come back to thank her and pay her back the money (with votive papers) that they had borrow.

One person who can vouch for the generosity of Ba Chua Kho is my aunt Le Kim Anh from Ngo Quyen Street, Hai Phong City. Last year, Anh borrowed VND2.5 billion to invest in a real estate project, which she re-enacted at Ba Chua Kho temple. She was successful and this year she went back to the temple to borrow another 3 billion.

It took her some time to elbow her way through the crowd with a tray of offerings and a petition to place before Ba Chua Kho. After nearly an hour she came back, looking tired, but pleased. “Now I feel a lot more secure about my business plan. I’m not superstitious, but after coming here to ask for Ba Chua Kho’s blessing, I definitely feel more confident about it,” she says.

Like my aunt, the crowds of people outside the temple were waiting to ask for Ba Chua Kho’s blessing. Only they and Ba Chua Kho would know about the amount of money they wanted to borrow for their business this year, but onlookers could guess by looking at the amount of offerings on their trays.

However, not everyone has come here with business in mind. I met two women outside the temple with simpler requests. “We are teachers so we haven’t come here to borrow money from Ba Chua Kho,” one of them said, “We just came to pray for a prosperity and a happy new year for our family.”

According to Mr. Nguyen Van Quan, head of the management board of Ba Chua Kho Temple, the number of visitors coming here has increased dramatically in recent years, mostly during the festive season which runs from the last few days in December until February, according to the Lunar calendar.

No one knows how many people can attribute their riches to Ba Chua Kho; there are people who succeed and, of course, some who fail. The one thing that does unite the visitors to this temple is their shared belief and faith in a nearly 1,000 years old tradition.

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