If today the Vietnam is faced to a challenge of the time of integration, which is to preserve the national culturel background and at the same time assimilate the advanced cultural values coming from abroad, avoid to be dissolved in a plane world, likewise the people of Dong Son of the state of Au Lac have analogous challenges, even more serious before the agressions and the intention of liquidating the culture, deleting the frontiers of the empire Han – Duong, with the policies and institutions reported in vietnamese and chinese annals, namely the abolition of the regime of Lac Hau and Lac Tuong, the interdiction of the practice of tooth lacquering, betel chewing, the creation of quan and huyen after the chinese model of Dong Han.
If today the Vietnam is faced to a challenge of the time of integration, which is to preserve the national culturel background and at the same time assimilate the advanced cultural values coming from abroad, avoid to be dissolved in a plane world, likewise the people of Dong Son of the state of Au Lac have analogous challenges, even more serious before the agressions and the intention of liquidating the culture, deleting the frontiers of the empire Han – Duong, with the policies and institutions reported in vietnamese and chinese annals, namely the abolition of the regime of Lac Hau and Lac Tuong, the interdiction of the practice of tooth lacquering, betel chewing, the creation of quan and huyen after the chinese model of Dong Han.
However, from its bright summit, the culture of Dong Son has not been dissolved. It retired in villages to combat the policy of assimilation. It hides as an underground water through 1000 years of domination to preserve its national background so that “after thousand years of resistance against the Han – Duong, we remain us”, with a spectacular restoration under the Ly Tran. The most striking features of Dong Son mixed themselves to foreign elements as a cultural interweaving that we can still recognize in the vestiges of the beginning of the era. They don’t surrender before the severe institutions, preserve the ancient habits among which the habit of tooth lacquering is still visible in the local boat-tombs. They cannot annihilate the life nor the death of the ancient Viets, since the house they bring with them are not the brick-tombs of the foreigners but the traditionnal boat-tombs.
Dong Son could resist to the cultural force of the foreigners because it has a rather solid basis, it is a summit of the vast southern region, it has a diversified cultural life which yields to no other state, as a pride of the local population.
However, it is ready to receive the foreign acquirements to enrich the local culture. The most important importation is the technics of ceramics, followed by the organization of a handicraft-village, by the transformation of these products into goods, as the first jump of the three jumps of the technics of ceramics of the Dai Viet.
If the challenge of the people of Dong Son is considered as a lesson, this lesson preserves its value until today, when our Party is constantly speaking of the orientation toward an advanced culture, full of vietnamese national character (2 photos: elephant-shaped bell, basin-shaped drum).
Hồng Hà