Hung Kings Temple Festival to celebrate Vietnamese heritages

Palanquin procession is an important ritual of the Hung Kings Temple Festival. Photo: Phutho.gov.vn

This year’s festival will highlight the values of two provincial cultural heritages that have been recognised by UNESCO as part of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, namely the worship of Hung Kings and xoan folk singing.

Besides traditional rituals like incense offering and the palanquin procession, the Hung Kings Temple Festival and the Culture and Tourism Week of Ancestral Land 2023 will include performances of intangible cultural heritages of Vietnam honored by UNESCO, and the celebration of the 20th anniversary of the implementation of the 2003 UNESCO Convention for the Protection of Intangible Cultural Heritage.

A conference on promoting cultural heritages in association with tourism development and a photo exhibition of Vietnam’s legendary capital lands will also take place within the nine-day festival.

Visitors to the Vietnamese ancestral land will be immersed in numerous sports and cultural activities, like the swimming contest, a football and a volleyball tournament, xoan singing and water puppetry performances.

To those interested in tourism, food and fashion should not miss the chung cake cooking or giay cake pounding contests, food festival, the Northwestern Tourism Fair, children’s ao dai (traditional long dress) festival, the Cultural Camp and Art Festival to celebrate the legacy of the Hung Kings and a tourist trip to explore the ancestral land.

Chung cake cooking contest is one of the many interesting elements of the Hung Kings Temple Festival. Photo: Phutho.gov.vn

Nguyen Dac Thuy, Director of Phu Tho Provincial Department of Culture, Sports and Tourism, said this year's festival activities will be closely linked with tourism to attract visitors while widely promoting the potential and strengths of Phu Tho’s cultural tourism resources.

The province is expected to receive eight million visitors at this year’s festival.

Phu Tho is regarded as the ancestral land and the root of the Vietnamese people. In this place more than 4,000 years ago, Hung Kings founded the country of Van Lang, the first state of Vietnam. From this cradle, valuable cultural heritages of the Vietnamese people were established, including the worshipping of the Hung Kings and xoan singing.

The anniversary of death of Hung Kings is commemorated on the 10th day of the third lunar month, which falls on April 29 this year, and is a national holiday.

Xoan singing was officially recognised by UNESCO as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in need of urgent protection in 2011 and the practice of worshiping Hung Kings in Phu Tho as part of the world's intangible cultural heritage in 2012.

VNS