North Vietnam in 1965 was in a struggle arguing their Soviet and Chinese influenced system would be better and less corrupt than the South’s western, colonial, and Catholic influenced system. What better time to remember Nguyen Du’s epic poem that was Chinese influenced and told of Northern Vietnamese corrupted by their Southern rulers. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.
Nguyen Du was a figure from 200 years before in a country that was not doing much to record it’s history. This works well for this stamp as his work and in this case his northern birthplace is cast as mythic and which proports to show a very different Hanoi.
Todays stamp is issue A158, a 12 Xu stamp issued by North Vietnam on November 25th, 1965. It was a four stamp issue in different denominations celebrating Du and especially the epic poem The Tale of Kieu. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth 40 cents used.
Nguyen Du was the seventh son by the third wife of a Vietnamese Prime Minister. His mother was a poetic songstress which at the time was considered disreputable. Du was well off and well educated and after completing his studies he was employed as a government advisor called a Mandarin. He also married his own songstress which was still considered disreputable. The dynasty he worked for and swore loyalty to was overthrown and Du was out of a job. 6 years later the new guys were out and a new group of Southern rulers were in. This time Du accepted his job back as a Mandarin and eventually was promoted to Ambassador to China. Working for the new people was thought a betrayal. In China Du found a minor romance novel that he thought under a pen name he could translate into Vietnamese verse and it would serve as an allegory to trying to keep your honor while serving a corrupt government.
The Tale of Kieu is the story of an attractive young educated girl named Kieu who travels to visit the graves of her ancestors with her younger sister. Kieu meets and falls in love with a young man. Before they can marry he is called back to his home village for 6 months to mourn the death of his uncle. While at home herself awaiting reunification her family gets cheated in a business deal and losses all their money and the government is threatening to jail Kieu’s father and brother. To buy their way out of trouble, Kieu sells herself into marriage with a middle age man and tells her younger sister to fulfill her previous promise of marraige. The older man Kieu married turns out to be a pimp and delivers Kieu to an upscale brothel. There she attempts suicide but is instead forced into the life of a prostitute. She is especially popular and degraded as she is of higher class than the other prostitutes. One of her clients is a government Mandarin who takes pity on her and buys her out of the brothel and makes Kieu his wife. When her first husband hears of this he tries to force her back to the brothel as he is still her husband. Kieu runs away and hides out with Nuns. At the Nunnery her first love finds her, but Kieu thinks herself too debased to take up again with him.
The epic runs to 3254 verses and is delivered in a six-eight meter. There are some in Vietnam who can recite it in full. In 2007 there was a movie version called Saigon Eclipse that moved the story to the present day and had Kieu working in a massage parlor in San Francisco to pay off her family’s debt in Vietnam. No fault of North Vietnam in that one. Well maybe a little.
Well my drink is empty. I can see how the south can be accused of debasing corruption but perhaps those up north should check if they themselves are throwing stones from glass houses. Come again tomorrow for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting.