The Tày

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The instrument is built over a gourd. A dried calabash for the sound-box, a length of mulberry wood for the neck, two or three strings of spun silk stretched down its face — the đàn tính, the tính tẩu, a lute a traveler in the north-eastern valleys of Vietnam might take for a farmer’s ornament until it is played. In the hands of a Then Master it is neither ornament nor, strictly, entertainment. The master plucks it and begins to sing, and the singing is a vehicle. It carries a company of spirit-soldiers up out of the paddy-lit earth, through the layered heavens, to the court of the Jade Emperor, where the community’s petitions are laid down: for a cure, for a good harvest, for peace, for the safe turning of the year. The lute ties the valley floor to the sky.

The people who carry it are the Tày. They are, in one sense, easy to place — the largest of Vietnam’s ethnic minorities, a settled valley people of the northern uplands who have farmed the same wet-rice bottoms long enough to be counted native to them. In another sense the lute places them better than any census does. Where their highland neighbors are peoples of the ridgeline, the Tày are the people of the valley bottom, and the sound that rises off that valley — the plucked gourd-lute and the long sung journey it accompanies — is the surest thing they have carried into the wider record.

The đàn tính (tính tẩu), the gourd-bodied lute of the Tày and neighboring Tai-speakers, from Lạng Sơn. DTH-BD-NVT, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The valley people and the name outsiders gave them

By the 2019 national census the Tày — người Tày — numbered 1,845,492, which made them the most populous of Vietnam’s fifty-four recognized peoples after the majority Kinh. Second only to the Vietnamese themselves, they are a minority chiefly by contrast with a very large majority; among the country’s minorities they stand first. Their homeland is the belt of north-eastern provinces where the deltas give out and the hills begin — Cao Bằng, Lạng Sơn, Bắc Kạn, Thái Nguyên, Tuyên Quang and Quảng Ninh — and their settlement pattern there is exact. They took the valley floors and the lower slopes rather than the high ground, built stilt-houses, the nhà sàn, along the rivers and streams, and worked irrigated wet-rice paddy. This is the fact that sets them apart from the peoples of the same mountains. Where the Hmong and the Dao hold the ridgelines and the swidden slopes, the Tày hold the bottomland and the standing water, farming much as the lowland Việt do, only higher up the rivers.

They speak a Central Tai language of the Kra-Dai family — the grouping older reference works call Tai-Kadai — which places them among the Tai-speaking peoples strung across southern China and mainland Southeast Asia rather than among the Vietnamese, whose speech belongs to the Austroasiatic family. Their nearest kin are close indeed. To the Nùng of Vietnam and the Zhuang across the Chinese border the Tày are so near in speech and custom that scholars describe the three as culturally and linguistically almost indistinguishable, a single Central Tai world cut by a modern state boundary. That the Tày are reckoned indigenous to their corner of Vietnam and yet carry a language whose relatives run north into China is not a contradiction. The critical account places their ancestors among the Tai migrations that moved south out of what is now southern China and settled the north-eastern uplands early — early enough that the land has been theirs beyond the reach of any dynastic memory, and their long neighborhood with the Đại Việt state to the south has left a heavy freight of Vietnamese loan-words in their speech, thick already by 1900. Antiquity of settlement and entanglement with the lowland state are, in the Tày case, the same story told twice.

Their name is itself a small document of that entanglement, and it carries a guard. Through the dynastic and colonial centuries the lowland Việt did not call them Tày. They called them Thổ — a word taken from the Chinese tǔ (土), “land” or “local,” so that the exonym meant something like “the soil people,” the natives — and beside it ran a scatter of regional labels: T’o, Ngạn, Phén, Thu Lao, Pa Dí. Thổ was an outsider’s word for an inside people, and under the socialist state it was set aside as pejorative in favor of the ethnonym the people use for themselves. Tày is now the official name and the correct one; Thổ survives only as the superseded outside label, worth naming precisely so that it can be marked as the name that was left behind. A people that had been called “the locals” by the valley below them are named, in the register that now counts, by the word they give themselves.

The lute and the journey

Within the sacred world of northern Vietnam the Tày hold the forest-and-mountain end of it, and their own ritual heart is Then. The word covers a religion and a rite at once — an organized spirit-worship in which tutelary gods, the spirits of the mountains and rivers, the ancestors at the household altar, and above them all the Jade Emperor are venerated, and a ceremonial performance, the ritual-song mediumship, through which that world is addressed. In the related traditions of the Nùng and of some Tày the same office runs under the name Pụt or Bụt. Its practitioner is the Then Master, called to the work by a spirit-vocation rather than choosing it, and the office is open to women and to men alike.

The rite is a journey, and the journey is sung. Robed and equipped, the master takes up the đàn tính, shakes a ring of rattle-bells fixed to the foot, waves a fan, and begins to sing, and the song narrates and enacts a passage the whole company is understood to make together. The master leads a troop of spirit-soldiers up from the earth realm, stage by stage through the tiers of heaven, to lay offerings before the celestial court and set down the petitions the ceremony was called to carry — the healing of an illness, the safety of a house, a good crop, the peace of the coming year. This is the point at which the gourd-lute stops being an instrument in any ordinary sense. It is the vehicle of the ascent; the plucked strings and the sung line are together the road the spirit-army travels. The description belongs at the public record’s distance — what the rite is for and what it looks like from outside, not the operative sequence a master would use — but even at that distance the structure is plain. Then is a developed liturgy with a fixed itinerary through a mapped cosmos, not an improvisation and not a fit.

How it is carried forward matters to what it is. Then is transmitted orally, and not in the abstract: it is learned in the doing, absorbed by an apprentice over years of attending and assisting at the ceremonies themselves rather than from any written scripture. The knowledge lives in performance, which is one reason the practice is so tightly bound to the master’s own voice and hands, and why its safeguarding has become a matter of teaching younger singers to play the tính tẩu and to hold the long sung journeys in memory. The instrument travels with the tradition. The lute the Tày of Lạng Sơn carry is close kin to the tianqin of the Zhuang across the border, and the Tày are commonly credited with bringing the gourd-lute into Vietnam — the sound itself a marker of the Central Tai world the border cuts through.

A traditional Then performance of the Tày people at Ba Bể Lake, Bắc Kạn. Ba Bể National Park, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

The forest Mother in Tày dress

Then is the Tày tradition standing on its own, but it does not stand alone in the northern sacred landscape. It has a cousin along the same upland axis of spirit-worship, and the two worlds touch at one precise seam. That cousin is the lên đồng of Đạo Mẫu, the Vietnamese religion of the Mother Goddesses, whose disciplined trance-mediumship serves the presiding Mothers of the Four Palaces, the Tứ Phủ. Then and lên đồng are not the same rite — one is the Tày journey up the lute to the Jade Emperor’s court, the other the Kinh serving of a ranked pantheon through a succession of embodied spirits — but they are neighbors on the same axis, the lowland cult and the upland cult of a single wide world of spirit-worship. The seam where they meet is the forest.

It meets there in the person of Mẫu Thượng Ngàn, the Mother of the Forests and Mountains, who rules the green Palace of the Four — the Nhạc phủ, the palace of the wooded uplands, colored green against the red of the sky Mother and the white of the water Mother. Her realm is exactly the country the Tày inhabit: the timber and the game, the source-rivers and the high passes, and the peoples who live along the forest’s edge. Her retinue names them without disguise. In the hymns her mountain court commands the deified spirits of the living upland communities, and when a medium — a thanh đồng — in the hầu đồng embodies the green Mother or one of the Chầu and Cô of her mountain courts, the medium is robed in the costume of the upland women: Tày, Nùng, Dao, Mường. The lowland cult of the Kinh reaches up into the forests, and the forest answers in Tày dress. The people of the valley are present, quite literally, in the wardrobe and the choreography of the Four-Palace liturgy — the mountain court made visible in the clothing of the mountain peoples themselves, the Mường and the Tày among them.

The great northern seat of that green Mother stands in Tày-Nùng country. Đền Bắc Lệ, in the commune of Tân Thành in Hữu Lũng district of Lạng Sơn, is reckoned one of the three principal temples of Mẫu Thượng Ngàn in the northeast, and it sits squarely in the uplands the Tày and Nùng share. For the Tày and Nùng of the district the temple is woven into local devotion, its worship braided with their own, so that the Mother of the Forests is honored on the very ground her forests cover. The main festival falls on the twentieth day of the ninth lunar month — the temple keeps three days to it, the eighteenth through the twentieth — and it draws pilgrims up from the delta to the mountain Mother, with the bathing of the statues, the great communal feast, and the procession. That a lowland pilgrim climbs to Bắc Lệ to petition the forest, and that the Tày who live around it hold the same Mother sacred, is the seam itself made into a road. This is tradition-internal ground, the temple’s own account of who its Mother is and whom she gathers, and it is best read as that — as the sacred story the shrine tells, marked as such rather than as documented history. Neither the Đại Việt state to the south nor the Cham polity of Champa far down the coast, whose own mother-goddess fed the southward cult of the waters, needs retelling here; the Tày belong to the green forest end of that wide world, and it is the forest end this account keeps.

A vindicated practice

The Tày are a living people and Then a living, honored practice, but the honor is recent and it has a history worth naming. Through much of the twentieth century the trance-mediumships of northern Vietnam were pressed hard by the campaigns against what the state called mê tín dị đoan, “superstition” — the Kinh lên đồng and the minority ritual-singing alike filed under a heading of backwardness and, for long stretches, banned. The historiographic reflex that filed a developed ritual system like Then under “primitive shamanism” belongs to that same climate, and it is a framing to name and set down rather than to adopt. What the campaigns treated as superstition was an ordered liturgy with its own cosmology, its own itinerary through the heavens, and its own transmitted repertoire; the “superstition” reading is a thing that was said about the practice by the state, not a description of it. Only across the Đổi Mới reforms from 1986 did the tính tẩu and the Then journey return openly to festival stages and temple courtyards, the ban giving way to a slow public rehabilitation.

That rehabilitation reached its formal height at the end of 2019. On 12 December 2019, at the fourteenth session of UNESCO’s Intergovernmental Committee for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, meeting in Bogotá, “Practices of Then by the Tày, Nùng and Thái ethnic groups in Viet Nam” was inscribed on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The inscription file describes the element in the tradition’s own terms: an essential ritual practice reflecting the peoples’ concepts of the human being, the natural world and the universe, in which a Then Master, female or male, sings and plucks the tính lute to lead spirit-soldiers on a journey from the earth realm to the heaven realm, there to offer worship and present prayers for peace, for the treating of illness, for good crops and a happy new year. A rite prosecuted within living memory as superstition now carries the seal of world heritage, and it does so alongside a sibling recognition — the Kinh Mother-Goddess practices of Đạo Mẫu, inscribed three years earlier in 2016 — the two standing as the upland and lowland counterparts within a single national frame of vindicated spirit-worship.

The vindication is not merely on paper. Tày Then singers from Cao Bằng, Lạng Sơn and Thái Nguyên now carry the sound onto national and international stages, and the effort to safeguard the practice runs to teaching a new generation to make and play the gourd-lute and to hold the sung journeys. The Bắc Lệ festival on the twentieth of the ninth month still draws its pilgrims up from the lowlands to the Mother of the green Palace. And the Tày contribution to the wider Đạo Mẫu world — the forest register, the upland costume, the mountain courts — is read in the scholarship on northern Vietnamese mediumship: in Ngô Đức Thịnh’s foundational Vietnamese study of Đạo Mẫu, and in English in Barley Norton’s Songs for the Spirits (2009) and the work of Karen Fjelstad and Nguyễn Thị Hiền on the living practice, each read critically and against the temples’ own accounts. The valley people who were once “the locals” to the delta below them are now the tradition-bearers of an ascent the delta climbs to share — the ones who keep the road up the lute open, and who, in the wardrobe of the forest Mother, lend the whole northern cult its mountain dress.

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