There is still a long time before the Spring Festival, and the whole of Vietnam is already busy. Flower farmers are preparing peach blossoms and yellow plums to ward off evil spirits for the New Year, which can bring auspicious kumquats; merchants are preparing various New Year goods, including New Year paintings, couplets, and lanterns; the media are preparing special issues for the New Year, and the post office is going to issue Zodiac stamps and first day covers; units are preparing year-end summaries, group worship, issuing new year cards, annual calendars, and giving New Year gifts. In the New Year paintings, special issues, and greeting cards, they are inseparable from the Chinese zodiac pattern of the upcoming New Year, and they are inseparable from the dry branch year. This year, in order to welcome the New Year, the National Gallery of Vietnam organized a special exhibition of four screens in vietnam's ancient art. The National Museum of Vietnam organized an exhibition of the image of the tiger in ancient Vietnamese art works to welcome the arrival of the Year of the Tiger. This year's epidemic is serious, but I still received a greeting card from a Vietnamese friend early, which reads "T t Nh m D n" (壬寅年節) (T t Nh m D n), which depicts a cute little tiger.
Yes, you read that right, these are all Vietnamese New Year customs. Due to historical reasons, Vietnam has long been immersed in Chinese culture, and China and Vietnam use the same calendar, writing, reading the same documents, and enjoying the same cultural achievements, such as the "History", "Tao Te Ching", "I Ching", "Analects", "Romance of the Three Kingdoms", "Water Margin", "Chronicles of the States of the Eastern Zhou Dynasty", "Fengshen Yanyi" and so on. Vietnam, which has long been in an agricultural society, uses the lunar calendar to guide the agricultural time, life is handy, and has formed the custom of new year's festival, of which New Year's Day (China changed to spring festival in modern times), Shangyuan, Qingming, Dragon Boat Festival, Zhongyuan, Mid-Autumn Festival, etc. pay special attention. As the heavenly stem and earth branch of the lunar calendar to calculate the days and years, the Five Elements Theory used to explain philosophical and medical thought is also familiar to the Vietnamese people. The twelve zodiac signs that are combined together, although there are different zodiac images such as Chinese rabbits and Vietnamese are cats, but using the zodiac signs to tell fortunes and tell people's fate is the same. This year is the Year of the Tiger, and the tiger symbolizes bravery and achievement. And because zhao Gongming, the god of wealth, rides a tiger, so the tiger is the main wealth, people think that people who belong to the tiger in the zodiac will have good luck this year, and this year is suitable for giving birth to "tigers". Yes, the son of the praise family, can be said to be "tiger son". China speaks of the Five Tigers, and vietnam also has five tigers in history, and here it is also extended to the literary world, there are "Four Tigers of the Red Mountains", "Four Tigers of the South Temple" and so on. It can be seen from this that the recognition of the meaning of tiger culture has long been deeply rooted in the minds of the Vietnamese people and has become part of daily thinking. Some people have counted that among the idioms, idioms and songs used in Vietnam, there are more than 1,200 tiger-related ones. Of course, many of these are well known to the chinese and Vietnamese people, such as the "tiger poison does not eat children" used when talking about human nature.
The East Lake New Year Painting is a representative of vietnamese New Year paintings, which have a history of about 400 years. The representative "Five Tiger Diagrams" reflect the embodiment of the Five Elements Theory in Vietnamese folk thought. The yellow tiger is centered, and the white tiger, black tiger, red tiger, and green tiger are all around. Green Tiger, main wood, main town east; red tiger, main fire, main town south; yellow tiger, main soil, center. White Tiger, Main Gold, Main Town West, Black Tiger, Main Water, Main Town North. Although the colors and orientations are clear, they are familiar to everyone. If the ancestral hall of the four towns in Hanoi, the town east town west town south town north, stand on the corresponding geographical orientation of Hanoi. However, specific to the New Year paintings, the four-colored tigers are not arranged according to such a direction, most of them are black and white on the bottom, blue and red on the top, or vice versa. The left and right positions will also be adjusted to see your preferences. The image of this tiger, with its long beard and big eyes, gives people more of the feeling of a leopard. Chinese draws tigers and likes to refer to the stout and mighty siberian tigers. Vietnamese painters may have historically seen more Southeast Asian tigers and leopards, and the image also tended to be leopards, and the king pattern on the tiger's forehead was not prominent or absent.
Tigers or leopards are beasts of prey. The tiger and leopard have a long history of roaming the forested Indochina Peninsula, and were still very active in the mid-20th century, and are still active to this day. Some Vietnamese friends who participated in the War to Resist France and resist the United States in the 1940s and 1950s said that in addition to dealing with vicious enemies, they also had to deal with poisonous snakes and insects in the forest and tigers and leopards that were more likely to hurt people. So like other ethnic groups elsewhere, the Vietnamese people have long developed the worship of tigers and leopards. For example, for more than 2,000 years, the image of these beasts has appeared on bronze utensils such as the Dong Shan copper drum named after Dong Son in Vietnam, and there have been activities to reduce the damage of the beasts through ritual sacrifices for a long time. Therefore, there are various legends about tigers, and there are various tiger images, or carved in places that need to be guarded, to increase the sense of majesty, such as temples, mausoleums, etc.; or to make year paintings and paste them on the door of the home. There is a village in northern Vietnam called An Xie, which has a special temple dedicated to tigers.
△ Tiger on the Nine Dings of the Nguyen Dynasty in the Forbidden City of Hue
△ Tiger figure on 15th century Vietnamese ceramics
The above images of the combination of tigers and the Five Elements, and gods riding tigers are related to the popularity of Taoist and Buddhist culture in Vietnam. The Four Towns are the result of the spread of the cult of the city god from China to Vietnam and its rise in Vietnam.
Author: Peng Shi tuan (Cultural Counsellor, Chinese Embassy in Vietnam)
Editor-in-charge: Zhang Yibo