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In a Hanoi art gallery later that day I bought two hand colored pictures from a French newspaper (Le Petit Journal, Supplement Illustre), dated July 28, 1895. One depicted the imaginary scene of testing in “Tonkin,” perhaps in the Temple of Literature itself. A handful of students were sitting on the ground engaged in Chinese calligraphy while three proctors in raised towers hovered over them and two more walked among them.
The picture of the man who gets credit for “inventing” Romanized Vietnamese as a national script, a French Jesuit priest called Alexandre de Rhodes (1591-1660), was in the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology which we visited next.
Inside the Temple of Literature were 82 steles, each stone tablet marking the accomplishments of one of the best students. They had been chosen, in the Chinese Mandarin tradition, for high administrative posts by the emperor as long as Hanoi remained the capital. Our guide said: “These remaining steles are national treasures, our most valuable. They have defined our national identity since the 14th cent.” The steles were each on a turtle which signified “patience.”
At the end the eight puppeteers came out knee deep in the water and took a bow by joining us in the clapping.
Its architecture of a lotus of purity emerging from an ocean of suffering is unique. On the day of our visit art students were sketching it as a class assignment.
This evening, to the accompaniment of the music of several traditional instruments and two women singers, we saw a total of seventeen dances by puppets in a pool used as a stage.
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