Being dead is a serious business in Vietnam

 

The dead may be gone, at least from this earthly plane, but they certainly aren’t forgotten. Death is a transformation rather than an end in traditional Vietnamese culture. Ancestors continue to play an important role in everyday life and if you don’t treat them well they are liable to make your life extremely difficult.

The most sure way of upsetting the dead, so that their displeasure manifests itself in the world of the living by dishing out liberal portions of bad luck, is to fail in your duties of being a decent human being. There’s no hiding your sins from the eyes of the dead, so people feel an obligation to do the right thing. As retribution from the spirit world of the ancestors can be severe it is not taken as in idle threat. Clearly obeying traffic lights is not covered by this system, as anyone who has risked life and limb crossing the road in Vietnam will attest.

Whatever the precise nature of the Vietnamese afterlife may be it certainly doesn’t come with the all mod cons of the Christian heaven. The spirits need to be furnished with equivalents of earthly human needs, such as money, cars and flat screen TVs. Thankfully you don’t need to dispatch a brand new Toyota Corolla packed with dollar bills and the latest, digital media system to spiritual eternity, burning paper replicas will suffice. Offerings of food, booze and cigarettes need to be the real deal however, but not in the daily quantities we prefer. The spirits may be demanding but they’re not greedy.

Before all of this however, the dead need to be given a send off worthy of their status as venerated ancestors to be. A failure of funerary obligations, could condemn the spirit to endlessly wander the nether regions between the earthly and spiritual planes in torment, hurling ghostly bad vibes back on their negligent relatives. Even criminals and the far from perfect require the appropriate rituals to send them on their way.

For many, the grave or tomb needs to be suitably reverential and nowhere is this more apparent in An Bang on the East coast in the centre of the country. Back in the early 90’s it was a simple fishing village but once the government permitted remittances to be sent from relatives abroad the people started honouring their deceased with progressively more lavish tombs. It soon turned into a full-on, keeping up with the Joneses competition, with families investing tens of thousands of dollars in ornately decorated structures. By now some 90% of the villagers have relatives abroad to perpetuate the exorbitant expenditures.

The veneration of ancestors is shared by virtually all, regardless of religion. All that varies are the precise details of rituals and decorations. Among the architectural details here can be found Christian, Buddhist and Taoist elements, with styles borrowing from the West and China, as well as the essential Vietnamese characteristics.

Some tombs are so well equipped they even come with toilets. Blessed be relief in the An Bang resident’s afterlife! Others are still awaiting the arrival of their owners, who invested early in ensuring a smooth passage to the next world before the inconvenience of dying. Some are even graced with night time illuminations. The cemetery has grown so vast that in an hour of wandering in a state of wonder I hadn’t even seen all that was to offer in just the portion, on one side of the road through the village.

 

This predilection for ostentatious tombs hasn’t come out of nowhere however There’s at least two centuries of tradition behind it in this region of the city of Hue, the Imperial City of the Nguyen dynasty from 1802 to 1945 but an important regional centre long before that. The most immediate predecessor to An Bang is the Mausoleum of emperor Khai Dinh, who died in 1925.

Here you can see gaudy tile-work and the same jumble of styles, albeit on a lot grander scale, after all, emperors are rarely short of a bit of cash to throw around in vainglorious immortalisation.

His predecessors, such as Tu Duc and Dong Khanh were yet to develop some of the more flowery embellishments or take on European features in their architectural preferences. The buildings in their mausoleum complexes have a more understated elegance and the tombs themselves are fairly modest in style, unlike the assault on the senses that is Khai Dinh’s. Dong Khanh’s modesty went beyond the relative restraint, at least for an emperor, of his decorative demands: the large engraved stele in the pavilion in front of his tomb humbly admits to some of his failings in life. In this spirit I may well have my gravestone carved with the words: “here lies Graham, on the whole not a bad bloke but once in a while he could be a bit of a twat”. Hopefully this will ensure my tortured soul won’t linger to reap misery in the world of the living.