State President Pays Tribute to Nation-Founding Hung Kings

State President Nguyen Xuan Phuc offers incense to pay tribute to Hung Kings in the Hung Kings’ Temple at Nghia Linh mountain in Phu Tho Province, April 21, 2021

Hung Kings worship ritual originates from ancestor worship rituals in Vietnamese families and has become a significant cultural festival for the people.

Annually, millions of people converge on the Hung Kings’ Temple at Nghia Linh mountain in Phu Tho to commemorate their ancestors and pray for good weather, abundant harvests, good luck and good health.

The largest ceremony, the Ancestral Anniversary festival of the Hung Kings, is celebrated about one week at the beginning of the third lunar month.

People from surrounding villages dress in splendid costumes and compete to provide best palanquin and most highly valued objects of worship for the key rite in which drums and gongs are conveyed to the main temple site.

Communities make offerings of rice-based delicacies such as square cakes and glutinous cakes, and there are verbal and folk art performances, bronze drum beating, Xoan singing, prayers and petitions.

The rituals are led and maintained by the Festival Organizing Board – knowledgeable individuals of good conducts, who in turn appoint ritual committees and temple guardians to tend worship sites, instruct devotees in the key ritual acts and offer incense.

The tradition embodies spiritual solidarity and provides an occasion to acknowledge national origins and sources of Vietnamese cultural and moral identity./.

By Thuy Dung