Though his health has become increasingly weaker, senior citizen Ha Minh Du, 79, from Quan Tri Village (Yen Lam Commune, Yen Dinh District, Thanh Hoa Province) rides his old bike every day to each and every Muong ethnichousehold to collect their traditional customs, games, folk-songs and proverbs.

At night, Du tirelessly types up the notes he has collected that day of the ethnic group’s cultural values.

Du joined the army when he was 16. He also fought in the Dien Bien Phu Campaign. After the resistance war against the French colonists ended, he worked in the Central Voluntary Youth Union Command.

In 1956, he was sent to study at the Hanoi Pedagogy University. After that, he worked for the former Thanh Hoa Department of Education. During that time, he travelled a great deal in order to compile a full set of the Muong alphabet, which was one of his long-standing dreams.

The elderly teacher shakingly opens several A4-sized pages full of words in the Muong script and says: “These are documentary pages on the communication culture, manners and customs, and behavior of the Muong ethnic people, and the Muong-Viet vocabulary that I have been collecting for nearly five decades”.

Du’s footprints have been left in several provinces with large populations of Muong ethnicpeople, such as Hoa Binh, Phu Tho, Yen Bai, Son La and Thanh Hoa.

So far, Du has amassed a huge treasure of knowledge on Muong ethnicculture, including several different works, which are kept in the form of manuscripts, such as Behavioral Culture, Muong ethnicpeople’s Communication, Manners and Customs of Muong ethnicgroup in Thanh Hoa Province, and Behavioral Culture of Muong EthnicBoys and Girls via Love Songs.

With great attention to detail, Du has compiled an alphabet of the Muong ethnicgroup. According to him, several Muong ethnicancestors, who knew Chinese calligraphy, created the Muong scripts.

However, in the past, 95% of the Muong ethnicpeople were illiterate; thus, they were not aware of their own script. The Muong ethnicpeople in Hoa Binh Province once tried to phonetically transcribe the script into their mother tongue, but the Muong ethniccommunities in other provinces were unable to read them.

Notably, a 300 page book on the customary law of the Muong ethnicgroup in Thanh Hoa Province, published by the National Culture Publishing House, is a combined work by Du and Cao Son Hai.

“Wherever I go, I try to find out about my ethnicgroup’s roots and its soul. What decides the existence or decadence of a nation is its language and script. The loss of such an element means a disappearance of a nation”, confided Du.

Therefore, the cultural works that Du has collected and studied are very meaningful. Yet the concern is how to make public these significant documents without appropriate authorities’ interest.

Source: LD

Translated by Mai Huong