Gifts From The River

Ho Tan Phan has long been regarded as one of the preeminent researchers into Hue's culture and history. He owns a large and valuable collection of books, including many that he's written. What he calls his "collecting career" started after 1975, thanks to his wife, a doctor who used to help fisherwomen living on houseboats on Hue's many rivers to deliver their babies. "My wife told me that they had very beautiful and strange objects on their boats, which they fished out of the rivers. I was so curious," recalls Mr. Phan.

Lacking cash, some poor boat owners paid Mr. Phan's wife with these strange objects. "When she first brought some items home, I shuddered to realize that they were antiques from the Chinese Tang, Song dynasties, and Vietnamese Ly, Tran dynasties, thousands of years ago," says Mr. Phan. "I was surprised that they were undamaged, while even broken pieces were hard to find in museums. After that I started to collect pottery fished out of the Perfume River.

At the beginning, he would buy small amounts of Western, Chinese and Vietnamese items, local divers selling him whatever they'd found on the riverbed. Some batches consisted of thousands of items for which he'd pay some hundreds of thousands of dong. If a single item was interesting he'd be happy.

Most of my collection consists of pottery used in daily life. They reveal the lives of generations of people who once lived on this land. If we can gather all of those objects, they will become additional sources of material for research, in addition to other materials like records. Sometimes these original artifacts can provide exact answers to questions of history and culture, as long as we study them thoroughly".

The collection
To study Mr. Phan's vast collection would take years. His garden, lying down a small lane near Hue's Citadel, is full of pottery, the entrance path lined with piles of earthenware jars, jugs and pots of various sizes. Columns of steel wire contain thousands of ancient lime-pots. Similar columns contain shards of Vietnamese and Chinese porcelain and Vietnamese pottery. Long rows of crude jars and jugs made by Kinh and Cham people line the garden paths. Pulling aside the weeds reveals tall, grass-covered mounds beneath which lie thousands of intact Cham three or four handled terracotta jars that are at least 700 years old.

Mr. Pharis collection includes all sorts of pottery, both popular and high-class, most items originating in Vietnam but also including Chinese pieces from the Han, Tang, Ming, and Qjng dynasties. His collection of crude terracotta Han-era jars from the Tam Tho kilns in Thanh Hoa province feature familiar patterns of overlapping diamonds, squares, and leaf veins. Nearby lies a collection of enameled pottery household objects like jars, vases, teapots, bowls, cups, lime-pots and oil lamps dating from Vietnam's Ly, Tran and Le dynasties. Precious items include a series of Chu Dau lime-pots made during the late Tran and late Le dynasties.

Even more precious are the items created by the Sa Huynh culture, which existed in Central Vietnam some 2,000 years ago, during the same time that the Dong Son culture flourished further north? Mr. Phan owns an amazing number of undamaged Sa Huynh pieces, which are his prized possessions. Along with various pots he owns some rare con luc lac, a kind of round-bottomed jar decorated with dense crosses, and pots with or without bases decorated with crosses or wavy patterns. Most striking of all are the delicate terracotta lids of incense burners. "Considering the technology of the time, I'd say that designing these 2,000 years ago is harder than designing a computer today," says Mr. Phan.

After all these years of collecting, Mr. Phan remains passionate about his finds. To this day, he's still searching for pottery, and continuing to find new treasures in the seemingly endless amount of items that are being pulled out of Hue's rivers. "Not everyone can witness the evidence of history's ups and downs, and hear the echoes of ancient people with their own eyes," says Mr. Phan