On Friday we visited the Hue Museum of Royal Fine Arts and the Bureau For Documents and Historical Research of the Hue Monuments Conservation Center. We were hoping to learn more about preservation techniques in Hue, and possibly to identify some materials that might reasonably be included in a digital library of cultural materials. At the end of next week Patrick and I will be offering a three-day Digital Libraries workshop for LRC directors and sections heads. We are still trying to ascertain what a digital library of cultural materials in Vietnam would contain.
The Museum of Royal Fine Arts is located in the Long An temple of the Bao Dinh Palace, near the Citadel. It served as the Nguyen Dynasty museum and royal library. The museum and library had 45,000 items after WWII, but by 1978, the collection was reduced to 10,000 items. The rest were stolen or destroyed. The items were moved several times to avoid the depredations of various wars, but the materials vanished nevertheless. There were no paper materials left in the Museum, although at one time it housed the library of the Nguyen Dynasty. We heard stories about how the books and manuscripts from the library were used as kindling or as traction for trucks stuck in the mud during periods of war.
Dr. Tran Duc Anh Son, the Director of the Museum, has focused much of his efforts on metadata, inventory control, cataloging and photographing the artifacts. We learned that many Vietnamese museum pieces have appeared in international museums or in western auctions, but the Vietnamese cannot sufficiently document the provenance of the materials because the earlier records are not complete. Therefore, their claims to ownership are not recognized. The cataloging of the pieces is now extremely thorough, and is based on Japanese standards of museology, modified for Vietnam. An MS Access database holds at least 12 different forms to be filled out for each item, and includes 24 photographs of each item. We viewed several workrooms filled with materials not yet cataloged. Dr. Son estimates it will take five years to complete the cataloging project. The materials of the museum are available on CDROM for researchers to view, but not on the web.
Since there were no paper products in the Museum, we then went to the Hue Monuments Conservation Center and the Bureau for Documents and Historical Research, where we spoke with Mr. Phan Thanh Hai, Manager of the Bureau. We met in the library. Most of the materials in the library date from 1975. One of their activities is the publication of the history of the Nugyen Dynasty in Han-Nom and Vietnamese, a bilingual edition. They are now in their seventh volume and have covered the period from the 1850 to the first decade of the 1900s in over 5000 pages. This project uses photocopies of the Han Nom history made from originals in Hanoi. People with preservation skills are in Hanoi and Ho Chih Minh City, but not in Hue.
The library did contain some Hue Tuong, the Vietnamese version of Oriental operas. Tuong emphasizes the rhythmic recitation of the story, singing, dancing and music, but it is closer to western dramatic poetry than to western opera. The recitative part is noi loi (rhythmic speaking). There is no music in the printed versions, because tuong pieces have no predetermined melody nor set musical score; instead the singing is determined by the rhythm and style of the poems. There are strict musical conventions to follow, but no fixed notes. Its origins go back to the 11th century, when troupes of tuong performers toured from town to town. There were two forms of tuong, royal and folk. The royal form was based in Hue where it flourished in the Nguyen Dynasty, and presumably that is what we were shown. (from An Introduction to Vietnam and Hue)
As shown in the photograph below, these tuong need preservation to save them. These materials are perhaps 150 years old, and are quickly vanishing. These materials are the only older, paper-based, cultural materials that we were shown in the Museum and the Bureau library.