Nguyễn Du

Nguyễn Du (1766-1820) was a Vietnamese poet and scholar-official who wrote in both Literary Chinese and chữ nôm, the script built from Chinese characters that was used to write Vietnamese. His best-known work, Truyện Kiều, a verse novel about love and fate, is now regarded as the masterpiece of Vietnamese literature.

He was born in 1766 in Tiên Điền, a village in northern Vietnam, into a family of educated nobles who had served the Lê dynasty. He was orphaned as a teenager and was raised by his siblings and relatives. He lived through a turbulent age in which the Lê, the Tây Sơn and the Nguyễn dynasties followed one another, and the wars, abuses and social upheaval of those years run through much of his writing.

After a restless decade of wandering, whose details are poorly documented, he returned to his village in the 1790s, where he spent his days fishing, hunting and writing poetry. Later he entered the service of the new Nguyễn regime, took a military post in 1802 and was promoted to ambassador to China in 1813. His poetry, written mostly in Literary Chinese and also in nôm, mixes classical forms with social concerns: the suffering of ordinary people, injustice and the plight of women.

His legacy has two sides. During the French colonial period and in the decades that followed, under successive governments, he became a national symbol, and his works were read, debated and reinterpreted in many ways. Today he is honoured as the greatest poet of the nation, and his ancestral house in Hà Tĩnh Province is a Special National Site.