Nom Character

From an early period a special ideographic script known as chữ nôm was also devised for transcribing spoken Vietnamese.

According to annals dating from the late 13th century, the poets Nguyễn Thuyên and Nguyễn Sĩ Cố were the first to write in chữ nôm. At the turn of the century King Hồ Quý Ly (1400-1407) himself translated the Confucian classic Kinh Thi into nôm. Thereafter an increasingly large number of other works were composed in the new script.

The era of the Lê kings (14th and early 15th centuries) was a significant period of development for chữ nôm literature. Of particular note were the works of Nguyễn Trãi, scholar and strategist to Lê Lợi (later King Lê Thái Tổ, 1428-1433) during the resistance war against the invading Ming Chinese. Trãi, whose Bình Ngô Đại cáo ('Proclamation of Victory over the Ngô') remains one of the finest works of Vietnamese national literature, left an important collection of 254 poems written in chữ nôm known as Quốc Âm Thi Tập. Though chữ Hán was the official the language of the Vietnamese royal court, two Lê monarchs - Lê Thái Tông (1434-1442) and Lê Thánh Tông (1460-1497) - are remembered for their poems written in nôm; some 300 works of great historical and literary significance written by Lê Thánh Tông may be found in the anthology Hồng Đức Quốc Âm Thi Tập ('Collected Poems of the Hồng Đức Period'). However, nôm poetry did not really begin to break free from Chinese influence until the 16th century, a process signalled by the appearance of 100 remarkable works in nôm by Confucian scholar Nguyễn Bỉnh Khiêm (1491-1585), brought together as the Bạch Vân Thi Tập ('Compilation of Bạch Vân's Poems').