Hung Yen Church - Lisboa Church

30/08/2017

Last week, I have visited Hưng Yên City, which is a city in the south of HaNoi, located near the Red River. During my trip I have visited a church called Pho Hien church - or Hung Yen Catholic church.

My first impression was that I was surprised that the church was so beautiful, especially it looked like a church in Lisboa that I have visited called Church Nossa Senhora da Conceição Velha.

Two pictures I have taken in Lisboa  and Hung Yen City, Vietnam. You can probably see the similarities between two churches.

On the left, It is the main gate of Hung Yen Church while on the right, it is the main gate of Church Nossa Senhora da Conceição Velha in Lisboa.

I was in Church Nossa Senhora da Conceição Velha  ( Lisboa) in February

and now I am in Hung Yen church (kind of a tiny version) 

The church was renovated in 1898. I looked on the outside and the front of the church was imitated in the Gothic style of Gotich, a three-lobed arch, generally feeling very similar to the churches on  Europe.
I looked into the inside of the woodwork is engraved and three-lobed arch triangular as outside, but there are guys and leopards, in the epigraphs are carved figure, dragon-style ant Ancient architecture of the Vietnamese. The church did not have a patio but walls, windows and doors. The columns and columns are made of wood, of equal magnitude.
The architecture of the church is made of wood, which has created the style of the church in the west and has a very sculptural architecture in Vietnam.
Legend has it that the church was built by the Portuguese when they began their missionary work here. This is the entrance and place of the clergy, foreigners and local followers.

I have to admit that I do not expect to meet a Portuguese Architecture in Vietnam, so I decided to read to find out about this strange thing. As a result, I would like to introduce you with the article about Portugal and Vietnam. There are many astonishing things that most of Vietnamese do not know about. 
For example, Portugal missionaries first not French, Portuguese took the first step to make Vietnam Alphabet , etc.

So let's read if you are interested in Vietnam and Portugal history!!! 

• Portugal and Vietnam

I will run through a century and a half, since 1498, the millennium marked the first Portuguese occupation of ships and retained the monopoly presence of Europeans in Asia for a while. In terms of trade as well as in the field of communication. In the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, new trade competitors emerged: the Dutch and the British. In both cases, the countries involved were non-Catholic countries, so both had no direct influence on the Portuguese mission.

Most people know that my country was a French colonial country, but I must say that France is completely absent in Asia throughout the period we will discuss. In contrast, there is an indirect presence of Italy: although no small country of this peninsula has been present as its national, Portuguese merchant ships recruit seafarers. Italy is especially Italian missionaries.

On this occasion, I must admit that Vietnam is no exception; And in the process of spreading Christianity, always under the influence of Portugal at that time, saw many talented Italians.

Alexandre de Rhodes, pope and trained in Rome, belonged to that group. But before thoroughly studying the activities of Christian evangelism, it is necessary to better situate the encounter between Portugal and Vietnam.

• The story begins.

 When the Portuguese boat people began northward across the Straits of Malacca, their main target was the two great empires, Japan and China. The long chain of small states between Malacca and Macao, for boat people and merchants, is considered only as a stop. As for missionaries, starting with Francisco Javier in the middle of the sixteenth century, the purpose of their efforts was to get the Chinese emperor to convert: it is thought that once this conversion is made, The dependents from northern Vietnam (Outside) to Siam, must follow. . In the context of such a mission strategy, these small countries are not considered priorities.

In fact, even in Vietnam, the first contacts between Portuguese and Vietnamese were known as anecdotes.

For example, my trip to Hung Yen, it is said, through memory, a stone tablet was erected in 1524 on the island opposite the port of Hung Yen, with witness Fenão Mendes Pinto have an attempt The first Christian proclamation of 1533, which is known only through a single source of Vietnamese literature, is indirect and late, and finally has a linguistic, Extremely, by Gaspar da Cruz in a landing in 1555, is recounted in his "Report to China".

However, after learning more about it, I learned that the first evangelistic efforts in Vietnam, of which Western sources had been traced, actually occurred early in the late 16th century. Their missionary strategy, the Jesuits tried to hold monopoly missions in China and Japan, but many times they encouraged other religious orders to have missionary initiatives in "small countries." Thus, in 1583, the first Spanish missionary Francisco arrived to Cochinchina. And this stage completely failed. The following year, there was a second evangelization; Bartolome & Ruiz, who had carried out the first mission, succeeded in living alone in Da Nang for nearly two years, but did not achieve any results. Due to the mediation of the arbiter of King Philippe II of Spain, the two Portuguese Order Friars continued, but only six months remained.

At the end of the century, the Portuguese Augustinian hermits who came to them, tried to enter the mission twice, but the results were modest, and they gave up for special reasons,

After learning about the memoirs of the Francisco and Augustinian lines, I found that on this occasion the encounter between real cultures as a dialogue between deaf people. It does not produce tangible results in the Vietnamese context. In the history of the expansion of Portugal, the real note to Vietnam appeared rather late. The decisive factor arising from Japan's closure to trading and evangelism, in the early decades of the 17th century

• Vietnam in the seventeenth century,

 After winning the Chinese invaders in 1427, Vietnam's Emperor built a new country.

If you have the opportunity to go to Hanoi, you will visit the lake swords, also known as the sword lake and hear the story of returning the sword to the turtle which was given by God to fight with the Chinese invaders.

At that time the name of the country was Dai Viet, an internal name; The name "Annam" used in relations with China and the world outside the Southern Frontier is now the northern part of Nha Trang, - the whole country has a unification on the name under the reign of the Lê Dynasty.

But in reality, the two regions controlled by the two rulers are separated by the Gianh River, at the 18th parallel; hereditary son linked with uncle Trinh ruled Northern Tonkin, Lord Nguyen in the south. The definitive separation occurred again in 1614, the year when the Inner Lords of the Nguyen lord chased the mandarins from the north. Because of the narrow land and the poor people, the determination to expand foreign trade to prosper; It will be a privileged trading customer in the Portuguese region of Macao for a very long time.

• Cochinchine – Indochina

 The Portuguese word Vietnam for Cochinchine is "Cochinchine" (because "Kochi" is the Vietnamese name for the Malays and Japan, and the word "Chine" is used to distinguish it from "Cochim"). The city of Cochin, originally applied to the whole of Great Britain, was, at that time, the land of the Nguyen lord, often referred to as the "King of Cochinchine" in the texts. Although the author is often reminded that this is just an "alevantado," a spirit against the real king in the north, while the northern lord of Trinh, the Portuguese call Is the "TUNQUIM" kingdom (literally "Hsinchu"), which means "capital of the east", and more clearly than Thang Long. Le Le and Lord Trinh.

Around 1616, at the invitation of the authorities of Inner Vietnam, some Portuguese immigrant settlement projects were proposed and supported by the emperor Je'ronimo Azevedo and the imperial court. But the conquerors João Coutinho and Francisco de Gama insisted on rejecting the project, so the project was removed except for the purely religious fields raised in the project. If the intention is to find a benefit on the official level of Portugal to Vietnam, then soon cooled down just to screech, the opposite there is a regular commercial cooperation between Macao and two cities. of Vietnam. That commercial partnership lasted for two centuries with extraordinary results. These political and commercial aspects have been highlighted by other prominent studies.

In the religious realm, mission regions in Vietnam are named by the Jesuit Province of Japan. For Portuguese bishops in Malacca and Macao, it was formally established in Aàng Trong in 1615, in Tonkin In 1627. The Jesuit Order of Japan was totally Portuguese and Portuguese-funded in the framework of royal patronage. Human resources of most Portuguese, but from the beginning there are many Italians in it;

 There are Japanese, but only in the subordinate, since the end of the sixteenth century, the line gradually extended its territorial jurisdiction to China (later the Autonomous Province) and its headquarters In Macao. At the time of our study, the Province attempted to expand towards Indo-China and the peninsula south of the Pacific Ocean, navigating the maritime routes that originated from Macao.

Portuguese also paid attention to diocesan jurisdictions, although in theory these authorities are given the responsibility to coordinate missionary work.

• The Jesuit mission in Vietnam and Vietnamese

In Vietnam, as elsewhere, the missionary effort has gone hand in hand with the high levels of accomplishment in the field of culture. Right after the commencement of the mission in Vietnam, the Jesuits of the Japanese Prefecture have had more than twenty years of Japanese language study and research experience. Chinese, Vietnamese, and Japanese have a similar position, and because these two languages bear a certain kind of influence through the Chinese script.

The translations of the first Christian texts into Vietnamese date from the 11th century, and the essential part of the work of Francisco de Pina, the Jesuit priest born in Portugal; He graduated from the Macao school, and then famous Japanese writer Jaão Rodrigues "Tcuzzu" was present there. In his work, Father Pina relies on the very fruitful help of a young Vietnamese baptized papal liturgist named Peter; This young man's knowledge of kanji should be very helpful in Pina's work.

These events derive from an official mission statement: "He (a familiar soldier) had a sixteen-year-old son, a clever and intelligent young man. He is a very beautiful Han, very popular with the people ... His baptismal name is Peter, thanks to his talents or words, he helped the priests in translating the Pateras. Noster "," Ave Maria "," creed "and the ten commandments of the local dialect (sutras), which the faithful have memorized. God is made human, redeemer, as well as the necessity of faith and the sacraments to participate in the merits of our Lord Jesus Christ. Hey, And began the rosary as in our country

According to the habit of carrying out the annual records of the Jesuits, the "priest", the author of the unrelated contact works, was named. The three Jesuits were present at the Pulo Cambo missionary base (possibly corresponding to today's Quy Nhon name), at which time this work was conducted: priest Buzomi, suffering from "serious illness" Pray for people to come back, Father Pina and Father Borri, one who has just arrived and has just begun to learn the language. We understand that the works were carried out under the supervision of Buzomi, a former superior of the Cochinchina missionary base and now a local base, but the main actors in this project are Father Pina and the Vietnamese youth collaborated with him,

According to the insistence of the priest Pina, he completed the construction of a system of transfer of alphabet letters suitable for the pronunciation and tone of Vietnamese language. He made a collection and started writing a grammar. As a result, Father Pina has worked hard, with the help of a small number of Vietnamese students gathered around him.

 I would like to report on the death of a Portuguese missionary according to an ancient Vietnamese document:

"Pina is a Portuguese Catholic, aged 40. He was loved by local Vietnamese people. Because he could speak their language as if he himself was a native of Vietnam. "

 ( continued) 

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