Met my teacher on Saturday. As part of the learning process, we went to the Temple of Literature (Van Mieu). The Temple is around 1000 years old and was built by kings to be a centre for academic and cultural excellence. During the time of the royal dynasties, Vietnamese around the country would go to the Temple to take their examinations, which would determine whether they had a future as mandarins. It also served as a temple to Confucius and his followers like Mencius.
It is a huge place. It was also very crowded with many Vietnamese families bringing their school-going children to the Temple.
Why this was so? Well. The Temple grounds contain many stone steleas, which have names of the scholars, who passed their examinations, engraved on them. These steleas are held up by stone carvings of tortoises. Many Vietnamese believe that if you are going to sit for an examination, you should touch the tortoises for luck. I saw many Vietnamese doing that on Saturday. However, there were also student volunteers present, whose main duty was to ask people to stop touching the stone tortoises! Not surprisingly so given that the multitude of people touching the tortoises on a regular basis would result in the gradual and definite erosion of the carvings! Hope collides with conservation concerns!
That aside, as I walked through the grounds, I cannot but help imagine how it would be like a thousand years ago. For the many Vietnamese who had come to the Temple to take their exams. I wondered how they felt.
And then suddenly it hit me.
There I was thinking of the past and right in front of me was an ATM machine!
Hehe.
The ATM was present to facilitate the buying of merchandise sold by several shops around the grounds.
So we cannot never get away from modernisation. It follows everywhere we go.
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