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Promoting tourism through spring festivals

06/03/2025

Ha Nam has about 100 festivals, most of which are held in spring. In addition to famous festivals such as the Doi Son Tich Dien Festival, the Duc Thanh Tran Salary Distribution Ceremony at Tran Thuong Temple, the Tam Chuc Spring Festival, the Doi Pagoda Festival, etc., there are many festivals associated with historical and spiritual cultural relics (communal houses, temples, pagodas, etc.) in many rural areas throughout the province.

Spring festivals meet the spiritual needs of people, meeting, exchanging, satisfying the psychology of relaxation, spring travel after a year of hard work. With the development of society, many village festivals have also attracted a large number of people and tourists to enjoy and pray for luck. This is an opportunity for the locality to promote and develop tourism to all classes of people and tourists. However, to promote tourism through festivals requires many factors, from the organization of the festival, the attitude of the people and the quality of accompanying services, in which the first factor that attracts tourists is the uniqueness of the traditional elements of the festival.

The Tich Dien Festival, which has been restored and maintained to this day, is the highlight of the early spring festival in Ha Nam. The festival is unique in its origin, its rituals, its rituals and the traditional games that go with it. In addition to the uniqueness of a typical, ancient and most realistic agricultural festival, the festival also has many elements, which is the care for the people of a monarch - the head of the country, teaching the people "to use agriculture as the foundation" - the root of prosperity throughout the centuries of one of the countries in the rice civilization. These are the factors that have made the festival recognized as a national intangible culture and attracted a large number of tourists from all over the world. The festival in recent years has become more vibrant with booths introducing and promoting agricultural products, handicrafts, OCOP products, bearing the characteristics of localities in the province.

Ritual reenacting the story of King Le Dai Hanh plowing the fields at the Doi Son Tich Dien Festival, Spring At Ty 2025.

Besides those strengths, tourism today does not stop at simple sightseeing and sightseeing but is also associated with experiential activities. Experiencing farming is one of the activities that attracts rural agricultural tourism. This is also an advantage of the locality when organizing the plowing competition festival after the main rituals, visitors can visit, experience the traditional craft village of carrying drums and enjoy traditional dishes of the villagers such as sticky rice cake, sweet soup and unique perch porridge. For the festival to truly create its own mark, the physical works for the Tich Dien festival are also very necessary because the spiritual element is always associated with festivals, whether traditional or modern. The temple of Than Nong - the ancestor of agriculture and the spirit of Emperor Le Dai Hanh - the first king to directly plow the first fields of the year for the people to start the new crop are necessary for visitors to come to the festival to visit and pray for a prosperous and fulfilling year.

The Saint Tran's salary distribution ceremony, a cultural creation of Ha Nam. Tran Thuong Temple - a special national monument worshiping Hung Dao Dai Vuong Tran Quoc Tuan and his generals. The main temple is where Hung Dao Dai Vuong Tran Quoc Tuan previously placed a food warehouse to feed his troops during the resistance war against the Yuan-Mongol. The temple has a unique architecture with an ancient artistic style combined with a decorative style with elaborately carved motifs combining many techniques of ancient people from carving to wood processing techniques, traditional materials... The Saint Tran's salary distribution ceremony at Tran Thuong Temple takes place on the 15th day of the first lunar month every year. This is also an agricultural festival when the food bags are filled with cereal grains - the staple food of Vietnamese people. The salary distribution ceremony used to take place on the night of the 14th, early morning of the 15th and the following days. From 2024 to present, to attract tourists to come and worship and enjoy the temple's landscape, Tran Thuong Temple opens the Saint Tran's salary distribution ceremony on January 8, creating a unique early spring festival.

Ha Nam also has many unique regional and village festivals in the spring, such as: Tam Chuc Spring Festival - the province's largest Buddhist festival; Ba Danh Pagoda Festival associated with the worshiped character and the legend of the pagoda associated with the familiar proverb "Deserted like Ba Danh Pagoda"; Unique Truc Temple Festival with Dam Quyen Son singing troupe; Phuong Lam where there is a wrestling competition and palanquin planting game in Dong Hoa ward, Kim Bang town; Gua Village Festival (Liem Thuan, Thanh Liem) with ball wrestling; Vu Village Wrestling Festival, Binh Luc district... Currently, in the construction of advanced new rural areas, there are criteria for preserving and promoting the values ​​of cultural heritage, forms of cultural activities, and traditional folk sports of the locality. Accordingly, each commune must have free wifi in public places, QR codes at relic sites to post information about relic sites and festivals on the commune's website... Besides focusing on preserving, conserving and promoting heritage values, this is a very practical and effective form to promote the image and local cultural heritage, contributing to promoting tourism development right from the grassroots.

Source: Chu Binh/baohanam.com.vn

 

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