Vietnamese Symbols #1: the nghê

Many buildings in Vietnam now have snarling stone lions at the gate. Yet at Vietnamese communal houses, temples and pagodas, the more familiar guardian is the nghê. Everyone has seen one; few people can tell it apart from a lion.

What a nghê looks like

According to Đặng Văn Dự, writing in the newspaper Đại biểu Nhân dân (2009), the nghê is small, with short legs, no horns and no scales; its head, body and tail are usually covered in fur. Its bearing is supple, playful and cheerful, far from the proud, fierce look of a lion.

A 2016 article on Vietnam+ also notes the many moods of the nghê: sometimes dignified, sometimes playful and friendly.

Where you find it

• Carved on the wooden brackets and upturned roof corners of communal houses.
• Sitting at village gates, communal-house gates and temple entrances, often in pairs.
• Standing beside incense tables and altar niches.

What it is for

The nghê guards sacred places and wards off evil spirits. Vietnam+ adds that beyond marking the sacred realm, it carries the farming community’s wish for timely rain and good weather.

And the stone lions at the gate?

Associate Professor Tống Trung Tín, quoted by VietNamNet in 2013, said that paired Chinese-style stone lions were mainly tomb guardians. In China they stay at tombs, while in Vietnam copies are placed in front of temples and offices. He also noted that lions in the Vietnamese tradition were stylised and given new names, such as Lân and Nghê.

Where the nghê comes from: still debated

• Researcher Bùi Ngọc Tuấn sees the nghê as a purely Vietnamese creation derived from the stone dog. Đặng Văn Dự notes that this is still conjecture without concrete evidence.
• Another view links the nghê to the Buddhist guardian lions at temple gates across East and Southeast Asia. Đặng Văn Dự considers this the more likely origin, reshaped by Vietnamese hands into a smaller, livelier form.
• Vietnam+ records two more readings: the nghê as a son of the dragon, or as a dog made sacred to serve the gods.

So calling the nghê “one hundred percent Vietnamese” goes beyond the evidence. What is certain is that the nghê on our temples carries a spirit of its own, nothing like a snarling lion.

Where to see one

Việt Nam News (2020) shows a pair of stone nghê at the gate of Gióng Temple in Gia Lâm, Hanoi, in a piece on a talk by art researcher Trần Hậu Yên Thế, author of the book Nghê Việt tinh tuyển.

Know a beautiful nghê at a village temple? Send me the place on Zalo and I will go and find it. It may become an episode of my journey in search of Vietnamese identity.