VietNamNet Bridge - In Hanoi’s Phu Thuong quarter, I spot three men covering the old village well with slabs of concrete. It is the end of the road for this old servant.

I remember as a child I also helped my mother fetch water from our village well in Ha Dong. The water tasted sweet and could be drunk without being boiled. The well was hundreds of years old but on my last visit it had been filled in and covered up. A villager told me that there would soon be a road running through where the well sat and you can’t stop progress.

The urbanisation of rural areas in Vietnam has led to the disappearance of old wells, which were once one of the focal points of your typical Vietnamese village. It was said you could live without cooking or clothes but not without a well! The village well is an important symbol in fairy tales poetry. It is considered to be not only the “eye” but also the “heart” or the soul of the village.

Many villages even put altars at the well in a belief that the Well Genie would bring sweet water to the villagers. “The well is a mirror of a village. It contains the village’s vitality and creates luck and prosperity for villagers. That is why it is one of the places where villagers meet to chat every day,” says Pham Quynh Trang, a lecturer from Hanoi‘s University of Cultural Studies.

Trang quotes a few lines of verse, “If it rains a lot the well will always be full of water. And if you came to see me a lot, my parents would agree to our love”. A well keeps the “yin” part of the village in balance. Together with the village’s communal hall, the well is also believed to determine the village’s social order and prosperity.

If the village were rich, then the well would be inlaid by brick and decorated with traditional figures around its mouth. However, if the village were poor, the well would be a simple, less ornate affair. “All altars in homes, pagodas or temples would have a bowl of water taken from the well,” says Trang.

“In festivals, water in the well is often used to wash worship objects and for rice cooking contests.” On the surface of water, there would often be duckweed, which helps keep dust out of the water. A village well would be washed once a year by villagers, who would fish rubbish out of the well and place a layer of sand at the bottom to filter the water.

It used to take one month to build a well and it’s construction would have been a communal event. “Nowadays people just make a phone call and within 24 hours they can have a well in their home,” says Trang.

(Source: Timeout)