Pham Van Hang (sitting, R) poses beside his sculpture of Alexandre de Rhodes, the creator of the modern-day Vietnamese alphabet

A 43-ton statue of Alexandre de Rhodes, the creator of the modern-day Vietnamese alphabet, is set to be installed in Hanoi next October as part of the capital city’s 1000th anniversary celebrations.

Hang said the former prime minister had mentioned several times that a statue of the French Jesuit missionary would be a fitting tribute.

During his time in Vietnam in the 1620s, de Rhodes published the first Portuguese-Latin-Vietnamese dictionary, in which he used the Roman alphabet to write Vietnamese.

The system he created, known as Quoc Ngu, or national language, is still used today.

Vietnam was the first country in the Far East region to use Roman characters for its polyphonic language, in contrast to China, Japan, Korea and other countries of Indochina.

As a memorial to de Rhodes, a stele was erected in 1941 near Sword Lake in Hanoi to mark the 350th anniversary of his birth, but was removed in 1957.

In Ho Chi Minh City, there is one street named after him.

Reported by Vo Tong Xuan