Eight Vietnamese records were recognised at the Nha Trang Sea Festival 2009 in the coastal Nha Trang city, Khanh Hoa province, which closed on June 12.

The traditional orchestra with 189 members.

During the festival, 189 instrumentalists aged between 11 and 55, who are lecturers and students of the Nha Trang Culture, Art and Tourism College, on June 8, 2009 participated in a concert entitled “Nha Trang in Festival”.

Artists used 30 kinds of traditional musical instruments such as dan bau (monochord), dan tranh (16-chord zither), t’rung, gong, horn, saranai wind instrument and others to play music pieces of ethnic people in the Central Highlands and Cham people.

The concert included four parts: Rhythm of Waves, Colours, Night of Festival, and The Melody of Forest and Mountain.

The concert was recognised as the biggest traditional orchestra.

From June 5-8, around 700 people, both local residents and visitors, drew a 100m-long, 1.4m-high oil painting entitled “Joining hands to preserve the environment” at the coastal park on Tran Phu Road.

A piece of the 100m-long painting.

The painting has three sections, featuring different topics: environmental disasters which have happened, are happening and will happen and solutions to protect the environment. This is a community artwork, expressing the thoughts and aspirations about the environment through paint.

Also on Tran Phu road, a set of embroidered paintings called “Tri Ky Huu” were displayed. The paintings depict 12 species of flower: rose, marguerite, pensee, cherry apricot, cam tu cau, coquerico, thach thao, mimosa, thien dieu, wild sunflower, green apricot and forget-me-not.

The longest flower car.

Each painting is 1.95×3.1m in size, with a painting on each sides. Each painting was made by eight artisans within 960 days, totalling 96 artisans and 11,250 working days for the whole set of paintings. The paintings were made from May 1 2005 to April 30 2009.

The most special feature of the paintings is that the paintings on the two sides are exactly the same. To make two-face paintings like this, embroidery artisans must be very experienced and skilled.

One embroidered painting.

The two above artworks were recognised as the longest oil painting with a community theme and the most pain-staking embroidered flower painting set in Vietnam.

Other records set at the Nha Trang Sea Festival 2009 were: the biggest pho pot in Vietnam, the longest flower car (22.5m), the largest dragon made by scrap iron.

Thanh Tham