With the love for Ao Dai tailoring, every day the tailors of Trach Xa village work hard with colour cloth to bring beauty to women in all over the country and hopefully to the world. Trach Xa tailors believe that the soul of Vietnamese Ao Dai will never be lost by keeping the beauty of their trade village.
Trach Xa trade village is in Ung Hoa district, former Ha Dong, now in Hanoi. It has the traditional craft of making Ao Dai and some other costumes such as four-part dresses, cotton blouses, etc. The tailoring was passed down through generations. The particular point is that some items in clothes made here are hand-stitched, making them unique and traditional.
Today, in addition to the traditional costumes, Trach Xa village also make cotton blankets which are hand-stitched with tight hidden lines in blankets, creating beautiful diamonds and squares. The uniqueness is formed by the skilful and patient hands of tailors with products full of national identity.
Ao Dai made in Trach Xa village
According to the deity, Ms. Nguyen Thi Sen was born and grew up in Trach Xa village, Hoa Lam commune, Ung Hoa district, Son Tay town (built by Quy Minh Lord, a general deity in King Hung dynasty). In her teens, she was a beautiful, good, smart and resourceful girl, especially being good at planting strawberry, weaving, tailoring and embroidery.
According to Dai Viet Su Ky Toan Thu, Dinh Tien Hoang King (924-979) had five wives namely Dan Gia, Trinh Minh, Kieu Quoc, Co Quoc and Ca Ong, among whom Co Quoc Queen or Ms. Nguyen Thi Sen was the founder of tailoring.
In 968, Dinh Bo Linh led the army to defeat 12 warlords to come to the throne, named Tien Hoang De and called the country Dai Co Viet with the capital in Hoa Lu – Ninh Binh (He was Vietnam’s first king after nearly 1000 years of domination by the Northern invader. In his visit to Son Tay town to choose talents for the country, in Trach Xa village – Hoa Lam – Ung Hoa, Dinh Tien Hoa King fell in love with and married Ms. Nguyen Thi Sen. Following the king to Hoa Lu capital, she was named Tu Phi Queen.
At the king’s palace, she was entrusted with the royal costume tailoring division. With her intelligence, ingenuity and creativity, she and the other members made clothes of the Emperors, the Princes, the Queens and the Mandarins, which were both solemn and convenient. Especially, she trained a huge number of tailors. She taught women in the palace how to sew and developed the garment industry in the place which had never been seen before.
In 979, Dinh Tien Hoang King was murdered. To stay away from the competition for the throne, she took the children back to Trach Xa village, where the sewing profession was taught to the villagers and developed. She passed away on December 12. In order for the descendants to know about her merits, Trach Xa villagers built the temple to worship her as the tailoring founder and celebrate her death anniversary every Lunar December 12.
To be grateful to their benefactor, the annual anniversaries of the tailoring founder’s death are solemnly organized by most tailoring organizations, enterprises and associations all over the country. The largest annual anniversaries with various formal rituals as well as traditional exchanges and traditional games are held in Trach Xa and Hoi An.
Despite the ups and downs, Ao Dai tailoring in Trach Xa has never been mixed up by modern trends even when modern Ao Dai products took over the market and faded the image of the traditional Ao Dai. Cultural values seem difficult to be maintained when modern Ao Dai products, which can be mass-produced with a wider variety of styles and colours for users to choose from than the traditional one, are innovated according to users’ tastes. With the only design, partly making Ao Dai less popular, its cultural values can last forever. It is this feature that drives Trach Xa villagers to stick with their profession.
Mr. Do Minh Thuong (commonly known as Tam) in East Area, Trach Xa hamlet, has worked as a tailor for roughly 30 years (Photo by Labor Newspaper)
Trach Xa village currently has 500 households, 90% of which live by making Ao Dai. However, their income is not stable and even low because there are only more orders at the beginning and end of the year. In the rest of the year, the villagers often joke that they will abandon this low-paying job although everyone knows that they will not give up such profession passed on by their ancestors and becoming an integral part of the community life. Mr. Thuong, a long-time tailor of the village, said, “The young generation is now more advanced than we were before and has more opportunities to do business, so they pay little attention to the traditional craft. My most concern is that the traditional craft has become increasingly narrowed by the fact that to do this job, learners must have talent, skills and perseverance”. Therefore, he is trying to keep the traditional profession by transferring it to his children and encouraging young people in the village to learn such profession.
Doan Van Huynh