Hạ Long Bay

Hạ Long Bay's limestone shore became a setting for royal poetry in 1468, when Lê Thánh Tông visited the northeastern coast. At the mountain then known as Truyền Đăng or Rọi Đèn, he composed a poem and ordered it carved into the cliff. The inscription gave the mountain its later name, Bài Thơ, or Poem Mountain.

In 1729, Lord Trịnh Cương visited the same place, read the king's verses and added a poem of his own. These successive inscriptions made the shore a meeting place of landscape, royal travel and literary memory. The poems looked out upon waters and islands that drew rulers to Vietnam's northeastern seaboard; their survival preserved two distinct moments of courtly engagement with the bay, separated by more than two and a half centuries.