Hương Tuyết Pagoda

Hương Tuyết Pagoda is located at Alley 205, Bạch Mai Street, Bạch Mai Ward, Hanoi City. On the Hậu Phật stele erected in the Nhâm Tý year, the 6th year of Duy Tân (1912), the history of the construction of this pagoda is clearly recorded as follows: “Mr. Nguyễn Hữu Quang of Hàng Đào Street, Đồng Lạc Ward, together with his wife Trương Thị Điều, made a vow and bought a private garden plot in the area of Bạch Mai Ward, Hoàn Long District, to build a pagoda to worship Buddha, and also to make statues and cast a bell for the pagoda. In the Tân Hợi year (1911), in October, on an auspicious day, the pagoda was completed and named “Hương Tuyết Tự” (Hương Tuyết Pagoda).”
The pagoda complex includes: the gate, the main pagoda, the Patriarch’s house, the Mother Goddess house, and the guest house. The main pagoda includes: the front hall, the middle hall, and the upper hall. The most notable feature of the pagoda is the system of Buddha statues arranged progressively higher in the upper hall. The entire system consists of more than 50 round statues, created around the first half of the 20th century. In addition, the pagoda preserves many precious artifacts, such as: 3 bronze bells; 3 stone steles from the Nguyễn dynasty recording the construction of the pagoda and the donors; and wooden artifacts including: horizontal plaques, parallel sentences, y môn, cửa võng, scroll-shaped plaques, incense tables, dragon thrones, worship niches… carved with themes of the four sacred creatures, the four precious objects, dragons flanking, tiger symbols… all lacquered and gilded, dating from the 19th–20th centuries. With its typical values of traditional architecture and rich system, Hương Tuyết Pagoda was ranked as a National Historical-Cultural Relic on February 13, 1996. In addition, the pagoda is also a revolutionary historical relic, making great contributions during the anti-French resistance. At the pagoda gate, there is a stone stele engraved in 1938 stating: “The Hương Tuyết Pagoda area was a contact point of the Vietnam Revolutionary Youth Comrades Association in 1929 and was the headquarters of the command committee of the first strike of workers of the Avia Hanoi factory (from May 28 to June 10, 1929)”. The Hương Tuyết Pagoda relic and the struggle of Avia Hanoi workers were a direct driving force promoting the wave of revolutionary struggle of our people, leading to the birth of the Indochinese Communist Party (June 17, 1929) - the main nucleus of the Communist Party of Vietnam, founded on February 3, 1930. Along with other revolutionary relics in Hanoi, Hương Tuyết Pagoda is a red address and important evidence in the history of the Vietnamese Revolution in 1929–1930.