Rice: the year of a field in Vietnam

For most Vietnamese, rice is not just food. It is a calendar. The rhythm of the year in the countryside follows the field: when to flood it, when to plant, when to wait, when to cut. Many holidays and customs still echo that rhythm, even for families who left the village generations ago.

Water and mud

The season begins in water. Young seedlings, grown first in a nursery bed, are pulled up and transplanted by hand into flooded fields. It is slow, bent-over work, and on mountain terraces it follows the curves of the hillside.

From above, terraces like these look like contour lines on a map. They are the result of generations of shaping the slope so that water can move from one level to the next.

Green

For weeks the field is simply green. This is the long middle of the season, the time of weeding, watching the water level and worrying about the weather. It is also the least photographed part of the year, because nothing seems to happen.

Gold

Then the colour turns. In the northern mountains, terraced fields ripening to gold have become one of the most recognisable images of Vietnam, and every autumn they draw photographers from across the country.

Harvest

The last stage is cutting, threshing and drying. Machines now do much of this work in the lowlands, but in many places it is still done with sickles and conical hats, as in the frame below.

In the Mekong Delta farmers can grow more than one crop a year, so the cycle starts again almost as soon as it ends.

A reflection

I grew up surrounded by stories about harvests, so these pictures feel both beautiful and heavy to me. The golden field is the image everyone shares. But the field is golden for only a short time. Most of its year is mud, green, and waiting, and the beauty at the end belongs to all of that work.

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Photos: nohtnongdan, dangquangn, pb29, minh82bn on Pixabay, used under the Pixabay Content License. These are not my photographs.