Thôn Phong Nam

This guide to Thon Phong Nam, a cluster of rice-farming hamlets near Da Nang, centers on a festival held only once every twelve years, when about sixty buffalo are led down the lane behind a procession of children in deliberately ragged clothes. You'll hear how the village has grown rice on this plain for roughly five hundred years, and why the festival honors not a general or scholar but the buffalo boys who once herded before dawn as children. It also stops at the communal house where farmers still honor Than Nong, the god of agriculture, and the two elders who keep the procession in order.