Queen Mother Nguyen Phi Y Lan

The relic of the temple of the Queen Mother Y Lan (Duong Xa commune, Gia Lam district, Hanoi) (Internet source).

Royal Thai Queen Nguyen Phi Y Lan is commonly known as Le Thi Khiet. She is a beautiful intelligent village woman and the only woman in the country who has been twice regent on behalf of the king to rule the country. At the age of 25, King Ly Thanh Tong was busy fighting in the border, so she and the officials discussed and made bold decisions to overcome the raging famine. In addition, she also introduced a number of policies to promote production, severely punish corrupt and rebellious mandarins when the king left the palace to fight for the throne.

In 1072, when the Crown Prince succeeded to the throne Ly Thanh Tong at a young age, she and the royal lieutenant Ly Thuong Kiet helped the court maintain discipline to defeat the invasion plots of the Song army. It was Hoang Thai Queen Y Lan who was instrumental in bringing folk dancing into the royal court. In particular, she encouraged the development of agriculture, built dykes against floods, developed handicrafts, made irrigation and banned the killing of cattle and plows. She is very concerned about the poor people, taking money from the court to redeem the good girls who had to sell themselves to pay their debts and find husbands for them.

She is also the first woman in Vietnamese feudal history to pay attention to the status of women. She not only wants to liberate and bring happiness to women, but also to bring about gender stability and balance yin and yang, because that is the basic foundation for building the most ideal social form.

Contemporary historians assess that, perhaps because of her character from the time she was born as a village girl, she understood society and sympathized with the plight of people in poverty! There are also people who explain that the reason Y Lan has such a soul is because she is a devout Buddhist, so she is imbued with the compassionate thought of Buddhism... That's why, up to 1115, she built  hundreds of pagodas and temples in many rural areas of the Red River Delta, among which the Phat Tich temple in Tien Du has made great contributions to her.

In the year of Dinh Dau (1117), Y Lan died at the age of 73. In the autumn of August of the same year, she was buried at Tho Lang Thien Duc in Dinh Bang ward, Tu Son city. Nguyen Phi Y Lan's life left posterity with many valuable lessons about self-study spirit, talent for governing the country, benevolence, meritorious deeds, and raising a "smart and filial" leader. King Ly Nhan Tong for the country... That merit of Nguyen Phi Y Lan will forever be remembered. Grateful for her merits to the country, the people have built pagodas and temples to worship her in many places and honored her as Guanyin Buddha. Kinh Bac people call her - the daughter of the homeland, Ba Tam of the North