Home / People & stories / Nguyễn Du, Chinese name: 阮攸； courtesy name Tố Như, art name Thanh Hiên

1765–1820 (exact dates disputed)

Nguyễn Du, Chinese name: 阮攸； courtesy name Tố Như, art name Thanh Hiên

Nguyễn Du · 越南

18th–19th-century Vietnamese poet and official, author of *The Tale of Kiều* (Truyện Kiều), hailed as Vietnam's "great national poet".

His birth year has two accounts, 1765 and 1766, and his birthplace has two accounts, Thăng Long (now Hanoi) and his ancestral home Tiên Điền, Hà Tĩnh, both marked "uncertain"; his father was the Lê dynasty minister Nguyễn Nghiễm. Nguyễn Du passed the examinations in his youth, lived through the successive changes of the Lê, Tây Sơn, and Nguyễn dynasties, drifted for a long time, and later served the Nguyễn dynasty, being sent on a mission to the Qing dynasty in 1813. His representative work *The Tale of Kiều*, written in chữ Nôm, comprises 3,254 lines of lục bát verse, drawn from the Ming novel *The Tale of Jin Yun Qiao*, telling the troubled fate of the talented woman Thúy Kiều in troubled times and expressing sympathy for social injustice and women's suffering. He died of illness in Huế (now Huế City) in 1820 and was buried in Tiên Điền, Nghi Xuân, Hà Tĩnh.