13 November 2024

Imagine the things Vietnam’s 200-year-old turtles have seen

And who are we, in the minds of those creatures?

Photo by Bridgeman Images

I don’t really feel like I’ve travelled anywhere unless I’ve seen some animals, be that a grey seal sticking its nose out of leaden seas on a day trip to Bridlington, or a polar bear prowling along the coast of Spitsbergen. Watching reruns of David Attenborough documentaries on in-flight entertainment systems doesn’t count, by the way.

Animals are the true residents of most places on this planet, having established habitats long before we emerged. For example, birds are descended from dinosaurs, and using that timescale for calibration, we’re barely out of the delivery suite, let alone in a position to claim territorial rights. The land owns the land, and we live upon it – some of us with dignity, others not.

It’s an interesting exercise to tot up the number of animals we encounter each day; for many people the total will be zero, beyond those creatures lying dead, dismantled and sometimes re-formed on a plate in front of them. Other than a police dog sniffing suitcases in the airport, it’s five hours before I see a living non-humanoid in Hanoi – a rat darting from underneath a bus shelter to a planted strip on the other side of the pavement. Then some brightly coloured birds in cages in a shop window. Chittering gaggles of sparrows have turned the trees near Hoan Kiem Lake, in the middle of Hanoi, into maracas, and there are signs of life in the soupy green water itself – big fat splashes, ripples, bubbles here and there – even if dozens of dead fish lie on their side or belly up around the perimeter. At Jade Mountain Temple, over the red wooden bridge, things are more promising: herons and black squirrels in the branches leaning out from the bank, and two absolutely huge Hoan Kiem turtles – although they have been dead for a good while and are preserved, Hirst-like, in glass cases, either by “stuffing and impregnating with chemicals” or by “a plasticisation technique of the Federal Republic of Germany” (though perhaps the translation should have read “plastination”).

Whether it’s alive or deceased, I can’t look into the face of a creature without feeling captivated and enthralled, and even by scientific standards these particular Hoan Kiem turtles are enigmatic. If they are a separate species from the rare Yangtze giant softshell, as some researchers have claimed, then they are probably extinct. The last confident sighting was in 2015, and a dead turtle – in all likelihood the same one – was hauled from the lake in 2016. Some locals claim to have seen telltale shapes in the water more recently. Similar reports are made from the shores of Loch Ness.

Because they were once so present in our lives, animals have played a huge role in the development of most folklore. One turtle here was said to have loaned its not inconsiderable claws to a third-century warrior to make a crossbow, another to have presented a magnificent sword to a 15th-century Vietnamese emperor, ensuring victory in battle.

But what role do we play in the minds of the turtles? Imagine being alive for 200 years, sticking your head above water now and again, and witnessing a small trading town become a megacity, home to 7 million people, most of them on motor scooters and driving down whichever road I’m trying to cross. And this in a lake that might be considered holy or sacred, but which functions mainly as a roundabout. Thinking of this body of water as a refuge for wildlife is like thinking of Trafalgar Square as a safari park. Who are we, in the minds of those beasts, apart from their tormentors? As worshipped as the turtles were for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years, it didn’t stop a local fisherman clubbing one to death with an iron bar in the late Sixties.

In the Temple of Literature across town, a similar-sized turtle has been plated in gold, but its revered status as a god-like muse could not secure its existence. It can only be our own deep-seated insecurities, even after all this time, that makes us want to both venerate and violate those beings that are not us.