Much of what the Dega know was never written down. It was played on gongs and sung through the night. In 2005 UNESCO recognized the gong culture of the Central Highlands as a masterpiece of the world’s intangible heritage. This page is about what that heritage is, and about the long epics that carry our history, our law and our idea of a hero.
The gongs
A gong ensemble in the highlands is a set of three to twelve bronze gongs, from about 25 to 80 centimeters across, each tuned to a note and played by one person, men or women depending on the people and the occasion. Every household owned at least one gong, and a family’s gongs and jars were its wealth and its standing. The gongs were played at the rice-blessing, at the new rice, at the buffalo sacrifice, at a marriage and at a death — the ensemble was, in effect, the way a village spoke to the spirits and to itself.
In 2005 UNESCO proclaimed the Space of Gong Culture in the Central Highlands a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity, and in 2008 inscribed it on the Representative List. The inscription covers seventeen Austroasiatic and Austronesian peoples of the plateau — ours. UNESCO’s own listing names the threats plainly: the old players are dying, the economy that gave the gongs their meaning is being replaced, the craftsmen who tuned them are few, and gongs have been sold for scrap.
There is an irony we should state. The recognition was sought and is managed by the Vietnamese state, which presents the gongs as national heritage while restricting the religious and communal life they were made for. A gong played for tourists at a provincial festival is not the same thing as a gong played for a buffalo sacrifice in a village that still owns its land.
Older than bronze
In 1949 the French ethnologist Georges Condominas was shown a set of stone bars at the Mnong Gar village of Ndut Lieng Krak that turned out to be a prehistoric lithophone — a stone xylophone, among the oldest musical instruments known in Southeast Asia. It is now in the collections of the Musée du quai Branly in Paris, and recordings of it being played in 1953 are freely available in the French national sound archive (see Archives and collections).
The epics
The Rhade call a sung epic klei khan; the Bahnar call theirs h’mon. They were performed through the night by a specialist singer — for the Rhade, a po khan — to an audience who knew the story and listened for the telling.
The best known is the Rhade epic of Dam San. Dam San marries two sisters, Hơ Nhi and Hơ Bhi, according to the custom by which a man goes to live in his wife’s house (see Dega women); defeats the chiefs who carry them off; and dies in the end in pursuit of the Sun Goddess, having overreached. It is a story about wealth, marriage, obligation and the limits of a man’s power, and it is still the best known of all our stories. The French administrator Léopold Sabatier wrote it down and published it in Paris in the late 1920s as La Chanson de Damsan (catalogs differ between 1927 and 1928), and a text-and-translation edition followed in 1933 (see Sabatier and the Rhade code).
The Bahnar epic cycle is larger than anyone realized until recently. Researchers working in Kon Tum since the 1980s have recorded nineteen separate h’mon and believe there were thirty or more, most of them known now to very few singers.
If an elder in your family can still sing
Record them — on a phone is enough — and write down who they are, where they learned it and from whom. An epic that has not been recorded dies with the last person who knows it, and several already have. We will keep any recording you send us safely and credit the singer, and we will not publish anything without the family’s agreement.
Further reading and listening
- UNESCO, Space of gong culture — the 2005 proclamation and 2008 inscription, with a description of the instruments and the threats
- Léopold Sabatier, La Chanson de Damsan: légende radé du XVIe siècle (Paris, 1927 or 1928) — free public-domain copy; text and translation also in the Bulletin de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient 33 (1933), on Persée
- “Introduction au klei khan kdam yi,” BEFEO 47 (1955) — another Rhade epic
- Harvard-Yenching Institute, “The Bahnar epic cycle of Kon Tum” — the nineteen recorded h’mon
- CREM-CNRS sound archive, Georges Condominas, Jeu du lithophone mnong gar, 1953 — free to listen; and Musique Mnong Gar du Vietnam (OCORA, 1974), gongs, mouth organ and laments
- “Le lithophone préhistorique de Ndut Lieng Krak,” BEFEO 45 (1952)
- Georges Condominas, We Have Eaten the Forest: The Story of a Montagnard Village in the Central Highlands of Vietnam (Hill and Wang, 1977) — borrow from the Internet Archive
See also: Films and recordings, Instruments beyond the gongs.
Compiled September 2026. We would welcome recordings of gong music and epic singing from Dega families, in the highlands or abroad.