The Tale of Kieu

The Tale of Kieu is a narrative poem in Vietnamese by the poet and statesman Nguyen Du, published in 1820 near the end of his life and widely regarded as the greatest work of Vietnamese literature. Composed in 3,254 lines of luc bat, or six-eight, verse and originally written in the chu Nom script, it tells the story of Thuy Kieu, a young woman who sells herself into a forced marriage and endures years of suffering, including forced prostitution, to save her family from ruin. The poem has been translated into some twenty languages, including English, French, Japanese and Korean, and some scholars read it as an allegorical commentary on the political upheavals of Vietnam during the rise of the Nguyen dynasty.