Vietnam's Sacred Turtle Dies At An Awkward, Some Say Ominous, Time

HANOI, Vietnam: A giant turtle, a mythic symbol of Vietnamese independence and longevity that had quietly paddled around Hanoi's central lake for decades - some say centuries - has died, official state news media reported.

The turtle, known as Cu Rua, or Great-Grandfather Turtle, weighed an estimated 360 pounds and was believed to have died of natural causes. His precise age was unknown.

It would be difficult to overstate his spiritual and cultural significance in this deeply superstitious and Confucian country, where the news of the turtle's demise prompted an outpouring of sadness and hand-wringing.

And its timing, as a Communist Party congress opened to choose Vietnam's top leaders for the next five years, was widely interpreted as a bad omen for both the party and the nation.

"People say the turtle's death is bad luck, and a way for the gods to show that something's about to happen," said Nguyen Thien Hung, the caretaker of the Vu Thach Buddhist temple, which lies a few steps from the lake.

"If I were to discuss the political implications of this, the government would think I was trying to destabilize it," he said. "But everyone thinks this is bad luck for the government."

For many here, Cu Rua was sacred, the earthly embodiment of the legendary turtle of the lake. In the 15th century, the legend says, a nationalist hero borrowed a magic sword - possibly from a dragon king - fought with it to drive out occupying Chinese forces, and returned it to a turtle that surfaced in Hoan Kiem Lake, the "Lake of the Returned Sword," in central Hanoi.

Cu Rua's death was a loss for biological history as well. He was one of the last of the Yangtze giant softshell turtles, species Rafetus swinhoei, which now has just three known specimens, two in China and one in a lake outside Hanoi.

"The loss of this critically important animal brings the species one step closer to extinction," Peter Pritchard, an international turtle authority and author of the book "Rafetus, The Curve of Extinction," said in an email from his home in Florida.

But for the Vietnamese, biodiversity may have been the least of his attributes.

Of the four animals that many Vietnamese consider sacred, including the dragon, phoenix and unicorn, the turtle is the only one that exists in real life, said Pamela McElwee, a Vietnam expert and a professor of human ecology at Rutgers University. As a result, she added, Hanoi's giant turtle was seen as an important link between "the here and now, the earthly world and the spiritual world."

He was also a symbol of the capital's endurance in the face of decades of war and upheaval.

Whenever a train rumbles into the Hanoi Railway Station, the conductor plays a patriotic song that chronicles Hanoi's recovery after the Vietnam War and ends with an ode to one of the city's most famous monuments: a shrine in the center of Hoan Kiem Lake built in the 1880s to honor the sacred turtle.

Nguyen Thi Van Anh, 40, a customer-service agent at the Hanoi Railway Station, said she had never seen the turtle but always thought of him as an important symbol of her hometown.

"Now I feel like I'm missing something, but I can't describe what," she said.

If the sacred turtle was a national symbol, it is hardly surprising that it had a troubled relationship with China, Vietnam's giant neighbor and longtime Communist ally.

Thanks to the legend of the lake, the turtle is Vietnam's clearest symbol of resistance to Chinese aggression. Cu Rua's death was discovered the day the Vietnamese Foreign Ministry lashed out against China for sending an oil rig into disputed waters of the South China Sea and during a heated national debate about the country's political and economic dependence on China.

But the turtle's relationship with China also has an element of codependency.

The only known remaining female Yangtze giant softshell turtle lives in China, and her male partner there may be infertile, several turtle experts said in interviews this week.

The species' last best hope may be to breed Vietnam's last surviving turtle with China's female.

So far, there has been no effort to do so, according to Nguyen Quang Truong, a herpetologist at the Institute of Ecology and Biological Resources in Hanoi.

For one, the sex of the remaining Vietnamese turtle is not yet clear, he said. But even if it turns out to be male, planning a cross-border turtle tryst, or even a sperm shipment for artificial insemination, would require high-level bilateral collaboration, piles of paperwork and the cooperation of nature.

"It's quite complicated," Truong said.