Fifteen Buffalo Out of Thirty-Two Reach the Do Son Final and the Qualifying Round Is Back After Eight Years
Vietnam's buffalo fighting festival has restored its two-stage format. The final is on the nineteenth in Haiphong.
The Do Son buffalo fighting festival holds its final on the nineteenth of September in Do Son Ward, Haiphong, with fifteen buffalo. Thirty-two started.
The qualifying round returned this year after an eight-year absence, and that is the substantive change. Sixteen qualifying bouts were fought on the twenty-first of July in front of more than ten thousand people, and the survivors go through to the final.
The calendar is lunar rather than solar. Qualifying is on the eighth day of the sixth lunar month and the final on the ninth day of the eighth, which is why the dates move by a fortnight or so each year and why the festival is difficult to schedule around.
Organisers say the two-stage structure is closer to the festival's traditional shape and improves the quality of the final field, which is the standard justification for a qualifying round anywhere. It also doubles the number of days on which the festival exists, and the festival is pursuing wider international recognition.
Do Son was named one of fifteen official national festivals in 2000 and listed as national intangible cultural heritage in 2012. The listing is what keeps it running and it is also what constrains it, because an event held as heritage is expected to look like the thing it is heritage of.
The buffalo are bought, fed and trained for a year by families and neighbourhoods rather than by an organisation. That is the part that does not scale, and the part that keeps it going.