The 82 doctoral laureate steles at Hanoi’s Temple of Literature, the earliest of which go back to the 1440s, have been included in UNESCO’s Memory of the World, the UN agency announced at a summit in Macau Tuesday.
They become the second Vietnamese heritage to be included in the list which has invaluable documents recording human history.
The stone steles at the country’s first university are carved with names of more than 2,000 people who achieved doctoral degree between 1442 and 1779 under the Le and Mac dynasties.
Each stele has detailed records written in Chinese characters about one of the 82 doctoral examinations held in that period.
With inscriptions on the history of royal examinations, the dynasties’ philosophies on education, the use and training of talents, they are considered to be the only one of their kind anywhere in the world.
The temple of Literature itself was built in the 11th century.
Last December UNESCO had recognized a collection of wood blocks used to print literary and historical works dating back to the Nguyen Dynasty (1802-1945) as a world memory.
The Memory of the World program, launched in 1992, is aimed at safeguarding and promoting the endangered world documentary heritages.
The Macau summit of the Memory of the World Committee for the Asia-Pacific was held from March 7 to 10.
Until late last year the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, or UNESCO, had included 193 heritages in its Memory of the World list.
They include the diaries of the Nazis’ Jewish victim Anne Frank, the Gutenberg Bible, and the Declaration of the Rights of Man.
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