Unlocking the Soft Power of the Ancestral Land

The ultimate mandate of foreign affairs is to maximize national interests, engineer a peaceful and stable environment, and mobilize resources to serve national development. Amidst deepening globalization and international integration, culture operates not merely as the spiritual foundation of society but has transformed into a vital endogenous resource and a core soft power asset for every nation and locality.

International travelers experience the unique, artisanal craft of traditional Dó paper making at the Ban Sung community-based ecotourism site in Cao Sơn Commune.

An Institutional Mandate for Cultural Diplomacy

The Politburo’s Resolution No. 59-NQ/TW dated January 24, 2025, regarding international integration in the new era, explicitly demands proactive, comprehensive, and highly efficient global integration—maximizing domestic resources while capitalizing on external forces to fuel national development.

Following this milestone, the Politburo’s Resolution No. 80-NQ/TW dated January 7, 2026, regarding the development of Vietnamese Culture, intensely focused on unleashing Vietnam’s cultural soft power, positioning culture as a true endogenous driver and a fundamental catalyst for socioeconomic growth.

Thoroughly institutionalizing these national directives, the Resolution of the 1st Provincial Party Congress for the 2025–2030 tenure outlines the mission to unleash the cultural values of the Ancestral Land, elevate international integration efficiency, and exploit diverse funding streams. The overarching milestone is to transform Phu Tho into an influential growth pole of the Hanoi Capital Region, while anchoring its role as the definitive industrial, service, and commercial hub of the Northern Midland and Mountainous region.

Translating this legislative framework into real-world action, Phu Tho Province has enacted and deployed its landmark Master Scheme for organizing the “Phu Tho Cultural Day” abroad and the “Foreign Cultural Day” in Phu Tho for the 2026–2030 phase. Far beyond a conventional diplomatic event, this initiative showcases a modern development paradigm: deploying culture as the bilateral bridge, cultural exchange as the foundation, and mutual development as the ultimate target.

A Cross-Regional Space Rich in Ancient Cultural Sediments

As the cradle of the Vietnamese nation, Phu Tho commands an exceptional value ecosystem of national and international significance. The province holds two UNESCO-inscribed Intangible Cultural Heritages: The Worship of Hung Kings in Phu Tho and Phu Tho Xoan Singing, reinforced by a deep network of historical monuments, traditional festivals, and distinct folklore that carve out the unique brand identity of the nation’s birthplace.

This newly consolidated developmental space now integrates the exceptional cultural heritages of Vinh Phuc and Hoa Binh. While Vinh Phuc stands out with its midland festivals, craft villages, and traditional folk arts, Hoa Binh operates as the birthplace of the globally renowned, ancient “Hoa Binh Culture”. It preserves the elite heritage of the Mường ethnic group, featuring Mo Muong, Muong gongs, stilt-house architectures, and an immense repository of folk knowledge.

This convergence creates a vast, highly diverse cultural space bound by a unified identity, offering a priceless asset fund to engineer regional and international-level cultural diplomacy products. This is a rare geocultural leverage that very few localities possess in building a distinct cultural brand and upscaling their international standing.

Amidst fierce global macro-competitiveness, cultural magnetism has emerged as a deciding factor in drawing Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), boosting premium tourism, expanding international alliances, and scaling local brand equity. A jurisdiction backed by a distinct cultural identity that is widely recognized on the global stage will capture superior windows to access international capital, connect with strategic partners, and elevate its macro-competitiveness.

While Phu Tho has historically sealed structured alliances with various sub-national jurisdictions across South Korea, Japan, China, Italy, Bulgaria, and Laos, past cultural exchanges operated primarily on isolated, single-event tracks. They lacked a institutionalized, periodic, and long-term mechanism capable of leaving a permanent global footprint. This reality drove the urgent necessity for a modern, highly professional cultural diplomacy model that seamlessly weaves cultural promotion into international trade matching and socioeconomic acceleration.

The Two-Way Diffusion Model: From the Ancestral Cradle to Future Vision

According to Mr. Nguyen Dac Thuy—Member of the Provincial Party Committee and Director of the Department of Foreign Affairs—the Master Scheme aims to accelerate cultural diplomacy on a highly proactive, professional, and targeted track.

Phu Tho Xoan Singing, inscribed as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO, serves as a priceless asset within the “Phu Tho Cultural Day” framework.

The highlight of the Master Scheme is the synchronized engineering of two mutually reinforcing, complementary programs: “Phu Tho Cultural Day” abroad and “Foreign Cultural Day” in Phu Tho. While the former serves as the external gateway projecting the Ancestral Land’s brand equity onto the global market, the latter opens a vibrant window for local citizens to directly access and experience the elite cultural colors of the world.

The “Phu Tho Cultural Day” abroad is designed as a comprehensive, integrated cultural diplomacy summit. Here, the signature heritages tied to the Hung Kings era, the Worship of Hung Kings, and Xoan Singing, alongside the folk arts of the Northern Midland and Mountainous region, will be formally showcased to foreign governments, multinationals, and the international public.

The festival space seamlessly integrates high-end art showcases, tourism promotion exhibitions, displays of premium OCOP and traditional handicraft masterpieces, and signature culinary arts. Crucially, it hosts high-profile forums for investment matchmaking, international trade, education-training, and youth-diaspora exchanges. Through these connection nodes, provincial enterprises gain immediate access to global buyers, expanding their market share and capturing fresh joint-venture windows.

Appropriately, the overarching theme “Phu Tho — From the Ancestral Cradle to Future Vision” not only honors the deep roots of the Vietnamese nation but conveys the province’s fierce ambition for modern growth, global integration, and breakthrough development in this new era.

Conversely, the “Foreign Cultural Day” in Phu Tho, themed “Identity - Exchange - Integration”, operates as a dedicated space for partner nations and international cities to showcase their unique cultural heritage to the local population. Through international art programs, exhibitions, youth forums, and corporate roundtable discussions, the citizens of Phu Tho gain a direct passport to global cultural landscapes, strengthening international friendship and the grassroots foundations of bilateral cooperation.

Deploying Culture as an Active Economic Lever

The core philosophy of the Master Scheme is utilizing culture as an active lever for economic growth. Culture acts as the initiation point, but the destination is hard investment, trade expansion, tourism revenue, and human capital alliances. By converting cultural prestige into tangible public assets, the model has garnered heavy praise from central government ministries as an innovative, high-yield approach to regional development.

Thai ethnic artisans from Mai Ha Commune showcase traditional arts and handicraft masterpieces during the 2026 Hung Kings Temple Festival and Ancestral Land Cultural-Tourism Week.

Furthermore, the Master Scheme smartly leverages the overseas Vietnamese diaspora community as a vital bilateral bridge. Bound by deep emotional ties to their homeland, overseas Vietnamese function not only as the primary guardians and diffusers of national identity abroad but act as influential agents connecting international venture capital, science-technology transfers, and people-to-people diplomacy.

In conclusion, Phu Tho is charting the course for a next-generation model of localized cultural diplomacy, where culture, economy, education, and global integration are harmonized within a single, continuous developmental framework. From the primordial Hung Kings era of nation-building to this contemporary era of global integration, culture remains the immortal thread linking the past to the future.

By sending culture out first to pave the way, and letting economic cooperation follow to seal development, the values forged since the dawn of the nation will continue to shine, upscaling the international status of Phu Tho and Vietnam at large in this fresh economic era.

Cam Ninh