Academic Context

For nearly a thousand years, Han Nôm was the soul of Vietnamese culture — the script in which ancestors recorded history, poetry, law, medicine, philosophy, and everyday life. It appears on ancient stone steles, temple inscriptions, wooden couplets, imperial manuscripts, and fragile paper documents. It is not merely a writing system. It is Vietnamese history and cultural memory made visible.

Today, that memory is in mortal danger. Every year, physical inscriptions erode under rain, wind, and pollution. Manuscripts crumble. The last generation of living scholars who can fluently read Han Nôm is rapidly shrinking — perhaps no more than a hundred people in the world still possess deep, native-level mastery of the script. When they pass, and when the stones and papers finally disintegrate, a vast and irreplaceable portion of Vietnam's heritage will be lost forever.

We are in a narrow window — perhaps the last one — where the final expert readers, the surviving physical artifacts, and modern AI technology all still exist at the same time. The Vietnamese Nôm Preservation Foundation spent two decades digitizing manuscripts before dissolving in 2018. Their work was extraordinary. But the window hasn't closed yet. NomLens exists to seize what remains of it.