Bui Van Phuc, 66, in Muong Pieng Village, Ngoc My Commune, recalls that when he was a little boy, he liked to see his parents and other Muong families taking part in new rice feasts.

“The traditional feast started in feudal times,” he says. “Before doing the cooking, people must prepare high quality glutinous rice and fresh fish caught from the stream.”

Early in the morning, villagers send a young man into the forest to get cheo tree bark. Using a sharp knife, he whittles the bark off, then brings a bunch back to the village.

People use stones to beat the tree bark until its resin seeps out, then dip the bark into the stream.

“According to the Muong’s experience, this resin can make fish emerge. Then they simply use nets to catch them,” Phuc says.

The Muong process fish into three dishes: fish mixed with chilli, baked fish and fish cooked with bamboo shoots.

In contrast to the Kinh, whose women do most of the cooking, young men in the Muong community are in charge of preparing the food.

Meanwhile, a group of young women wearing traditional black skirts with white scarves round their heads and 1m-long narrow bamboo tubes over their shoulders walk up the stream to its source to get clean water for cooking.

In their houses on stilts Muong women help the men cook the steamed sticky rice and other dishes. Amid the sound of voices and laughter they use bamboo clips to bake fish over the fires and smoke keeps curling upwards over the rooftops.

When the dishes are ready, people lay out seven food trays and pray for their ancestral spirits to come back home and bless them.

On behalf of villagers, Phuc, who is the village chief, prays for a new year with a bumper crop. He wishes everyone good health.

In the village yard young women hit the ground with bamboo tubes, making a series of thuds as if pounding rice.

One of them, Bui Thi Hien, says she feels very happy because this year her village harvested a bumper crop.

“That’s why we organise the new rice feast today. The feast demonstrates our national character and the traditions inherited from our ancestors,” she says.

In the bustling atmosphere, filled with the sound of gongs, people feel free to drink ruou can (local wine out of jars through bamboo straws).

“The present-day feast has been simplified with less quaint customs than in the old days,” Hien says. “Not long before, the Muong could not organise the new rice feast annually as it depended on whether their crops were successful or not.”