The wooden pillars are unadorned at eye level, but admiring their ornately carved, lacquered and gilded upper ends requires contemplating the ceiling, the direction of heaven, which may have been Father Six's intention. A visionary architect and engineer, Father Six's Phat Diem is a combination of Western and Asian architecture and religious symbolism. Three pagodas crown the cathedral's western entrance. The bell tower resembles a Vietnamese communal house. Christian apostles chiseled in marble float on Chinese clouds or sit on Buddhist lotus thrones.
Angels have the faces of Vietnamese children.
It took Father Six a decade to collect the stone, timber and marble to build his masterpiece. Father Six died the year Phat Diem was completed and is buried in the courtyard between the cathedral and the bell tower. Khanh received her name from her grateful father who, after praying for children at a temple, struck the temple bell as is the Buddhist custom. She shared this story with me as we walked to Phat Diem's five o'clock mass. We had relied on alarm clocks to wake us because Phat Diem's enormous two-ton bell, the sound of which carries a distance of ten kilometers when it marks the hour, was silenced for the duration of the tower's restoration.