Dung is the owner of Vietnam’s largest collection of printed newspapers, currently undergoing digitization. Do Hong Lang, daughter of journalist and revolutionary Do Duc Duc, jokingly calls him “the man with 23 tons of newspapers.”

On the morning of May 27, he messaged me: “I’m guiding a VTV reporter to my place. After meeting with the TV crew, I’ll continue the task you entrusted me with.”

The task I “entrusted” was scanning the cover of newspapers released in the years between 1925 and 2025 to gather materials for a special article – Luoc Su Tram Nam (A Century’s Brief History).

In May and June, he was busy receiving media outlets to his home in NamDinh, then traveling to Hanoi for the launch of the photo book “100 Years of Vietnamese Revolutionary Journalism (1925-2025),” which includes many images of newspaper artifacts selected from his archive.

This massive archive is Vietnam’s largest collection of printed newspapers published from the late 19th century to the present, with over 400,000 issues, including more than 100 published in Vietnam before 1954. It was certified by Vietnam Records in 2024.

Dung collects papers from various sources. Some are gifted, others gathered by his children who share his passion. Once, he bought 3 tons of newspapers in Hanoi and 1 ton in HCM City. Another source is BacNinh, where there is a paper recycling craft village.

His collection now weighs over 23 tons. The entire third and fourth floors of his family’s modern building, which is the head office of a computer firm, have been dedicated to displaying and storing these newspapers.

“Co Giai Phong” issue 1 (published October 10, 1942), the only surviving copy in Vietnam, was acquired in 2022 for VND50 million together with four other papers. 

The newspaper was the central propaganda organ of the Indochinese Communist Party, led by Truong Chinh, a fellow native of Hanh Thien, Dung’s hometown.

From father’s memory to national heritage

In his archive room, Dung reserves a solemn corner for his father’s desk—Nguyen Phi Hung. In the 1980s, his father bought favorite newspapers, read them carefully, bound them into volumes, and stored them meticulously. However, he later sold them for unknown reasons.

In 2016, when Dung stumbled upon online newspapers identical to those his father once kept, he began collecting old papers with nostalgic marks to give to his father as a gift.

In the first three years, from 2016 to 2019, Dung collected about 7 tons of newspapers. From 2019 to 2024, the figure rose to 21 million. Since 2024, the collection has increased by another 2 tons.

Among the reports and articles about his collection, I noted a VTV2 documentary from “Never Too Late” program, aired on June 4. It highlighted private “archives”: one is owned by Dung from Nam Dinh, and another belonging to writer-journalist Minh Chuyen (Post-War Literature Museum) in Thai Binh.

“If Minh Chuyen preserves war memories and human fates through words and documentary films, Nguyen Phi Dung keeps societal memories alive through old newspapers. Their methods differ, but both share a common effort to preserve time so that today’s and tomorrow’s generations never forget” is a comment about the reportage.

Digitizing the collection

“Never Too Late” is not just the name of a TV program. It’s also the spirit driving Dung and his friends at NTQ, a technology company, to digitize the entire archive.

“Digitization” sounds simple, but the process is challenging, said Bui Duc Chuong, co-founder of NTQ and project lead.

“At first, we thought that the German scanner could handle these newspapers, but the machine cost VND1.5 to 2 billion and took too long to place order and import. So, we decided to build our own scanning machine and develop software. After three months, we completed phase one, digitizing 1,000 issues to test quality and speed,” Chuong said. 

“As the quality matched the originals as recognized by Dung, we’re confident in setting up more similar production lines. We aim to complete the entire archive by September 2, 2026,” he added.

Chuong said that he has used artificial intelligence, trained AI to recognize newspaper pages, and automatically cut pages to speed up the processing. In the near future, there will be a solution to handle curved newspaper pages, with the requirement that the booklet cannot be removed.

Ha Anh