A second version of the story is more physical. A giant called Ông Đùng agreed to raise a hundred peaks in a single night as the price of a marriage. He worked in the dark, hauling mountains into place along the ridge, and had ninety-nine standing when a rooster crowed and dawn caught him short. Whatever he was still carrying he dropped across the Lam River, where it became núi Quyết — the hill that now watches Vinh from the far bank.

The names underneath both legends are older than the Chinese characters used to write them. Before the nineteenth century, people here said rú Hống or ngàn Hống in local speech, words understood to mean the mountains of the phoenixes and now effectively lost. The chữ Hán spelling 鴻嶺 that replaced them invites a different reading, and the well-worn local line about a blue river reflecting a red mountain comes from that later misreading rather than from anything the first namers had in mind.

Counted rather than sung, the range is more modest and no less striking. It runs roughly thirty kilometres from northwest to southeast across about thirty square kilometres, spread over Nghi Xuân, Can Lộc and Lộc Hà and the town of Hồng Lĩnh itself. Surveyors put the number of significant summits at around sixty, not ninety-nine, and the crests rise in a band between about 200 and 1,000 metres with the high point at 768.

The named peaks read like a bestiary — Thiên Tượng, Tai Voi and Mũi Rồng and Hàm Rồng, elephant's ear and dragon's snout and dragon's jaw — alongside Cột Cờ and Tháp Cờ, flagpole and flag tower. The Lê court issued seven royal edicts and a decree in the range's honour, and the Nguyễn dynasty cast it into the Cửu Đỉnh, the nine great bronze urns at the imperial citadel in Huế: a mountain promoted to national furniture.

Near the top of Hương Tích peak, in Thiên Lộc commune of Can Lộc, a pagoda sits at about 650 metres with the Gulf of Tonkin laid out below it. Tradition dates its founding to the thirteenth century under the Trần dynasty, and its story belongs to Princess Diệu Thiện, who fled into these mountains, was guarded on the way by a tiger, and attained enlightenment here as the bodhisattva Quan Âm.

Visitors from Hanoi sometimes assume this is a copy of the Perfume Pagoda in Mỹ Đức. It is a different place with the same name and its own long argument about which came first. Fire took most of the buildings and their contents in 1885; rebuilding began in 1901 under the administrator and playwright Đào Tấn. The state recognised it as a national cultural and scenic relic in 1990, and pilgrims still climb for the festival on the eighteenth day of the second lunar month. It is one of perhaps a hundred temples and shrines scattered across the range, Chân Tiên among them.

Nguyễn Du was born in Thăng Long in 1766, but his family seat was Tiên Điền, a village in Nghi Xuân at the foot of this ridge, and it was here he came during the years of upheaval he later called his ten years of wind and dust. He fished, he hunted, he wrote. The pen name he chose in that period was Hồng Sơn lạp hộ — the hunter of the Hồng mountains.

Out of those years came Truyện Kiều, 3,254 lines of lục bát verse following a young woman who sells herself to save her family and spends fifteen years paying for it. Vietnamese readers still quote it in ordinary conversation; phrases Nguyễn Du invented have become plain idiom. He died in 1820 in a cholera outbreak, a mandarin of the Nguyễn court who had never much wanted the job. His ancestral house below the mountains is now a special national site.

For most of the range's history, the practical relationship was seasonal and hungry. When harvests failed, villagers went up into the Hồng Lĩnh to hunt and to cut rattan and gather leaves for raincoats and conical hats — the mountain as a larder of last resort, taken from lightly because nobody could afford to strip it.

That balance has broken. Mật nhân, the shrub Eurycoma longifolia, is prized across Southeast Asia as a tonic, and the valuable part is the root. Harvesting it means digging the plant out entirely, and demand has drawn enough diggers onto these slopes to leave visible ecological damage. It is a modern kind of erosion, driven not by poverty but by a market for panaceas — and it is happening on a mountain that Vietnamese tradition has spent a thousand years describing as sacred.