Ill need to get spending: Vietnamese farmer wins the lottery... at the age of 97

A Vietnamese peasant who has lived below the poverty line all his life has won a fortune in a lottery - at the age of 97.

Now Nguyen Van Het admits he"ll have to hurry up and enjoy his 200,000 win before his time on earth runs out.

"I"ve been poor all my life and now I"ve got all this money," he said at his home in the south of Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon).

With the average annual income in Vietnam just 500, Mr Het admits he"ll have a lot of trouble spending the money before he dies.

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Lucky numbers: A Vietnamese man sits selling lottery tickets on a street corner in Hanoi

But he agrees that if he"s not careful, relatives, beggars, tricksters and opportunists will try to take it all from him, even though he has now banked his winnings - or what is left of them.

He has already given away a large amount of his windfall to people who have swarmed around his home after word leaked out that he had won the enormous prize in the lottery.

He used 100,000 dong (about 2.50) to buy lottery tickets from what he called "lucky money" that had been given to him by relatives to celebrate the Lunar New Year.

Small packets of "lucky money" are handed around in family circles as a traditional gift during the lunar celebrations, known as Tet.

Mr Het was so generous with his handouts that a worried neighbour had to call in local officials to stop him giving away his money.

But he still had a lot left over and was persuaded to open up a bank account and deposit it while he and his ailing wife decide how they will spend it.

An official from the Fatherland Front, which oversees government social programmes, said: "He won billions of dong - he"s a very lucky man.

"But unless we had intervened he would have been in danger of losing most of it.

"Relatives and strangers came to his home from all directions asking for a hand-out."

The official said Mr Het and his wife had been receiving special financial support from the authorities because they were living below the poverty line in a small shack.

"We"re going to wait for a few more weeks so that he can calm down," the official told the Thanh Nien newspaper.

"Then we"ll ask him what he wants to do with the money."

Mr Het said: "I"ll be talking to my wife about it. We probably won"t go anywhere. But we might look at finding somewhere nicer to live."