A man dubbed the ‘Vietnamese Tarzan’ after being brought up in the jungle has returned to the wilderness to die after several years living in a village.

Ho Van Lang, 51, left his home in the jungle seven years ago when his father, who brought him there as a two-year-old, fell ill.

Lang’s father Ho Van Thanh had been a soldier fighting the American army during the Vietnam War.

Ho Van Tri, who is a brother of the Vietnamese Tarzan, told local media that their father was devastated when a bomb destroyed the family home, killing his mother and two older brothers.

He then took Lang and moved to a treehouse they built in the jungle.

The pair initially lived near the edge of the forest but moved further infield as land was progressively cleared for farming.

In 2013, Thanh’s health began to deteriorate and Tri and his uncle brought the pair back to the village with the help of the local authorities.

Villagers did their best to accommodate the father and son, but they both missed their old life in the wilderness.

However, Lang spent a lot of time chatting with villagers and improving his grasp of the Cor language while his father’s health steadily worsened.

He also tried drinking beer with his brother, who grew up in the village with his mother, but Tri advised him to stop when he appeared to develop an allergic reaction to it.

Thanh died in 2017 and Lang began to feel the sounds of the jungle calling him more and more, and he moved back to live on the edge of the jungle near the rice fields where he gradually made fewer and fewer visits to civilisation.

Lang said: “Life in the village is really fun, I can listen to Cor and Kinh languages and there are vehicles everywhere… but the field is far away and walking home makes me very tired.”

He reportedly died two years after being diagnosed with liver cancer after moving to his home close to the rice fields of Tra Nga Village in the district of Tra Bong, located in the eastern Vietnamese province of Quang Ngai.

Locals said that the ‘Vietnamese Tarzan’ never settled properly even though he continued to visit ‘civilisation’ to occasionally work in the paddy fields and sell the mice and birds he caught, and the corn and bananas he grew in the forest.

According to reports, he was considered very sociable by the villagers despite being raised in the jungle by his father since he was an infant.