Released in 1971, Vietnam Inc. by Philip Jones Griffiths was a career-defining work for the Welsh photographer, whose candid, sympathetic images of Vietnam during the American War showed a much different side of the country to a global audience.

Griffiths didn’t have formal photography training, as he studied pharmacy. His part-time job as a photographer for the Manchester Guardian introduced him to the craft, which became his life-long passion. In 1961, Griffiths freelanced for the London-based Observer, covering the Algerian War and then the conflict in Vietnam from 1966 to 1971.

This selection of pictures, however, took place nearly a decade after the publishing of the book, in 1980. Five years after the war ended, life in Vietnam was returning to some semblance of normalcy, though the ramifications of violence were pronounced, from physical deformities on veterans to villages devoid of adults.

Have a look at some standout shots below:

Inside a general store in central Hanoi.

A rural school in northern Vietnam, whose yard is still filled with drenches once used as shelters during bombings.

Farmers dig irrigation canals together in a field.

Residents in Huế section off an area of the moat surrounding the Imperial Palace to rear fish.

Youths in Saigon during an illegal bike race at night.

Homeless people outside Hanoi's St. Joseph's Cathedral.

A public tenement in Hải Phòng.

The Mekong Delta.

Young queer people in Saigon on a night out.

Visitors listen to a presentation at the Vietnam Military History Museum in Hanoi.

Children in Sơn Mỹ Village, where the Mỹ Lai Massacre took place.

Xuân Lộc, Đồng Nai Province.

A street vendor selling magazines and novels.

Knick-knacks for sale on the streets of Saigon after local families escaped overseas.

A class in rural Vietnam in a half-open classroom after the school was bombed.

A rare drinks stall.

Inside a kindergarten.

War veterans watch a football match at a rehabilitation center in Hanoi.

An arts and crafts class inside a center for former sex workers.

[Photos by Philip Jones Griffiths via Redsvn]

Lê Quý Đôn High School (Trường Trung học Phổ thông Lê Quý Đôn) at 110 Nguyễn Thị Minh Khai Street is the city’s oldest surviving educational establishment.

The origins of Lê Quý Đôn High School may be traced back to the École normale indigène, established by a decree on July 10, 1871, but the first school to be established on the current site was the Collège indigène de Saïgon, founded in place of the École normale by a decree of November 14, 1874.

Work began immediately on the construction of the school campus near the junction of rue Chasseloup-Laubat (Nguyễn Thị Minh Khai) and rue de l’Impératrice (Nam Kỳ Khởi Nghĩa), and during the two-year construction period, the school was accommodated temporarily “in the Pagode Barbé and its dependencies,” which once stood on the site of the War Remnants Museum.

Led by its founder Director Honoré Wattebled and a staff of European and Vietnamese teachers, the school initially offered a three-year program for “young Annamites from good families,” the aim being “to provide interpreters and clerks for government offices, machinists for the Roads and Bridges Department, and employees for the Cadastre and Telegraph Office.”

Students who graduated with distinction could be eligible for a generous overseas study scholarship, and accordingly, “every year, a number of the smartest young Annamites were sent to Marseille at the expense of the colony, in order to complete their studies.”

In 1877, the Collège Indigène was named, like the street on which it stood, after the French general and military engineer François, Marquis de Chasseloup-Laubat (1754–1833). By 1879, the Collège Chasseloup-Laubat had 83 students.

Following the closure of the La Salle Christian Brothers’ Collège d’Adran in 1879, the Collège Chasseloup-Laubat was transformed into a secondary school of similar status to the Collège de Mytho. The first French children were admitted in 1880. Soon after this, the buildings were upgraded so that European and local pupils could be segregated in two distinct areas — a “Quartier Européen” for French children and a “Quartier Indigène” for local children, separated by “kitchens, courtyards, covered walkways, washrooms and pools.”

The current school buildings date from this period and feature a design typical of late-19^th-century French lycée architecture, with little attempt at adaptation to the tropical climate other than the peripheric gallery on the ground floor and the overhanging roofs.

The Collège Chasseloup-Laubat in the early 20^th century.

In subsequent years, the number of pupils grew steadily in size, increasing from 180 in 1884 to 200 in 1903, and 290 by 1924. However, by the early 1920s, there were still fewer than 50 European students at the Collège, since “the secondary syllabus it offered was incomplete and young French and Annamites had to travel to Tonkin to complete their secondary studies and take the baccalauréat.”

The absence of a “proper education for European children” in Cochinchina was remarked upon as early as 1903 by Governor General Paul Beau (October 1902–February 1908). “This question deserves our solicitude,” he said, “because it concerns the future of our colonisation.” However, not until 1924 was the teaching syllabus of the Collège Chasseloup-Laubat upgraded to permit the baccalauréat exams to be taken in Saigon.

Another view of the Collège Chasseloup-Laubat from early 20^th century.

In that year, the school also began admitting gifted French and Vietnamese children aged 9–12 by entrance examination to a course of pre-secondary studies at the Collège.

Young educated Vietnamese took an active role in the anti-colonial protests of 1926 and the Collège Chasseloup-Laubat in particular became something of a hotbed of activity. Things came to a head on April 4, 1926, the day of patriot Phan Châu Trinh’s funeral, when students of the Collège wrote ABLF — À Bas Les Français (down with the French) — on blackboards and participated in what subsequently became a nationwide school boycott. “It is unfortunate that our brilliant Franco-indigenous educational secondary institutions have suffered a serious blow,” intoned the newspaper L'Eveil économique de l'Indochine solemnly later that year. “School indiscipline, a basic form of social indiscipline, is completely intolerable.”

Students gather outside the Lycée Chasseloup Laubat in 1947.

In 1927, the Collège Chasseloup-Laubat was formally upgraded to become a full secondary school named the Lycée Chasseloup-Laubat. In November of that year, over 200 local pupils were relocated to the new Collège de Cho-Quan, which was initially established as an annex of the Lycée Chasseloup-Laubat. However, in August 1928, the Collège de Cho-Quan became a secondary school in its own right, named the Lycée Petrus Ký. The first intake of new students at Saigon’s two new Lycées took place in September 1928.

During the later colonial period, the Lycée Chasseloup-Laubat became known as one of the most prestigious in the region and trained many famous individuals, including Vietnamese revolutionary leader Trần Văn Giàu (1911–2010), French novelist Marguerite Duras (1914–1996), last South Vietnamese president General Dương Văn Minh (1916–2001), King Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia (1922–2012) and historian Vương Hồng Sển (1926–1996).

During the Japanese occupation, the school served briefly as a center for refugees.

Two Vietnamese teachers pictured outside the Lycée Chasseloup Laubat in 1947.

After the departure of the French, the school continued to operate under French management, but in 1958, its name was changed to Lycée Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Thereafter, the student intake was overwhelmingly Vietnamese.

In 1967, the school was transferred to the South Vietnamese Education Ministry and became the Lê Quý Đôn Education Center (Trung tâm giáo dục Lê Quý Đôn), named in honor of 18^th-century Vietnamese mandarin, philosopher and poet Lê Quý Đôn (1726–1784).

Known since 1975 as the Lê Quý Đôn High School, the school remains today one of the principal scholarly establishments of the city.

The former Lycée Pétrus Ký (now the Lê Hồng Phong High School) at 235 Nguyễn Văn Cừ in District 5 stood in for the former Lycée Chasseloup-Laubat in French filmmaker Jean-Jacques Annaud’s 1992 film version of Marguerite Duras’ The Lover.

The former Lycée Chasseloup-Laubat was featured in French filmmaker Jean-Jacques Annaud’s 1992 film version of Marguerite Duras’ The Lover. However, if you watch the film closely, you will see that the school used as a location is in fact not the Lycée Chasseloup-Laubat at all, but the former Lycée Pétrus Ký (now Lê Hồng Phong High School) at 235 Nguyễn Văn Cừ in District 5.

Top photo by Le Quy Don Photography Club via Facebook page Trường THPT Lê Quý Đôn - Phường Xuân Hòa, TP.HCM.

Tim Doling is the author of the guidebooks Exploring Huế (Nhà Xuất Bản Thế Giới, Hà Nội, 2018), Exploring Saigon-Chợ Lớn (Nhà Xuất Bản Thế Giới, Hà Nội, 2019) and Exploring Quảng Nam (Nhà Xuất Bản Thế Giới, Hà Nội, 2020) and The Railways and Tramways of Việt Nam (White Lotus Press, 2012) For more information about Saigon history, visit his website, historicvietnam.com.

About 90 years ago, Modern Times was released. Its title carried a warning. The film railed against the new industrial age and the misery it inflicted on workers amid the Great Depression. Yet a film about the dangers of modernity was being told through an almost-silent medium, nearly a decade into the era of sound. Charlie Chaplin, who wrote, directed, produced, and scored the film, in addition to starring in it, was deliberately resisting Hollywood's shift into the future.

Chaplin's Tramp caught in the machinery of the factory floor, in one of the defining images of Modern Times.

By 1936, Chaplin had spent more than two decades working in an industry that had been in its infancy when he entered it. He had become one of its greatest beneficiaries while repeatedly playing a man who could not keep up with the world it was creating. It was against this backdrop of constant change that he decided to embark on a long journey. His son, Charles Chaplin Jr., wrote in his book about the trip: "His churning mind began to grope for something new and exciting upon which to fasten itself. And he settled upon a visit to the Orient, which had so impressed him when he went there on his trip around the world.”

Paulette Goddard in a publicity photograph for Modern Times, the film she starred in alongside Chaplin before travelling with him to Hanoi.

In February 1936, Modern Times premiered in New York and Los Angeles, in the midst of Hollywood's Golden Age. However, once Chaplin had finished promoting the film, he and Paulette Goddard, his co-star and soon-to-be wife, left for the trip to Asia that saw them land in southern Vietnam, before making their way north towards Hanoi.

Travelling aboard the Aramis, a ship operated by the Messageries Maritimes company, they disembarked in Saigon on the morning of April 13. From Saigon they travelled through Phnom Penh and Angkor, before continuing through Đà Lạt, Đà Nẵng and Huế towards Hanoi. Chaplin and Goddard arrived in Hanoi on the evening of April 29 and stayed at the Metropole Hotel on Ngô Quyền Street, in Hanoi's French Quarter.

Hanoi was entering its own “modern times,” though not the one Chaplin had imagined. The city was changing rapidly, with new buildings, electric trams, cinemas, newspapers, schools and railways reshaping daily life. But this was not yet the industrial world of assembly lines and mass unemployment that Chaplin was satirizing. Under French colonial rule, in the region then known as Tonkin, a new cultural identity and class was emerging along with it.

The Hôtel Métropole, where Chaplin and Paulette Goddard stayed during their visit to Hanoi in April 1936.

Much of the city Chaplin walked through is still recognisable today. St. Joseph's Cathedral, with its towers modelled on Notre-Dame, remains a major landmark in the Old Quarter, while the Hanoi Opera House sits close to the Metropole itself. Across the Red River, Long Biên Bridge still carries trains and traffic, while the red Thê Húc Bridge remains one of Hoàn Kiếm Lake's most recognisable landmarks. 

Cinema arrived in Hanoi during the First World War, initially as a new form of entertainment in a city undergoing cultural change. The Metropole hotel played an important role in introducing Hanoians to this new medium. According to Tuổi Trẻ, films were first screened here from June 1916, Chaplin's among them. Four years later, in August 1920, the Pathé cinema opened next to Bà Kiệu Temple, becoming Hanoi's first purpose-built cinema. Journalist Nguyễn Ngọc Tiến, in his book Walking Across Hanoi, notes that Hanoi's first picture houses showed only silent films, with sound films not arriving until the mid-1930s, beginning with All Quiet on the Western Front. 

Cinema in the city was divided by class. First-class and balcony tickets cost between 1.00 and 2.00 Indochinese piastres, several times more than the roughly 0.50 piastres the city's working class earned in a day. Second-class tickets cost around 0.50–0.80 piastres, while third-class tickets cost 0.30–0.50 piastres. At those prices, cinema was an expensive type of entertainment for Hanoi's working class, meaning many of the workers Chaplin's film was depicting may not have been able to afford to see it. 

The former Pathé cinema, rebranded 'Le Variétés' by 1933, on the corner of Boulevard Francis Garnier — the same street where Chaplin would later stop for drinks at the Taverne Royale.

By 1936, Chaplin needed no introduction in Hanoi. He was known as Charlot (Sác-lô in Vietnamese) across Indochina, after the French nickname for his character The Tramp. Chaplin and his travel group stopped for drinks at the Taverne Royale on the then Francis Garnier Street, which is now Đinh Tiên Hoàng Street, next to Hoàn Kiếm Lake. Hà Thành Ngọ Báo reported that he was signing autographs for fans there, an early glimpse of celebrity culture in the city. On another occasion, he and Paulette Goddard visited the Tây Hồ dye shop on 46 Hàng Trống Street to buy silk, clothes and souvenirs. The street remains a popular destination for tourists looking for similar items more than ninety years later.

Chaplin developed the idea that machinery driven by profit could create misery, after a conversation with Gandhi, and placed it within his own concerns about a changing world. He turned that sentiment into the central conflict of Modern Times, taking aim at industrialization, unemployment and a system in which efficiency and profit came at the expense of workers. His Tramp character was still the familiar figure of hardship from Chaplin’s earlier films, but in Modern Times, the struggle felt more layered. The changing world around Chaplin was becoming part of the character too, giving the Tramp a sense of uncertainty that had not been as visible before. 

In an interview, Thạch Lam recalled Chaplin describing the plight of the hero in Modern Times, explaining how a production line worker was reduced to a twitching, traumatized state. Thạch Lam's reply cut straight through it: “In our land, there's no machinery, no factories at all.” The exchange exposed the distance between Chaplin's industrial world and the one he had encountered in Hanoi. 

A 'Procession du Génie' passes through Hanoi's Old Quarter, goods carried entirely by hand, in a city still without the machinery Thạch Lam described to Chaplin.

Yet the parallels between the film and the city may run deeper than Thạch Lam suggests. Hanoi satirist Vũ Trọng Phụng published Số đỏ (Dumb Luck) that same year, a book that shows starkly contrasting sides of the city, from the “emergent Francophile northern upper classes” to the “filthy sidewalks of Hanoi's old commercial quarter.” Its protagonist, Red-Haired Xuân, rises through this world not because of who he is, but because of what people believe him to represent. In Modern Times, the machinery of modern life has become so dominant that the individual is forced to perform his role within it, whether he belongs there or not. Both works find comedy in societies trying to manufacture the appearance of progress while revealing how easily the people caught inside the illusion can be discarded. 

Saigon newspaper L'Impartial, a conservative publication, described Chaplin's visit to Hanoi as “quiet, serious, slow-speaking and touched by sadness.” It's a description that sits oddly against the Tramp's slapstick, but not against the man who played him. Chaplin's characters often bore the hardships of the world, reflecting some of the difficulties of his own upbringing. The Tramp's vulnerability was therefore not entirely separate from the man playing him, even if Modern Times gave it a new social dimension. 

Chaplin (centre, in white) photographed with a group in Hanoi, inscribed to him from the newspaper Đông Pháp and dated April 29, 1936 — the day he arrived in the city.

Vietnam left a profound impression on Chaplin, who said: “In my eyes, this land is vastly different from the places I have previously visited.” In Hanoi, he found himself in a city where that industrial world had not yet arrived in the same form. On May 5, the couple visited Hạ Long Bay, concluding their stay in Northern Vietnam, before boarding a ship bound for Hong Kong via Hải Phòng, continuing on afterwards to Canton, China. It was around this time that the two were reportedly married in secret, though neither ever publicly confirmed it, and no marriage certificate was ever produced.

Chaplin with child actor Jackie Coogan in The Kid (1921), one of his early iconic roles.

Hanoi offered a brief pause from the machinery and noise that Chaplin had spent years putting on screen. Modern Times had imagined a man escaping the factory; in Hanoi, Chaplin found himself in a city that had yet to fully enter the industrial world the film depicted. The irony ran deeper than simple contrast. Chaplin's wealth came from the Hollywood system, itself built on industrialization and mass production, the same machinery he mocked and critiqued onscreen. He had become incredibly wealthy playing a figure left behind by society and modernity, and it was that wealth which now afforded him this peace, in a city only beginning to experience the changes he had turned into comedy. The very system he was going against had paid his way to escape it. 

According to Thạch Lam, when asked about Hanoi, Chaplin said “Hanoi is peaceful, very peaceful.”

During lunchtime at work, I spot a few aluminum cà mên that my coworkers bring from home to keep their lunch warm. Cà mên was once an indispensable item in my family too, but now it’s rarely used; it's limited to the few occasions when my grandparents or parents pack lunch for the kids.

Cà mên still lives at hospitals, dangling from the hands of visitors carrying nutritious food to their ill loved ones. The appearance of cà mên could be an optimistic sign of recovery — perhaps someone’s appetite has returned? Inside cà mên, portions of homemade porridge or warm phở bought from a regular eatery have become a crucial part of Vietnamese patients.

Though I don’t use it often, it is still a familiar sight to me. It reminds me of the time of my parents and grandparents, as something they remain close to like a default routine, firmly rooted in unforgettable historical episodes. Cà mên has encapsulated both the poverty and wealth of Vietnamese life for years.

Cà mên’s historical origin

Cà mên is an early ancestor of the heat-insulated lunchboxes of today. It consists of a few separate compartments made of aluminum, stainless steel, or even plastic. Each “drawer” holds a separate part of the meal. They can be firmly stacked on top of one another and then secured by a lock for transportation. Depending on the region, it’s also known as cặp lồng, cà mèn or gà mên. Cà mên originated from “gamelle” in French, which in turn was based on the Latin “camella,” referring to a cup or bowl. French-style cà mên was produced starting in the mid-19^th century, becoming popular on battlefields across the world, each location using a slightly different variation. It’s possible that the French introduced cà mên to Vietnam.

An aluminum cà mên used by French soldiers during World War II. War veterans in Vietnam also kept a cà mên with a similar design. Photos via Marna Militaria.

During the French occupation of Vietnam, cà mên was a mainstay at cơm tháng eateries in Saigon. Cơm tháng, literally “monthly rice,” was a service offered by local rice stalls in which one could pay to eat for a whole month. In an ad in the newspaper Trung Lập Báo, Vi Tiên, an eatery offering Central Vietnamese-style meals at 42 rue Amiral Courbet (now Nguyễn An Ninh Street), promoted a takeaway option with meals stored in cà mên. The sight of French housewives biking with a cà mên to deliver meals to their husbands and blocking a bike race appeared in Vịt Đực, a satirical newspaper from 1938.

Cà mên was a major part of mealtime during French rule. Images via the Journalism Archive of the National Library of Vietnam.

Cà mên also played a part in soldiers' lives in Vietnam, but in this manifestation, it was often painted over or wrapped in fabric to prevent reflected flares from exposing the troop’s location. It was used to store rations for long stretches of time, heat up food, and as bowls.

It was this versatility that helped military-issued cà mên remain in Vietnamese civic life, especially the thick and enduring type that arrived from the Soviet Union as aid. The generic aluminum cà mên, in contrast, sold at nationalized stores was often thin and could warp easily with one drop.

Cà mên on the battlefield, 1973. Photo via TTXVN.

Similar to Vietnam, a number of Asian territories with colonial histories also incorporated western war food containers into daily civic life. In India, these containers are called tiffin, and the food they contain is transported by a network of delivery people called dabbawalla. During colonial times, British colonialists used the word “tiffin” to refer to a light meal eaten to abate the tropical heat in India. Today, across major cities, lunchtime dabbawalla fill the streets to deliver meals to workers in a diverse range of tiffin containers. The containers are marked by colorful signs for ease of distinction. They are delivered around noon from rice stalls or home, and then collected when work ends. This word is also used to refer to tiered containers in Malaysia and Singapore, popular due to the ability to separate rice and soupy dishes.

The subsidy economy in cà mên’s meager meals

If nowadays, answering the casual question “what’s in your lunchbox today?” is quite an easy task, this would be redundant and dispiriting during the subsidy period, because the content of every cà mên would be the same: destitution.

In the planned economy era, a meal with enough rice — never mind meat or vegetables — was a dream of many Vietnamese. According to historian Đặng Phong, in March 1978, Hanoians could only purchase 4 kg of rice a month each; the rest was sweet potato and cassava. The demand for market rice was sky-high, and subsidized rice was constantly running short, too cheap, and of low quality. Most people bought it for cheap to resell in hopes of bartering for homegrown rice from the countryside. Farmers and wholesalers shied away from selling to the state because of low profit margins. The total amount of food yield and donation in 1979 and 1980 even decreased compared to 1976.

Queuing for rice in 1985. Photo via ZNews.

The subsidy-era cà mên was so scantily filled that, when you accidentally dropped one, nothing of value would go to waste. Writer Đỗ Phấn recalls: “The rice, mixed with noodles, congealed at the bottom of the cà mên like a cake. It rolled out dozens of meters on the street and stopped.” The meals were often rice mixed with corn, adlay, and noodles; the side dishes rarely appeared, mostly boiled vegetables, broth, salted peanuts, or pickled fire-cracker eggplants. Sometimes, if there was a sick person in the household, the cà mên could contain a takeaway bowl of state-subsidized phở — meat-included for better-off families and meatless for the poor.

“Hanoi in my meager cà mên,” poet Thanh Thảo writes in Hà Nội – nhìn về phía tôi (Hanoi — look at me). In this era, civil servants usually biked to work with a cà mên on their handlebars. This image is so entrenched in the collective memory that people packing lunch to work were humorously called “cán bộ cặp lồng” (lunchbox officer). It followed them to work and then back home, like a reluctant accessory. It also bears witness to the sly office tradition of bringing ingredients to cook at the company’s electric appliances to save money.

Cà mên on a bike during the subsidy era. Photo via CGvDT.

Opening up a cà mên is like taking a glance at the realities of life at any given point in history. The cà mên content reflected the quality of life of the average salary worker. In the issue published on March 17, 1988 of Lao Động newspaper, a report discussed the wage of healthcare workers. It referenced a moment when a doctor showed the journalist their cà mên, which contained “barely any rice, a morsel of vegetable, and a few braised peanuts.”

Before Vietnam opened up the economy to outside products, buying basic household necessities wasn’t easy. Military-issued items like cà mên were thoroughly repurposed because they were very durable. Household goods became a big-ticket item, so cà mên was frequently given as a wedding gift, alongside basins, thermos, textiles, etc.

After Đổi Mới, the livelihood of Vietnamese gradually improved, yet cà mên remained a mainstay at casual rice eateries. I couldn’t keep my eyes off the four- and five-layered cà mên of the cơm tháng place portrayed in the film Quán Kỳ Nam. The content is still classic home-cooked dishes: braised pork, tofu in tomato sauce, fish canh chua, stir-fried veggies. But when they are kept in the hidden compartments of cà mên, every meal is a surprise. Though I had already eaten before the movie, I still felt that secondhand sense of hunger seeing a mouth-watering meal on screen inside cà mên.

Cà mên is used to serve cơm tháng in Quán Kỳ Nam.

The sets of cà mên used as props in Quán Kỳ Nam are made of anodized aluminum, with ornate motifs on the side. These designs mirror those of traditional cà mên seen in Thailand, which could potentially be their original source. In Cambodia, ornate cà mên is called chan srak, often used to contain altar offerings and gifts for monks during the Pchum Ben Festival.

Across our history, from wartime to the subsidy era, cà mên has encapsulated many hardships. When life improves, cà mên is still patiently hibernating in a corner of our kitchen, waiting for its next mission. Cà mên has been the companion of countless hands during the early mornings, as they prepare food and package a little flavor from home to improve rushed lunches at work. Opening up the cà mên to be surprised by the dishes of the day is still a much-anticipated ritual for many, and I can’t help feeling wistful when I happen to spot a cà mên dangling from a handlebar on the street, even though today, cà mên no longer carries within it the signs of an impoverished time.

How has your life been transformed in the past 30 years? Changes might materialize overnight, but some tend to creep up on you at a glacial pace. Through this collection of images from 1992, mull over how Vietnam as a country has grown with every 12-month cycle.

These photographs were taken by travel writer Mark Hodson, who had a rare opportunity to tour Vietnam in the early 1990s when international tourism was virtually unheard of here. Without the presence of themed resorts, travel agents, cable cars and cruise boats, scenes in the country were captured as closely as possible to the quotidian life of locals.

A busy phở joint in Hanoi.

“I was using a Canon AE1 SLR, shooting on Fujichrome Velvia 50, mostly with a 50mm lens,” Hodson writes on his website about the trip. “I had prints made from the original transparencies, and what you see below are scans of those prints. I haven’t adjusted any of the coloring.”

Here are some glimpse of Hanoi, Hội An, and Nha Trang in the 1990s:

Fruit vendors set up shop in front of rows of old buildings in Hanoi.

The vast emptiness of Hanoi's airport, where Hodson was heading to “Vientiane aboard an ancient Russian-built Tupolev jet.”

A casual food street in Hanoi where one can slurp on porridge and instant noodles, or chew on a plate of hot xôi.

Sampans were often homes of families in Hạ Long. There wasn't any hotels in the area, so Hodson reported sleeping in a Russian workers' hostel.

Living on the water was much more common in 1992 than today.

Wood-fired inter-province coaches were quite unreliable and often broke down mid-trip.

The colonial design of Huế's train station.

An ice cream cart in Hội An.

The boats of Hội An.

In Đà Nẵng's Chợ Hàn, a grain merchant took a nap during slow periods of the day.

Fishmongers in Hội An with their catch of the day.

Boats in Hội An.

A dapper Hội An man posed for a photo.

It's corn! A big lump with knobs. It has the juice (it has the juice).

Cross-country trips were often truncated by rest stops and engine failures.

Xích lô drivers in Hội An.

A fiery cockfight in Nha Trang.

A Nha Trang resident and her morning fish haul.

For those condemned to a long daily commute along that busiest of city arteries, Điện Biên Phủ Street, the clean, elegant lines of the Hồ Chí Minh City Eye Hospital offer a refreshing contrast to the surrounding urban clutter. The compound was formerly known as Clinique Saint-Paul, so many older Saigoneers still refer to it by the name Bệnh viện Xanh-Pôn.

Funded and operated by the Sisters of Saint-Paul de Chartres, the Clinique Saint-Paul was built in 1936–1937 at the junction of rue Legrand de la Liraye and rue Pierre Flandin (modern Điện Biên Phủ and Bà Huyện Thanh Quan streets) to replace their earlier Clinique du Docteur Angier (1908), which had stood at 1 rue Docteur Angier (now Nguyễn Bỉnh Khiêm street), immediately behind the St Paul’s Convent.

The Clinique Saint-Paul pictured in the early 1950s.

The new Clinique was built by the Société Indochinoise d’Études et de Constructions (SIDEC), one of the leading construction companies in the colony, which was also responsible for the Tân Định Market as well as numerous other civic works in Cambodia.

The Clinique was designed by distinguished Saigon-based architect Louis Chauchon (1878–1945), whose other major works include the Public Library (now the National Library of Cambodia, 1924), the Psah Thmey Central Market (1937) and the Palais du Commissariat de France (1938) in Phnom Penh and the Pavillon de la Cité Universitaire in Hà Nội (1942).

The south and central wings of the former Clinique Saint-Paul. Photo by Tim Doling.

According to the Echo Annamite newspaper, the Clinique was inaugurated on December 19, 1938 in the presence of Cochinchina Governor André Georges Rivoal and several other local dignitaries. Its Director, Dr Roton, treated them to a tour of the state-of-the-art facilities which “made a great impression on the visitors.”

Functional yet elegant, the Clinique is noteworthy for its stylish fusion of art deco curves and traditional four-panel roofs. Truly a sight for sore eyes.

Top image via Wikimedia.

Tim Doling is the author of the guidebooks Exploring Huế (Nhà Xuất Bản Thế Giới, Hà Nội, 2018), Exploring Saigon-Chợ Lớn (Nhà Xuất Bản Thế Giới, Hà Nội, 2019) and Exploring Quảng Nam (Nhà Xuất Bản Thế Giới, Hà Nội, 2020) and The Railways and Tramways of Việt Nam (White Lotus Press, 2012) For more information about Saigon history, visit his website, historicvietnam.com.

In a secluded corner of Saigon’s Bệnh viện Nhiệt đới, or Hospital for Tropical Diseases, a prison continues its century-long existence hidden from public memory and discourse.

It is uncommon knowledge to most people that the present-day Hospital for Tropical Disease (formerly Nhà Thương Chợ Quán) was once home to a 150-year-old detention camp where revolutionaries such as Trần Phú, Hà Huy Tập, and Nguyễn Văn Trỗi were held captive. According to historical records, the cells were originally built by French colonialists in 1875 as a specialized ward to treat psychiatric patients at Chợ Quán Hospital.

The institution later took on a darker purpose as the regime turned it into a base to confine political prisoners that were being treated at the ward to extract intel on anti-colonial efforts. The encampment went on to be responsible for detaining prisoners of war throughout Vietnam’s decades of conflict with French and American forces.

Chợ Quán Hospital was established in 1982 with donations and support from the local Vietnamese community. Long before the hospital’s founding, its plot was occupied by a French-run first-aid clinic. In 1864, the clinic operation was handed over to the succeeding government. A specialized wing was created to isolate and treat its psychiatric patients.

Despite the changes in the political and cultural landscapes that surround it, the structure retains its colonially inspired architecture. The design of the prison is in a cowbell shape. The front entrance directly overlooks the women’s cell, while the men's cell is on its right. The pitched roofs are covered in double lap tiles supported by fixed iron frames and the floor still has its original terracotta tiles. Under French rule, bunks used to shackle inmates were made of wood, but under American control, they were replaced by cement blocks that were common in the Phú Quốc and Côn Đảo prisons.

A communal cell with double lap tiling where male inmates were held.

Though seemingly cramped, the women’s cell was actually the space that got the most sunlight thanks to the large windows that run along the wall.

The prison’s long and narrow corridors sent a chill down my spine, as the deeper I ventured into these halls, the colder and gloomier the atmosphere became, even though it was midday. Taproots from trees outside were seeping in through cracks in the wall, and in a few cells, shackles remained where they had been for decades. The innermost chambers were impenetrable by sunlight, further adding an air of mystery to the building.

Apart from the regular cells, the French also built solitary confinement quarters to quarantine patients that had infectious diseases that could spread to the rest of the inmates.

The inside of a cell for patients with infectious diseases.

A communal restroom that prisoners shared. 

The stairs in these dimly lit rooms lead to buckets placed underneath that were used as toilet bowls.

Iron shackles are kept intact for display

One of the most historically significant parts of the structure is the cell that held Trần Phú, the first General Secretary of the Indochinese Communist Party, who was still in captivity when he died of tuberculosis on September 6, 1931. His last words to fellow comrades were:

Trần Phú’s portrait and headstone, as well as information plaques detailing his capture and death, are still shown at the cell where he passed away. Here, flowers and wreaths are sometimes placed by visitors to remind current and future generations that this was the final resting place of a nation’s leader and patriot.

On special occasions such as Trần Phú's death anniversary or public holidays, bouquets are often placed by his headstone to commemorate his sacrifice.

In stark contrast to the bleakness that the prison bears within, a lush garden surrounding it has sprouted up to provide shade and comfort to patients receiving treatment at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases, who are most likely unaware of the fact that every brick, tile, and frame around them bore witness to a painful scar in the nation's history.

Documents about Trần Phú's life and revolutionary contributions are preserved and exhibited for visitors.

Readers keen on exploring more of the prison in person may easily do so since the site is accessible to the public and located to the right of the hospital's dining hall, which is only 100 meters away from the main gate. But as the prison is under the supervision of the District 5 Cultural Center, be sure to contact them for permission before planning a day trip!

Visit ttvhq5.com.vn or call 028 3855 6161 to learn more about the site or to schedule a visit.

This article was originally published in 2022.

Dropping a modern Saigoneer into the 1860s version of the city would be a wildly disorienting experience.

In this day and age, photos of Saigon from the middle of the 20^th century are common. Here at Saigoneer, we've certainly played a role in the proliferation of images from decades like the 1950s and 1960s. Going further back in time, however, is more difficult, largely due to the obvious limitations of technology.

This collection of photographs taken by Émile Gsell, some of which were taken as far back as the 1860s, is therefore a valuable addition to the visual history of Saigon — albeit through a very French lens. Still, these images, collated by RedsVN, depict a city that is largely unrecognizable today, as only the core of what is now District 1 was developed in any way, while heavily urban modern areas such as District 3 and Chợ Lớn were still part of the countryside.

Take a journey in the way back machine below:

Charner Street, which is now Nguyễn Huệ, before its canal was filled in. The crossing road is Ngô Đức Kế Street.

Where the Bến Nghé Canal flows into the Saigon River, seen from contemporary Bến Nhà Rồng. 

The same part of town, with the Thủ Ngữ flagpole prominently placed.

Shophouses along Bạch Đằng Wharf, between modern Nguyễn Huệ and Đồng Khởi Streets. Photo taken in 1866.

Norodom Palace in 1873. The building was largely destroyed in 1962 and replaced by what is now the Reunification Palace.

Soldiers at the Ô Mã Citadel, which no longer exists. It was located between the modern streets of Nguyễn Thị Minh Khai, Nguyễn Văn Cừ, Nguyễn Trãi and Cống Quỳnh.

A monastery that is now the Order of Saint Paul on the corner of Tôn Đức Thắng and Nguyễn Hữu Cảnh in District 1.

The Guangdong Hospital in Chợ Lớn in 1907. This is where Nguyễn Tri Phương Hospital now stands.

Life along the Tàu Hủ Canal in Chợ Lớn .

The Thị Nghè Canal looked a bit different over 100 years ago.

The outskirts of Saigon.

[Top image: Where Charner Street met the Saigon River.]

The very definition of cool was established decades ago in Vietnam, and it was badass women in áo dài dashing on the street in slick sunglasses.

In this set of old Nha Trang photos, the author, who’s only known by their Flickr handle ElectroSpark, completely ignored clichéd images of the coastal city and decided to turn attention to its commuters instead. For visitors from elsewhere, it’s hard to resist the pristine beaches, luxuriant coconut trees and curvy coastal line, but these photos show that holidaymakers also make a fascinating photo subject.

1960s Vietnam was the prime era for motorbikes, especially petite Honda Cubs which have, by today’s standards, achieved “iconic” status. Though the model was released with a rainbow of color options, judging by the photos, the young fathers taking their children around on a red Honda Cub was a sight to behold. The slick hairdo also contributed significantly to the sleekness of families too.

In a few shots, models from Yamaha’s V series were also present. The company released their V series to compete with Honda Cubs, and it seemed like Yamaha’s light blue model also held its own in the market. The odd Vespa and Lambro 550 appeared too, with the latter acting as an affordable option to travel long distance in Vietnam before buses arrived.

Have a look at Vietnam’s street fashion in 1969 through the photo collection below:

Photos via Flickr user manhhai.

A century before today's bulldozers, colonial planners were already wrestling with the same congested waterfront corridor — and the same promises of transformation.

Nguyễn Tất Thành Street pictured in 2025, running alongisde land prepared fro a public park. Photo by Quỳnh Trần via VnExpress.

In 2026, Hồ Chí Minh City is finally moving forward with one of its most long-anticipated infrastructure projects: the widening of Nguyễn Tất Thành Street, the perpetually gridlocked artery threading through the former District 4 between Khánh Hội and Tân Thuận bridges. The plan calls for expanding the road from its current four lanes to six or eight, at a projected cost of nearly VND3 trillion, while the adjacent Nhà Rồng–Khánh Hội port area — some 32 hectares of prime Saigon riverfront — is set to become a public park. Construction is expected to commence on September 2, 2026, timed to mark the 50^th anniversary of the city.

It reads like a story of long-overdue progress. But open the colonial archives in the Vietnamese National Archive Centre No. 2 on Lê Duẩn (the Government of Cochinchina files, thereafter GouCoch), and the sensation is uncanny: urban planners have been trying to sort out this exact corridor for over a century.

A canal that made an island

The story begins not with a road, but with a waterway.

On February 6, 1904, a French development company called the Société Française Industrielle d'Extrême-Orient was awarded an eight-year concession to maintain and improve Saigon's waterways. Among its tasks was the construction of a canal de dérivation — a diversion canal — planned to ease the chronic congestion of fluvial traffic between Chợ Lớn and Saigon's port on the Arroyo Chinois (nowadays Bến Nghé). The waterway linking Chợ Lớn to the hinterland and the Mekong Delta rice trade was simply too narrow, too shallow, and too crowded with junks to function efficiently as a commercial artery. The solution: dig a parallel canal to the south.

1906 map of Saigon and Cholon with canal and territorial annexation projects. (GouCoch, TDNK, 16753)

That canal is today's Kênh Tẻ.

The engineers got their waterway. But in doing so, they created an unexpected problem: they turned the village of Khánh Hội into an island. The canal would eventually become the boundary line between what residents knew as District 4 (now the Khánh Hội, Vĩnh Hội, and Xóm Chiếu wards since the city's July 2025 administrative reorganization), to the north, and Districts 7 and 8 (now Tân Hưng, Tân Thuận and Chánh Hưng wards respectively) to the south and southwest — a division that persists in the city's geography to this day.

Magnification of the above 1906 map to focus on the Khánh Hội and Chánh Hưng village territories to be annexed to Saigon (GouCoch, TDNK, 16753).

The village that became a bargaining chip

Khánh Hội had existed long before French colonization as a fluvial settlement on the southern bank of the Bến Nghé, close enough to Saigon's port to serve later as a logistical buffer zone, and legally part of Chợ Lớn province. Much of its southern reaches were swampland and rice paddies, considered unhealthy and largely undeveloped — a landscape that would take the better part of a century to fully urbanize. Once the new canal was dug to its south, the village was physically severed from its administrative parent. It sat, marooned between two waterways, on a strip of land that colonial planners quickly identified as valuable real estate.

Focus on areas set to be annexed: Khánh Hội (indicated with an 'A') and Chánh Hưng ('B') to be annexed to Saigon (GouCoch, TDNK, 16753).

In October 1906, M. Bos, the administrator of Chợ Lớn, wrote to the Lieutenant Governor of Cochinchina recommending that Khánh Hội be transferred to Saigon's municipal authority. The reasoning was pragmatic: a part of the area had factories, a dense population, and part of its northern waterfront was already registered under Saigon's cadastre. The famous Nhà Rồng Wharf — headquarters of the Messageries Maritimes shipping company, the same jetty from which a young man named Nguyễn Tất Thành would depart in 1911 to begin his decades-long journey toward becoming Hồ Chí Minh — sat in this disputed borderland.

The Saigon Municipal Commission accepted the annexation project on November 7, 1906. A map produced the following month, titled “Project for the expansion of the city of Saigon,” visualized what the administrators had in mind: not just a tidy administrative transfer, but an industrial island, an îlot industriel, stitched into Saigon's logistical network.

Ten notables, one letter

The annexation was not without friction. Vietnamese village notables were formally consulted — a procedural requirement under colonial regulations governing commune reorganization. The council of neighboring Chánh Hưng raised no objections to ceding a small portion of its territory. The representatives of Khánh Hội did.

Letter from Khánh Hội village representatives dated 12 November 1906 (left) and Public Notice of the factory project in Khánh Hội, 1909 (GouCoch, TDNK, 16753 and 20665)

On November 12, 1906, ten notables of Khánh Hội addressed a letter to the municipal administration of Chợ Lớn. The document, preserved in folder GouCoch TDNK 16753, raises concerns that feel strikingly human across the distance of 120 years: they worried that Saigon's municipal authorities would not tolerate their maisons en paillotes — traditional straw-and-timber dwellings — standing alongside the brick buildings of an industrial zone. Since 1878, Saigon had decrees prohibiting such structures in urban areas. To be absorbed by the city meant risking eviction from their own homes.

The colonial council dismissed these protests on April 27, 1907, characterizing them as driven by personal interest rather than legitimate concern. The administrative transfer was formalized on December 31, 1907, handing over Khánh Hội's archives, tax registers, and land tenure records from Chợ Lớn to Saigon.

Yet the archives tell a more ambiguous story than that official dismissal implies. Documents from the 1920s — lease requests for marshy plots in Khánh Hội containing straw huts and family tombs — confirm that paillotes were still standing, unremarked upon, well into the decade after the transfer. Colonial authorities, it turned out, were far more interested in developing the northern waterfront for industrial use than in policing the housing of the people living further inland. The industrial programme took precedence; the social regulation never quite caught up.

Renovation-Prolongation project of Jean Eudel Street (in red), 1925 (GouCoch, TDNK, 29240)

The street that planners kept deferring

Scene from Khánh Hội in the 1930s that offers a glimpse into the industrial appearance of Khánh Hội. Photo via Flickr user Minhchan Le.

By the 1920s, Khánh Hội had taken on the industrial character that colonial administrators had always envisioned for it. Archives document an oxygen factory (1910), a tannery (1909–1914), a silk-spinning operation dating to the 1860s, a colonial distillery, and buffalo hide warehouses belonging to Maison Denis Frères. A 1925 master plan for urban redevelopment proposed improving tramway connections, reorganizing industrial zones, and extending port facilities along the Khánh Hội waterfront. A report that same year by the Chief Architect of Civil Buildings outlined several infrastructural upgrades for the area.

Among them was the question of the street running along the riverbank.

Folder GouCoch TDNK 29240, dated 1931–1933, is titled “Dossier relatif au prolongement de la rue Jean Eudel à Khánh Hội” — the file on extending Jean Eudel Street. A renovation and prolongation project appears in the archive drawings in red ink, tracing the same corridor that would eventually become Nguyễn Tất Thành Street. The colonial engineers sketched their improvements; the files record the deliberations; the project was, apparently, partially implemented and partially deferred.

Map illustrating the renovation of Jean Eudel Street, c. 1931–1933; the dotted lines show the areas concerned by the project (GouCoch 29240).

By 1941, Admiral Decoux, making an official visit to the Pont en Y at Chợ Quán, was still publicly lamenting the poor connectivity between Khánh Hội and the rest of the city. The Tribune Indochinoise recorded his remarks in September that year. More infrastructure was needed. The links were insufficient. Something had to be done.

The Japanese occupation began shortly after. The interwar colonial development phase ended. The plans stayed on paper.

A century of deferral, one September deadline

What is striking, reading across these archival layers, is not the failure of any single plan but the persistence of the problem — and the repetition of its proposed solutions. Widen the artery. Improve the connections. Develop the port land. Make the industrial island legible and accessible within the city's broader logic.

Graphic by Dương Trương.

The Kênh Tẻ Canal transformed Khánh Hội in 1906–1907 by isolating it and then absorbing it. Jean Eudel Street — named after a French colonial official, later renamed to honor the man who left from Nhà Rồng Wharf to change the country's history — became the corridor through which that absorption would, eventually, be made real. It has been chronically under-built ever since: four lanes where the traffic demands eight, a waterfront of rusting port infrastructure where city planners have imagined parks for decades.

After years of chronic gridlock, Nguyễn Tất Thành Street — connecting the former Districts 7 and 4 with downtown — is now set to be widened, and Nhà Rồng Wharf is to be transformed into a riverside park. The proposed expansion would bring the road to a minimum of eight lanes with a cross-section of 30–40 meter. Construction is expected to begin on September 2, tied to the expansion of the Hồ Chí Minh Museum area and the Nguyễn Tất Thành road project.

An AI-rendered plan for the widening of Nguyễn Tất Thành Street with adjacent park space. Image via VNExpress.

The village notables of Khánh Hội who wrote their anxious letter in November 1906 could not have imagined the city that would grow around their straw huts. But they understood, with perfect clarity, what it meant when administrators started drawing new lines on maps of the place where you lived. They knew that infrastructure is never just about roads and canals. It is always also about who gets to stay, and on what terms.

As the bulldozers prepare for September, the archive suggests a gentle corrective to triumphalist narratives of urban transformation: this particular bend in the river has been waiting for its redesign for a very long time. And the people who lived there, long before the planners arrived, were asking reasonable questions that the plans still rarely think to answer.

The archival research for this article was conducted at the Vietnamese National Archive Centre No. 2, Ho Chi Minh City, drawing primarily on the Cochinchina Government Collection (GouCoch), in particular folders TDNK 16753, 29240, and 29345. The research is part of a broader project on colonial urban planning in Saigon-Chợ Lớn at RMIT Vietnam, School of Communication and Design.

Thwunk! Thwunk! Thwunk! Thwunk! The vendor’s cleaver struck the heavy wooden chopping board again and again after slicing through duck meat. Centimeters away, a microphone hovered, capturing each strike. 

“To me, photography and sound recording are actually very similar. They're both ways of preserving memories, just through different senses… Whenever I listen to old recordings, it feels like I'm transported back to that exact moment. I'm there again, surrounded by the same atmosphere, reliving the experience,” explained Trần Đăng Khoa, the founder of Vietnam Sound Library, as we ate the duck soup he had just recorded being prepared.

Between noodle slurps, he expanded on his philosophy of audio preservation. Sounds can be a powerful means of eliciting memories and triggering nostalgia for moments we’d forgotten, but all too often, unlike photos, we don’t think to record something until it’s already gone.

Khoa, however, is always thinking about what to record and approaches every sound field trip systematically. When arriving at a location, he asks himself two questions: “First: What is the most distinctive quality of this sound? If someone closed their eyes and listened, would they immediately recognize where they are? Second: 30 or 50 years from now, when the world has changed, which sounds from today will still mean something to people?” 

Khoa records Bình Tây Market's opening activities.

Saigoneer spent the morning witnessing Khoa’s approach in action, starting with when Chợ Lớn (Bình Tây Market) was just opening for the day, and a truck arrived at the front gate to unload. “This is significant — men at work,” he exclaimed before jolting off to get himself in position for the clanks and clamors of metal tables and stools being lugged down and set up. Minutes later, he was on the market’s second floor, asking a vendor to open and close her shopfront gate. Always listening for a sound to throw himself towards, Khoa even interrupted himself mid-sentence at breakfast to rush off to record a passing chè vendor.

A wellspring of energy, after the market, he brought us to several nearby pagodas where he recorded gieo quẻ xin xăm, a blind lottery vendor’s banter with visitors, bells being struck, and the ambient sounds of murmured prayers.

Sound has been central to Khoa since he was a child. “Every time I watched a movie and felt emotion, goosebumps, I realized mostly it came from sounds.” From there, the Saigon native took a logical route, studying sound engineering and finding work editing and mixing sound for films, TVCs, and other commercial projects. Occasionally, a scene would call for a specific ambiance or noise that wasn’t available in any archive. Sometimes, a Foley artist can create a sound that differs from reality but delivers a stronger emotional impact and enhances storytelling. But other times, there is no replacement for reality. In those situations, Khoa ventures off into the world to locate and capture it.

To organize and share these real sounds, in late 2024, Khoa created Vietnam Sound Library. At the time of writing, the archive contains more than 550 audio tracks assembled with a mission to make the everyday sounds of Vietnamese life available to everyone. Uploaded via SoundCloud, the lossless audio tracks are organized into clear albums such as parks, markets, residential areas, restaurants, the metro, and even festivals and activities, including a funeral. Within the folder are broad ambience and specific actions, such as a schoolyard’s morning drum, a street jackhammer, and people playing pickleball.

After our morning at the market and pagoda, we traveled to Khoa’s studio, where he sat in front of numerous monitors and a giant screen to edit what he’d recorded. He would review the recordings, isolate and remove distracting background elements, and cut out pauses before labeling and organizing them for upload. Likening the process to photo editing, he noted that every sound artist has their preferred level of manipulation, and it’s ultimately a matter of taste for how much polishing to apply.

To showcase how he uses the audio professionally, Khoa then pulled up an in-progress feature film for which he was completing the sound design. For a scene that takes place in a forest, he layered various sounds he’d recorded several weeks earlier in Cát Tiên National Park. Ambient noise, crickets, birds calling, a mosquito landing on the microphone, and other elements are layered atop one another to achieve not what a scene sounds like in reality but what listeners will imagine it to sound like.

While Khoa started Vietnam Sound Library for practical, professional use, the project took on new depth and significance when he met his partner, Đinh Vũ Thu Thủy. “At first, my goal was simply to build a sound library for film production. Then, in 2025, Thủy joined the project and brought me a completely different perspective on sound,” he shared.

It's rare to see either Thủy and Khoa without a smile.

Reflecting on the first time she joined him on a recording trip, Thủy said: “The first collection I worked on was recordings from traditional markets. That's when I realized that sound isn't just data — it tells cultural stories. Khoa felt the same way. Sounds like street vendors calling out to buy scrap metal, the school drum, or children playing năm mười were all part of our childhood growing up in the 1990s. But many of those sounds are gradually disappearing. That made us realize we should document everyday sounds while they're still here.”

The recording equipment is light and compact, so the couple is ready to go at almost any time.

Since then, Thủy has been by Khoa’s side on every trip, pointing out noises that might not be immediately relevant for films, but are important elements of Vietnamese culture that won’t be around forever. She also takes all the unique photos that accompany the tracks so people have a more exact understanding of what they are hearing, particularly if it's something they haven’t witnessed in person before. And in the studio, she is there to help clarify file names (“not sliding door, but rolling door”), and add essential cultural markers such as specific locations, dates, and times, beyond the generic notes that would be sufficient to satisfy the needs of filmmakers.

The project has changed Khoa and Thủy’s relationship with each other, as well as with sound itself. Thủy shared: “Before joining this project, I never paid much attention to sound. I took it for granted. I could hear, but I wasn't really listening. Now I've learned to slow down, to listen more carefully, and to notice the tiny sounds that I used to overlook. Through that, I've come to understand that sound carries much more than what we hear every day. It holds stories about culture, the environment, and people's memories. [Vietnam Sound Library] taught me to understand my surroundings through listening.”

In contrast, Khoa always appreciated sounds, but hadn’t before realized that his appreciation was a form of meditation: “One thing that really surprised me while recording was what happened when I gave my full attention to listening. I started feeling deeply connected to the present moment. Everything around me suddenly became much more vivid. That's when I realized that, before this, I had spent so much time lost in my own thoughts that I wasn't truly present in everyday life.” 

The genuine appreciation the couple has for sound recording allows them to work without annoying their subjects. Combined with a palpable sense of joy and excitement, this authenticity removes skepticism and puts the people populating streets, markets, schoolyards, and restaurants at ease. This is particularly important because while many sounds may be of natural or manmade objects, Thủy considers the presence of voices to be among the most important ones for culture. The street vendor calls, which Khoa likens to singing, are her favorite: “After hearing just a few voices, you can immediately feel the unique atmosphere of a Vietnamese market. Every vendor has their own style, their own rhythm, and their own voice, and together they become part of the market's identity.”

When was the last time you heard the call of a local rat trap vendor? An ice cream cart? What about a mobile laminator or someone offering to weigh your child on a scale? While discussing vendor songs, we soon found ourselves talking about lost sounds. With Khoa and Thủy, it’s easy to become philosophical and ruminate on the value of sounds, our favorite sounds, the sounds we wish we’d heard before they’d vanished, and what is disappearing all around us. What did Saigon sound like when horses still clomped down the streets pulling carts, and before plastic replaced vendor tables and chairs? “I wish I could record traditional Vietnamese children's games,” Khoa noted before offering the observation that “every generation has their own sound, for example, when elders come together and talk nowadays, they talk differently than elders 30 years ago; the way they talk, the topics they talk about, even their volume.” 

In addition to archival value, these sounds of the past can have a powerful impact on the present. Khoa explained: “One day, we received a message that said, ‘I'm studying abroad, and I really miss these sounds. Thanks, bro.’ It was incredibly moving because that was the moment we realized these recordings aren't just preserving sounds. They're also helping people reconnect with their own memories and emotions.”

Regardless of their use, one unavoidable truth of the sound library is that Khoa and Thủy cannot do it all. Even if one discounts sounds vanishing every day, Saigon simply contains too many noises for one couple to capture. And then one has to consider other locations, with Khoa noting “one man is never enough because its not about technique, it's about experience. People born in the north will understand the north, people born in the seaside or the mountains will understand their homeland better than me; they know what to record better than me.”

At the moment, Khoa and Thủy are not focusing on the marketing and branding that would help raise more awareness and attract additional archivists, let alone thinking of any way to monetize the library. Rather, they seem content to chase after important sounds and ensure they are preserved. If this means a homesick Saigoneer can connect with their childhood, or a film can contain a bit more reality, that's all the better. And in the process, we can all hope they remember to record themselves the soft laughter and exultations that accompany their process — that, too, is now an important part of Saigon’s auditory history.

On September 9, 1883, ominous smoke hung over Huế. The sun was blue-green, and throughout the day, people on the streets had no shadows. As their legitimacy relied on maintaining the Mandate of Heaven, the Nguyễn royal court was alarmed. Three high-ranking mandarins rushed to advise the Emperor to change his ways to regain Heaven’s favor. While this strange incident can be easily dismissed as another case of outdated superstitions, a closer look reveals it as a rare conjunction of astrology, power, and — given the source of the smoke — volcanism, all set against the backdrop of France’s rapid incursion into Vietnam.

The smoke of that baleful day stemmed from the island of Krakatoa in the Sunda Strait, located less than 2,000 kilometers south of Saigon. A vigorous, multi-volcano component of the Ring of Fire, Krakatoa showed the first signs of eruption on May 20, 1883, when a strong earthquake reached as far as the Dutch East Indies capital of Batavia (now Jakarta, Indonesia), rattling doors and windows. The following day, plumes of whitish steam and thick black smoke soared from various vents across the island, and molten rock burned away the lush vegetation on the volcanic slopes. This smoldering phase continued all summer; ships entering the Sunda Strait would report large, barnacled chunks of pumice bobbing in the waves. By late August, even passage through the strait became impossible, as ships were bombarded with pumice and ashes falling out of the sky, and around the island, loud bursts were heard every few hours.

A 1801 map of Southeast Asia by English cartographer John Cary. Image via Wikimedia.
The indicator of Krakatoa located towards the bottom left, between Sumatra and Java is added by Saigoneer.

Then, on the morning of August 27, Krakatoa exploded. The noise was so intense that it blew the eardrums of British sailors more than 60 kilometers away and sent shockwaves circling the world three times. Nearly 70% of the island was destroyed, and the pyroclastic flows that gurgled out of its collapse scorched entire Sumatran towns such as Ketimbang, killing more than 4,000 people. Tsunamis swallowed the nearby port city of Merak and crashed against shores as distant as South Africa. At least 21 cubic kilometers of dust and ash were launched into the sky, carried west by high-speed air currents that only scientists in the aftermath would come to identify as jet streams. As noted by British meteorologist Rollo Russell, wherever it spread, this smoke scattered the sunlight, changing the color of the sun into a bluish green, and that of the sky into an ashen grey in the day, then a bloodshot red at sunset. After wafting around the world for two weeks, the smoke entered Vietnamese skies, still thick yet more dispersed, in early September.

Footage from the Japanese weather satellite Himawari-8 of the 2022 Hunga Tonga-Hunga Haʻapai eruption, which was of similar scale to Krakatoa. Image via EUMETSAT.

At the time, the Nguyễn Dynasty was in crisis. The last few years were marked by constant French encroachments, and with the death of the staunch Confucianist Emperor Tự Đức in July 1883, the French saw an opportunity to ramp up these attacks. On August 18, Admiral Amédée Courbet launched a naval assault against the forts at Thuận An Estuary, where the Perfume River led straight into the capital. The three-day raid took the lives of many Nguyễn soldiers, including commander Trần Thúc Nhẫn who jumped into the sea to his death.

Victorious, the French marched inland, and Commissioner François-Jules Harmand gave the court an ultimatum, vowing that if they rejected French demands, then “even the worst catastrophe you can imagine will fall short of what will happen to you. The Empire of Annam, its dynasty, its princes and its courtiers will have chosen their own extinction. The name of Vietnam will be erased from history.”

On August 25, the same day Krakatoa entered its critical phase, representatives of Emperor Hiệp Hoà signed the Treaty of Huế (Hòa ước Harmand) with the French, which recognized French protectorate over their territory, renounced their own diplomatic independence, and allowed Bình Thuận Province to be annexed into the colony of Cochinchina. While the treaty was slightly revised in 1884, it had effectively put an end to Vietnamese sovereignty.

One of the few portraits of Hiệp Hoà (left) and an artist's interpretation (right). Images via Khám phá Huế.

Let us now return to the morning of August 27. According to a report by British officer Richard Strachey to the Royal Society, as soon as Krakatoa erupted, its sounds were heard in Cape St. Jacques (now Vũng Tàu, 1,800 km away) and Saigon (1,873 km away). That only two such locations in Vietnam were named was likely because Cochinchina had become a full colony and saw a stronger European presence than the rest; since the shockwaves circled the globe three times, it is possible that people elsewhere in the country heard the sounds too. Their wide propagation is also implied in Notes sur l’Annam (Notes on Annam) by explorer Etienne Aymonier. In his volume on Khánh Hoà, published in 1885, Aymonier wrote:

It is difficult to gauge just how much of this frantic response was real or exaggerated; however, the panic is not unimaginable given the intensity of the sounds. According to Richard Strachey’s report, in Singapore, there was no way to talk on the telephone line until 3pm; by shouting at the top of their lungs, both ends could hear each other, but “not one single sentence was understood.” More than 2,000 km west, in the landlocked Sri Lankan town of Bogawantalawa, the sounds “were like blasting [from the northeast] and kept on all day, from 7:30 a.m. till 4 p.m.” And far down south, in Western Australia, a local newspaper wrote that people were startled by a series of loud, artillery-like sounds, which continued “at irregular intervals till about 4 p.m. on Monday [August 27].” Sometimes, noted the newspaper, there were as many as three explosions in a minute, but “generally there was a few minutes’ interval.” With this context, we can infer that people not just in Bình Thuận, but all over Vietnam could have heard the eruption, and with the bombardment of Thuận An still fresh in their minds, many were driven to panic.

Then, two weeks later, came the strangely colored sun. An entry in the official chronicle Đại Nam thực lục (Veritable Records of Đại Nam) described that baleful day as follows:

Let us pause to situate the three mandarins’ appeal in their political lives. Tôn Thất Thuyết, Nguyễn Văn Tường, and Trần Tiễn Thành were all regents appointed by the late Tự Đức, who died without an heir. At first, they picked his 30-something adopted son, but to Thành’s horror, Thuyết and Tường teamed up to depose the new monarch after only three days for improper conduct. On July 30, the three regents crowned Hiệp Hoà, Tự Đức’s younger brother. Fearful for both his throne and his life, Hiệp Hoà quickly sought to make peace with the French, which also enraged the patriotic Thuyết and Tường.

After Hiệp Hoà approved the treaty of August 25 with Thành’s support, Thuyết and Tường devised a plot to remove Hiệp Hoà too. Seeing their conduct as a flagrant abuse of power, Thành retired to his manor north of the Perfume River. On November 28, while the French representative was away from Huế, Tường arrested Hiệp Hoà on charges of collaborationism, put him in jail, and poisoned him to death. On the night of November 30, Thành was murdered at home by unknown burglars; later historians suspected it was an assassination orchestrated by Tường and Thuyết themselves.

Tôn Thất Thuyết (left) and Nguyễn Văn Tường (right). Images via Wikimedia.

With such contexts, it is surprising that Tôn Thất Thuyết, Nguyễn Văn Tường, and Trần Tiễn Thành were appealing to Hiệp Hoà together, as noted by the official historical record Đại Nam thực lục, in response to the Krakatoa sun. Did it alarm them so much that they set aside their differences and rushed to warn the Emperor? Could there also be hidden motives for Thuyết and Tường, who already disliked Hiệp Hoà anyway? For although courtiers often saw astronomical phenomena as signs for their kingdom, they may also exploit these to their advantage.

In the 1430s, Bùi Thì Hanh rose to prominence for his forecasting; he would use this knack for astronomy to gain favors from Emperor Lê Thái Tông, becoming chief of the Bureau of Astronomy (Thái sử viện 太史院) until he was exposed for a false lunar eclipse prediction. Combing through Đại Việt sử ký toàn thư, historian Ho Peng Yoke also found that some eclipses had no match in the records of neighboring countries, and may have been invented by later compilers to condemn the kings during whose reigns they occurred, which in fact was a practice among other East Asian dynasties too. In a similar vein, Thuyết and Tường could have seized the rare opportunity of a blue-green sun to strike fear into Hiệp Hoà’s heart. Whether or not they had such motives, their appeal worked, based on Hiệp Hoà’s reaction. Unfortunately, this was not enough to prevent his fall three months later.

An illustration by William Ashcroft of a typical dramatic sunset after Krakatoa, as seen from London in 1883. Image via Bodleian Libraries/University of Oxford.

Krakatoa was not the Nguyễn’s first rodeo with volcanoes. In 1815, Mount Tambora erupted, causing a drop in global temperatures and adverse weather effects for years to come. In Europe, the cold, stormy summer simply inspired Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein, but in Vietnam, it led to a widespread famine and a Bengal-born cholera outbreak that killed hundreds of thousands of people, including the great poet Nguyễn Du. Still, the regime was able to pull through, thanks in part to Minh Mạng’s quick reactions by relieving taxes, distributing monetary aid, and supplying medicine to localities despite not fully understanding the disease himself.

Krakatoa, conversely, found the dynasty in a critical spot, with an ineffectual ruler, a domineering pair of regents, and an impending foreign conquest. Thus, although Krakatoa did not seem to take a heavy material toll on the dynasty like Tambora, it still left both the court and the commoners shaken. Whether the residents of Bình Thuận did flee en masse after hearing the explosions as Aymonier described, whether Tôn Thất Thuyết and Nguyễn Văn Tường had hidden motives in addressing the blue-green sun to the Emperor, the reality was all the same. The kingdom was no longer as it was under Minh Mạng; if anything, with the treaty signed just days before, it seemed that the kingdom was slouching towards doom.

Tôn Thất Thuyết and Nguyễn Văn Tường, the dynamic duo that they were, would go on to enthrone and dethrone another emperor, before settling with the 12-year-old Hàm Nghi. The French would maintain an arrogant, aggressive attitude, convincing the duo of imminent war. On the night of July 4, 1885, Thuyết launched a preemptive attack on the French, who quickly overpowered his forces and burned the citadel. Thuyết got away with the young Emperor and issued the Cần Vương (Aid the King) edict, exhorting patriots nationwide to rise up.

Meanwhile, Nguyễn Văn Tường stayed behind, and was arrested and exiled to Tahiti, ironically a volcanic island itself. He would live here for a year before dying of illness in 1886. That same year, Mount Tarawera erupted in New Zealand, the closest large landmass to Tahiti. It is tempting to wonder if Tường had lived to witness the effects, and if for a moment, far away in exile, he was reminded of that blue-green sun.

After his Saigon trip in 1972, famed French photographer Raymond Depardon returned in 1992 to traverse the length of Vietnam.

Depardon’s 1992 visit yielded many incredible photos with people as the main subject. There isn’t one photo in the extensive collection that doesn’t feature a local in one way or another, be it a gaggle of laughing children in Hanoi or a pensive young teenager in Lâm Đồng province.

Through the French photojournalist’s lens, 1992 Hanoi doesn't appear that different than in 2017, at least when it comes to buildings and famous landmarks such as the Hoàn Kiếm Lake or the Old Quarter.

Have a gander at Raymond Depardon’s perspectives below:

Outside the general store on Tràng Tiền, Hanoi.

Two Hanoian friends at the Thủy Tạ ice cream shop, Hanoi.

At a coal mine in Quảng Ninh.

Two ladies wearing different styles of clothing in downtown Saigon.

Children play on top a tank carcass in Đông Hà, Quảng Trị.

The Đồng Khởi-Lê Lợi intersection from the Continental Hotel Saigon.

Trying to take a nap on the North-South train.

Outside the police kiosk at the Saigon Train Station.

Parked vehicles on the street.

The exterior of Vinh Quang Cineplex on Pasteur Street.

Posing for a shot in Nha Trang.

Vacationers in Hạ Long. 

Hàng Bông, Hanoi.

A street guitar shop in Hanoi.

Hanoi children in Lenin Park.

A paper shop on Lương Văn Can Street, Hanoi.

A beach dip in Nha Trang.

Locals in Nha Trang have a picnic by the sea.

Hàm Long, Hanoi.

Vendors run after a train to sell refreshments.

A xích lô man reads while waiting for customers.

A gas station in Xuân Lộc, Đồng Nai.

A cafe and makeup parlor in Lâm Đồng.

At 30/4 Park in Saigon.

A fruit vendor in Lâm Đồng.

An entire family squeezing into their seats on the cross-country train.

A port in Hải Phòng.

Hàng Mã, Hanoi.

Soon after its completion, Saigon’s iconic Notre Dame Cathedral developed an embarrassing tilt.

Saigon Cathedral was built in 1877–1879 to a design by Jules Bourard, as a replacement for the ill-fated 1863 Église Sainte-Marie-Immaculée, which stood on the site of the modern Sun Wah Tower (Nguyễn Huệ) until it became infested by termites and had to be demolished — see Icons of Old Saigon: the Eglise Sainte-Marie-Immaculee. The first stone of the new cathedral was laid on October 7, 1877 by Admiral-Governor Victor Duperré, in the presence of Bishop Isidore Colombert.

The ill-fated Église Sainte-Marie-Immaculée (1863).

At the time of construction, the problem of supplying fresh water to city residents had reached crisis point. It was therefore seen by many as an “act of God” that in 1877, while the foundations of the cathedral were being laid, workers chanced upon a deep underground aquifer. Later that year, the first Château d’eau (water tower) was built on the junction of rue Sohier and rue Catinat prolongée (the modern Turtle Lake roundabout), to supply drinking water to city residents via a network of underground conduits and street pumps.

In his feature “Monumental Saigon – streets and boulevards,” published in the July-December 1893 edition of the geographical adventure magazine Tour du Monde, Pierre Barrelon commented: “That great underground aquifer now amply feeds Saigon with water which many cities in France would be envious of. The flow of this underground lake is inexhaustible, and during the dry season, as during wintertime, public fountains and private pipes never dry up.”

Saigon's first Château d’eau (water tower) was built on the junction of rue Sohier and rue Catinat prolongée (the modern Turtle Lake roundabout).

However, as Barrelon went on to explain, the discovery of this aquifer was not welcomed by the cathedral construction team.“The sandy soil, which forms a natural filter for this beneficial lake, created a thousand problems for the builders of this heavy construction, making it necessary for them to lengthen their initial works in order to find a very deep resistant layer.” Eventually a solution was found, construction resumed, and three years later on April 11, 1880 (Easter Sunday), Cochinchina Governor Charles Le Myre de Vilers and Bishop Isidore presided over the inauguration of the new cathedral.

The cathedral construction site is visible in the background of this picture of the Cercle des Officiers building (1876).

In the years which followed, this “beautiful monument of brick and stone” became “dear to many Saigonnais…” until one day, someone noticed that the cathedral had begun to tilt over on one side. “The mass gained the upper hand,” explained Barrelon, “and one of the towers began to sink! Quite lightly, but nonetheless in an observable way, so that, like Notre Dame in Paris, the cathedral of Saigon now has towers of unequal height, which displease those in favour of irreproachable symmetry.”

Urgent remedial work was done to prevent further subsidence, but the embarrassing tilt remained. Finally, in 1892, it was decided that two cast iron spires should be added, at a cost of 66,500 francs. Albert Butin's article “Les Flêches métalliques de la Cathédrale de Saigon” (The metallic spires of Saigon Cathedral), published in the May 1896 edition of Le Génie civil: revue générale des industries françaises et étrangères, describes in detail the construction of the spires, which was entrusted to M Michelin, “Ingénieur des Arts et Manufacture,” and got underway on December 26, 1894.

The Saigon Cathedral spires under construction in 1895.

In the original specifications, the spires took the form of 27m high octagonal pyramids with unequal sides, placed directly on the top of each tower and sealed into the masonry by means of brackets extending 3m inside the towers. Each spire was topped by a cross and incorporated four skylights order to provide ventilation to the upper parts of the building. However, during construction, a decision was made to increase the height of the west spire slightly, making it taller than the east spire, in order to restore symmetry. The spires were completed on February 28, 1895.

Saigon Cathedral in the early 1900s.

The addition of those spires seems to have solved the problem of the “Leaning Cathedral of Saigon,” but it seems that that not everyone was convinced: for many years afterwards, it was said that if you stood at the top of rue Catinat (modern Đồng Khởi street), the difference in height between the two towers was still clearly visible!

Cathedral square with Saigoneers coming out of mass.

Tim Doling is the author of the guidebooks Exploring Huế (Nhà Xuất Bản Thế Giới, Hà Nội, 2018), Exploring Saigon-Chợ Lớn (Nhà Xuất Bản Thế Giới, Hà Nội, 2019) and Exploring Quảng Nam (Nhà Xuất Bản Thế Giới, Hà Nội, 2020) and The Railways and Tramways of Việt Nam (White Lotus Press, 2012) For more information about Saigon history, visit his website, historicvietnam.com.

When they first drew up plans for a citywide tramway network in 1894, it seemed as though the Hanoi authorities would follow Saigon’s example by opting for steam traction. Yet, by the time government approval was forthcoming in 1899, advances in technology made it possible to construct the entire system as a state-of-the-art, one-meter gauge electric tramway.

In 1900, the Compagnie des Tramways Électriques d’Hanoï et Extensions (CTEH) was to set up to build the first two tramway lines, which were jointly inaugurated in November 1901.

A CTEH Line 1 tram at the Place des Cocotiers terminus.

Setting out from the Place des Cocotiers terminus next to the Petit Lac (Hoàn Kiếm Lake), Line 1 led southward to Bạch Mai and Line 2 northeastward to Giấy village, near today’s Bưởi Market. A subsequent decision of July 20, 1905 authorized the extension of Line 1 to Chợ Mơ on the Route Circulaire (now Đại La Street).

A CTEH Line 1 tram passes the Petit Lac.

In 1904, work began on Line 3, which led east from the Petit Lac to the Pagode des Corbeaux (the Temple of Literature) and then headed southwest to Thái Hà Ấp. This line was extended to Hà Đông in 1914 and to Cầu Đơ Market in 1938.

A CTEH Line 3 tram at Hà Đông.

Construction of Line 4 got under way in 1907. Following the path of Line 3 from Place des Cocotiers to the Pagode des Corbeaux, it then branched westward to the Pont du Papier (Cầu Giấy).

In its early years, despite its apparent popularity, the Hanoi tramway network suffered continuous financial problems. Until as late as 1913, CTEH remained a deficitary operation. Thereafter, profits remained relatively modest, precluding adequate maintenance on its rolling stock, track, catenary and buildings. In 1929, the increasingly run-down network was taken over by the Compagnie des Tramways du Tonkin (CTT), which upgraded large stretches of track and catenary and ordered replacement second-generation tractor and trailer sets from France.

It was under the CTT that the final stage of network expansion was implemented. A decision of November 14, 1930 authorized the creation of Line 5, which branched off Line 3 and headed south along the Route Mandarine to Kim Liên and northward from Place Neyret to Yên Phụ on the Red River Dyke. In 1943, Line 5 was extended further south as far as the Route Circulaire, in order to serve the René Robin Hospital, the radio station and Bạch Mai airfield. With the completion of Line 5, the tramway network in Hanoi had reached approximately 30 kilometers in length.

13 CTEH Line 3 tram at Place Neyret.

In 1952, at the height of the First Indochina War, the CTT was renamed the Société des Transports en Commun de la Région d'Hanoï. However, on June 1, 1955, this company ceased operations and all track, equipment and rolling stock was transferred to the new Democratic Republic of Vietnam.

A Hanoi Line 1 tram (1927 stock) heads south along Hàng Bài towards Bạch Mai in 1960.

Unlike its Saigon counterpart, the Hanoi tramway system continued to function for nearly 30 years after independence. In fact, in 1968 the Hanoi People’s Committee even built an additional spur from the Cửa Nam junction along Cột Cờ Street (now Điện Biên Phủ) and Hùng Vương Street, rejoining Line 2 south of Trúc Bạch Lake. However by the early 1980s, track, catenary and rolling stock had deteriorated to the extent that the tramway was no longer fit for its purpose. Line 1 (Bạch Mai Phong) was closed in 1982, followed in subsequent years by Line 4 (Cầu Giấy), Line 3 (Hà Đông), Line 5 (Yên Phụ) and finally, in 1989, Line 2 (Đường Bưởi).

A Hanoi Line 2 tram (1927 stock) picture in the 1980s.

Line 4 (Cầu Giấy) was offered a brief reprieve of sorts in 1986, when the route was taken over by a small donated fleet of old trolley buses from Eastern Europe. The Hanoi-Cầu Giấy trolley bus fleet outlasted the trams, soldiering on until 1993 when it, too, fell victim to modernization.

Tim Doling is the author of the guidebooks Exploring Huế (Nhà Xuất Bản Thế Giới, Hà Nội, 2018), Exploring Saigon-Chợ Lớn (Nhà Xuất Bản Thế Giới, Hà Nội, 2019) and Exploring Quảng Nam (Nhà Xuất Bản Thế Giới, Hà Nội, 2020) and The Railways and Tramways of Việt Nam (White Lotus Press, 2012) For more information about Saigon history, visit his website, historicvietnam.com.

In 1927, after being abandoned for more than 60 years by its Spanish owners, the “Jardin d’Espagne” — known today as Bách Tùng Diệp or Lý Tự Trọng Park — seemed set to become the new home of the British Consulate General in Saigon… but it was not to be.

The participation of Spanish naval forces in the 1859 French conquest of Cochinchina is well documented. The event which had triggered the expedition was the execution on July 20, 1857 of the Spanish bishop of Tonkin, Monsignor José Sanjurjo Diaz. In response, the invasion fleet incorporated a large contingent of Spanish troops drawn largely from the Philippines.

In the aftermath of the conquest, several streets in Saigon were named in honor of Spain, including Rues Isabella, Isabella II and Palanca.

The Jardin d’Espagne on the left of the postcard.

A potential location for a Spanish or British Consulate?

The French authorities also granted the Spanish government a plot of land on which to build a consulate. According to the Colonial Council minutes dated November 8, 1928, the Conventions of May 15, 1864 signed by Spanish Acting Consul Manuel M Caballero, and of January 31, 1866 signed by his successor Fédérico Taque, ceded to the Spanish government “a 3,000m² plot of land on the north side of the junction between Rues Lagrandière and Mac-Mahon [now Lý Tự Trọng and Nam Kỳ Khởi Nghĩa].” The concession of this land, now part of Lý Tự Trọng Park, was “made free of charge, but under the provision that the land is allocated solely for installation of a Spanish consulate and cannot be used for any other purpose”.

For a short while, an “old Annamite house” on the site was occupied by a group of Spanish naval officers. However, when the Spanish delegation eventually departed from Saigon, it had “failed to take effective possession of this land and abandoned the project of constructing a consulate in Saigon”. Thereafter, Spanish diplomatic affairs in Cochinchina were handled through the Consular Agent of Portugal.

Over the next half-century, as the surrounding streets were transformed into the so-called “Triangle of Power” (comprising the Law Courts, the Central Prison and the Palace of the Lieutenant Governor), this little piece of Spanish territory was christened the Jardin d’Espagne. During this period, it was looked after carefully by the staff of the Botanical and Zoological Gardens, who installed lawns and flowerbeds and took great care of its ancient banyan tree.

By 1919, the Consulate-General of Great Britain had outgrown its premises at 4 Rue Georges-Guynemer (present-day Hồ Tùng Mậu), and the search began for a suitable plot of land on which to build a larger diplomatic mission. The Jardin d’Espagne seemed to fit the bill perfectly, and later that year the British Consul-General wrote to the director of local administration asking if the French government “would be disposed to give its consent to the cession of this land from the Spanish government to the British government, which proposes to build a consulate there”.

The Jardin d’Espagne can be seen on the right of this early 20^th-century postcard of the Lieutenant Governor’s Palace.

The three-way negotiations between France, Spain and Great Britain continued for another eight years. Finally, on November 10, 1927, “the Consular Agent of Portugal, M. Brodeur, in the name of the Spanish government, ceded and abandoned to the Consulate General of Great Britain represented by Mr. F Grosvenor Gorton, its rights to the Jardin d’Espagne”.

For its part, the Cochinchina government agreed that Great Britain would be substituted for Spain in the conditional rights to the land, which were once again linked exclusively to the construction of a consulate.

Had things proceeded as planned, the British Consulate in HCMC might now be in a very different location, and Saigon would have lost a valuable green space to redevelopment. But that wasn’t quite the end of the story.

From would-be consulate to park

After commissioning a long-overdue survey of the Jardin d’Espagne in December 1927, the British “encountered problems and communicated these to the Cochinchina authorities.” On January 21, 1928, Cochinchina Governor Paul Blanchard de la Brosse wrote to Grosvenor Gorton: “On the occasion of the transfer, you pointed out to me the inadequacy of the said land area with regard to its function, which is the construction of your consulate, and informed me that you would consider favorably the principle of exchange against another city lot administered through the Domaine locale.”

A subsequent report to the Colonial Council by Blanchard de la Brosse sheds further light on the problems encountered and also reveals the alternative lot which had been identified:

“The Consul General of Great Britain has noted that the area of this land is too small for construction of a [consulate] building, and secondly that the Jardin d’Espagne does not seem favorable for the installation of a consulate. For our part, the local administration believes that there is interest in maintaining the current function of the Jardin as a convenient square for walkers and children’s games in the very central area where it is located. Therefore, the principle of exchange of this land against Lot 7 of the subdivision plan of Boulevard Norodom is being considered. This latter terrain, situated between Boulevard Norodom (Lê Duẩn) and the Rues de Massiges (Mạc Đĩnh Chi) and Lucien Mossard (Nguyễn Du), has an area of 3,548m² and its market value is equal to that of the land known as the Jardin d’Espagne.”

A plan of the 3,548m² Lot 7 on Boulevard Norodom, which the British Consulate General was granted in exchange for the Jardin d’Espagne.

A formal offer was made, and on April 25, 1928, British Consul General F Grosvenor Gorton wrote to the governor accepting the substituted plot on Boulevard Norodom. This undoubtedly pleased the French; another report dated November 26, 1928 says of the Jardin d’Espagne that “its situation right in front of the Governor of Cochinchina’s Palace, from which it is separated only by the Rue Lagrandière, is not appropriate for the installation of a consulate”.

On October 6, 1928 Les Annales Coloniales carried an article entitled “The future British Consulate in Saigon”, reporting the exchange of the Jardin d’Espagne for the new plot on Boulevard Norodom, and explaining that “the plans, drawn up in London, will be executed in Saigon under the supervision of one or more architects who will come all the way from England. The design will be a reproduction of those buildings already constructed to serve the same purpose in Bangkok and some major cities in China; or rather, it will be a ‘Cochinchina adaptation’ of the commonly adopted type.”

A view of Saigon's Boulevard Norodom.

The replacement lot was formally ceded by the Domaine Locale on December 21, 1928, but the new British Consulate General at 21 Boulevard Norodom (now 25 Lê Duẩn) took several years to construct and was not inaugurated until 1934. Sadly, no photographs have survived of this building, which in the 1950s became the British Embassy to the State of Vietnam and then briefly to the Republic of Vietnam. It was demolished and rebuilt in its current form in 1958–1959.

The 1958-1959 British Embassy building, now the British Consulate General in Ho Chi Minh City.

Crucially, the land exchange of 1928 returned the Jardin d’Espagne to the Domaine Locale and it became a small municipal park.

After 1955 it was renamed Công viên Liên Hiệp (Union Park) and, after 1975, Công viên Lý Tự Trọng. Then in the early 1980s, the buildings which had stood on the adjacent plot of land were demolished and the park was doubled in size, so that today it stretches the entire length of the block between Nam Kỳ Khởi Nghĩa and Pasteur Streets.

Abandoned by the Spanish and rejected by the British, the Jardin d’Espagne was eventually transformed into one of Saigon’s best-loved parks.

The former Jardin d’Espagne, now the Lý Tự Trọng Park, in 2016.

This article was originally published in 2016.

Tim Doling is the author of the guidebooks Exploring Huế (Nhà Xuất Bản Thế Giới, Hà Nội, 2018), Exploring Saigon-Chợ Lớn (Nhà Xuất Bản Thế Giới, Hà Nội, 2019) and Exploring Quảng Nam (Nhà Xuất Bản Thế Giới, Hà Nội, 2020) and The Railways and Tramways of Việt Nam (White Lotus Press, 2012). For more information about Saigon history, visit his website, historicvietnam.com.

Walking through Saigon nowadays, you will notice that ice is so omnipresent, it’s part of the scenery. From trà đá, cà phê sữa đá to sinh tố, every drink is consumed with ice in order to combat the intense heat. Before the French brought ice factories to Vietnam, in hot, tropical cities like Saigon, you wouldn’t expect to find ice. Controlling the cold chain is now an important part of our logistics, be it for healthcare or food storage, opening the door for any cuisine to expand with new ingredients. A few centuries ago, however, it was once a thriving business catering to French colonists.

Making ice in a tropical climate

Throughout history, Vietnamese people learned to manage food safety and storage by using the tropical weather as an advantage. Folks focused on fermentation to extend the shelf life of produce; to quench thirst, people either drank hot tea or used clay jars to cool down water by a few degrees.

When French colonists started living in Vietnam, they maintained their desire to live as comfortably as possible, according to their standards, even at the expense of the local people. One of the luxuries they couldn’t bring from home, but dreamt about, was cold beer. While ice trades, sourced from the frozen lakes of North America, flourished in large Asian ports in India, Singapore and Hong Kong, there is no evidence of a Vietnamese harbor importing ice. 

While it is highly likely that ice was imported from these regional ports, the lack of documentation indicates that it must have been in small quantities and for special occasions. The absence of consistent ice vendors revealed a market void, which paved the way for a lucrative industry. It was two French brothers, Victor and Gabriel Larue, who noticed the opportunity first. Victor started selling ice as soon as he arrived in Saigon in 1879; he was later joined by his brother, but their method wasn't documented until 1886, when the business scaled up. That year, they imported 140,000 kilograms of machinery to make ice, and built a secondary facility in Hải Phòng.

Saigon - Larue ice factory interior. Image via Les entreprises coloniales françaises.

The Larue brothers imported many kinds of machines to their factories throughout the years; whether they were compression or absorption refrigeration machines, the main goal was the same: the process of making ice is a continuous cycle where heat is constantly moved from one place to another. It starts with the compressor, which takes a low-pressure gas and squeezes it into a high-pressure hot vapor. The brothers used ammonia, having imported 15,000 kilograms of it in 1879.  This vapor then enters the condenser, where it releases its heat into the surrounding air and transforms into a high-pressure liquid. This liquid then passes through a throttle valve, where the sudden drop in pressure causes its temperature to plummet instantly. Finally, this cold fluid enters evaporator coils, which are submerged in or surrounded by water. Through the metal walls of these pipes, the refrigerant absorbs the heat from the water until the water solidifies into ice.

Business grew quickly: the target clientele was not only restaurants or bars, but also private individuals who were seeking blocks of ice for their homes. The sales process used prepaid vouchers that had to be bought beforehand, requiring a minimum purchase of one kilogram.

The Larue brothers were not the only ice makers in Vietnam. For example, there was an ice factory in Hanoi that was opened in 1886 by an entrepreneur named Berthoin. However, whether due to poor business management or bad luck, he didn’t succeed in lasting long. The price when he opened his business was 10 cents a kilogram (roughly equivalent to EUR2.5 today), which was criticized as too high. He had to cut the price to 6 cents a kilogram two years later. That same year, he lost a lawsuit that he initiated against a competitor whom he accused of selling tickets that were allegedly too similar to his, because they shared the same color palette. The next summer, Hanoi underwent an ice shortage, as Berthoin destroyed his old factory to build a new one. With quantity far outpaced by demand, some people queued for more than four hours to get some ice for their families.

The Larue brothers didn’t miss the opportunity and bought this factory in 1893, expanding their business to Hanoi, near the one they created in Hải Phòng.

Larue ice factory, Hải Phòng - Ice house. Image via Les entreprises coloniales françaises.

But maintaining an ice factory isn’t easy. One of the main issues was the quality of the water, which can affect the taste of the ice and, more critically, can create some serious health issues. Indeed, with water drawn from the river where trash was thrown, people were afraid that diseases could spread faster — most notably cholera, which caused many deaths in Asia at the time. In 1895, in Hải Phòng and Hanoi, many customers complained about the ice quality, as red stains could be seen through the blocks, and it tasted rotten. Wells were dug the next year in Hanoi to source better-quality water.

Larue’s success attracted a lot of attention, in particular amongst the brewing sector. The ice and beer businesses have always been intricately linked by the necessity of refrigeration. Specifically, the fermentation process must occur at a constant temperature, meaning that the ability to keep liquids cold is key for good beer. The Larue brothers had already entered the brewing industry as early as 1909, making their own “Larue” beer, which is still sold today.

Larue beer ad in the newspaper L’Information d’Indochine, April 26, 1934. Image via Les entreprises coloniales françaises.

Another colonial family, the Denis brothers, who were initially involved in the import/export of goods to Indochina, took the opportunity to merge the two already-linked industries into one and created the Brasserie et Glacière de l’Indochine in 1927. The Denis brothers bought the Larue business, and other breweries like Brasserie Hommel, and instantly became a formidable operation. This company, currently named Brasseries et Glacières Internationales, grew into an international firm with subsidiaries in many French colonies and later, other countries. Today, they are particularly dominant in the African beer market, but remain influential globally.

Outside of Hommel brewery in Hanoi, Tonkin. Image via Les entreprises coloniales françaises.

The business of colonists at the expense of locals

Ice-making was always intended to cater to French colonists' desire to drink cold beer, a colonial context wherein their wishes were satisfied at the expense of Vietnamese people. For example, the French relied on exploitative labor and the prioritization of private luxury over public sanitation. 

Larue ice factory, Hanoi. Image via Les entreprises coloniales françaises.

Of course, workers in the ice and brewing factories were indigenous people, and the dynamic between them and the colonists was characterised by systemic inequalities. Vietnamese people were seen as a means of labor for white settlers, as illustrated in this article extract from L’Avenir du Tonkin (May 18, 1895) about a French doctor addressing the poor quality of ice and coming up with a solution using “con-gai” (a French word derived from the Vietnamese term con gái, refer to local Vietnamese women):

In the process, the Brasserie et Glacière de l’Indochine generated a lot of money: in 1930 it declared a net profit of 329,714 piastre, the equivalent value of around EUR2.3 million in 2025. French settlers got rich by exploiting a cheap local workforce whom they viewed as mere objects, for a luxury — chilled beer — that was almost exclusively consumed by settlers, as noted in this article extract:

Household refrigeration developed when foreign companies entered the market after Đổi Mới, which enabled families to store food more safely and for longer. Meanwhile, most of the ice consumed in Vietnam is still made in industrial ice factories. They power restaurants and cafes, which account for most of the ice sold. Ice has historically been linked to the creation of beer in Vietnam, consumed by French colonists, but Vietnam has formed its own ice-beer relationship too: most Vietnamese people today like to drink beer with ice, a local custom that diverged from western conventions. Throughout their history, ice factories have never ceased to expand, paving the way for many creative cold drinks, like cà phê sữa đá with condensed milk — a humble Vietnamese cold beverage that is now conquering the world.

What is the Tower of Hanoi? While this official name might sound mysterious, if you’re an avid consumer of adventure media and role-playing games or just simply a curious former child, it’s likely that you’ve seen or even played this game without knowing what it’s called.

Tower of Hanoi is a mathematical puzzle involving a platform with three pillars and a series of discs of varying sizes arranged neatly from biggest at the bottom to smallest at the top. The objective is usually to move all the discs from the leftmost pillar to the rightmost pillar following a set of strict rules.

A simple animation showing how to solve the puzzle. Image via Geeks for Geeks.

The rules are: only one disc might be moved at a time, only smaller discs can be placed on top of larger discs, and only the disc on top of a stack can be moved. While, in theory, there could be any number of discs — the more discs there are, the longer the solution will take — children’s toy versions often feature from seven to nine discs that are differently colored.

At this point, you might be tempted to ask: what does this have anything to do with Hanoi, or Vietnam, for that matter? To answer this, one needs to trace back to the Tower of Hanoi’s origin, which many attribute to one Édouard Lucas, a mathematician living in 19^th-century France with a fondness for puzzles.

Édouard Lucas (1842–1891)

It’s believed that Lucas invented the game, which became commercially available in 1883. “The Tower of Hanoï - Authentic Brain teaser of the Anamites - A game brought back from Tonkin,” the promotional material for the puzzle reads. The marketing credits the inventor as “Professor N. Claus (of Siam), Mandarin of the College of Li-Sou-Stian.” Read the rest of the text on the packaging below:

The name N. Claus (de Siam), of course, is just an anagram for Lucas d’Amiens, with Amiens being the French hometown of Édouard Lucas; and Li-Sou-Stian is an anagram for Saint Louis, the school where he taught. The rest of the promotional text seems to be an exercise in passionate Orientalism, where the author tries to cram in as many eastern references as possible — perhaps in a bid to capitalize on the exoticism of a barely explored Far East in the 1880s.

The illustrations on the original packaging of the Tower of Hanoi game by Lucas. Images via The Puzzle Museum.

Considering the hodgepodge of Asian nations mentioned, maybe it was purely a coincidence that Hanoi made the official name, even though the only scenario where the Tower of Hanoi is related to Vietnam would be if the discs themselves are made of bún chả patties. In Vietnam, most toy vendors just refer to it as “đồ chơi tháp cầu vồng.”

Regardless of The Tower of Hanoi’s origins, its popularity has never waned, both as a children’s toy and as a recreational mathematical brainteaser. The puzzle has appeared in a number of pop culture products, including TV series like Doctor Who and Survivor, and RPG game titles like Mass Effect, Dragon Age, and Genshin Impact.

The preference for light skin is widespread in Vietnam. It is discernible from the mere sight of Saigon’s streets during the day, when the majority of riders are covered up — in hoodies, jackets, jeans, pants, and masks — for protection against UV radiation, but also to prevent tanning under the blistering sun. Especially more so for women, light skin is often associated with beauty and social status, so protection against the sun has become more than a health concern.

But when did this preference for light skin begin? On one hand, it is tempting to think that its roots lie within colonialism and white supremacy; that light skin is desired via its proximity to whiteness. But while the sentiment behind such a perspective is not entirely untrue, the history of Vietnam's preference for light skin is considerably more complex. Colonial dynamics certainly reshaped and reinforced existing biases, but the preference for lighter skin predates French colonial rule. And while the same bias no doubt continues to exist today, its manifestation in modern times is also quite different from that of a century ago. Both then and now, light skin signifies social status via its proximity to modernity — the difference, however, lies in the kind of modernity envisaged. While the preference for light skin exists broadly across genders, the standard is considerably less rigid and pervasive for men. As a disclaimer, this piece focuses exclusively on women, largely due to the bias towards women of existing scholarship on the history of cosmetics and beauty in Vietnam.

Perceptions of skin color during colonial Vietnam

In pre-colonial society, the preference for light skin was largely a product of class dynamics. Darker skin signified exposure to the sun under long days of labor, while lighter skin signified upper class privilege and leisure. In exemplifying the beauty that was associated with light skin, the poet Nguyễn Du describes the protagonist of the legendary Tale of Kiều as possessing skin as white as snow.

Under French colonial rule, the preference for light skin continued to persist, but under different terms. Colonialism did not so much create or displace the existing bias as it did complicate and reconfigure it by layering a logic of whiteness on top of what existed before.

The front cover of the Ngày Nay volume published on July 26, 1936.

Cosmetics and the skincare industry is one site in which such dynamics were, and continue to be, most visible. As the historian Christina Firpo explains in her recent book Beauty and the Nation — a thorough scholarly account of the development of beauty culture in colonial Vietnam which this section draws heavily from — mass-market cosmetics were popularized only in the 1920s and 1930s, both in Vietnam and around the world. The boom in the cosmetics industry could be attributed to a number of factors such as the development of new technologies for better and more consistent products, a shift in public perception of cosmetics away from its association with sex work, as well as innovations in transportation which allowed goods to travel around the world. It should be noted, though, that forms of skincare existed in pre-colonial Vietnam as well. For instance, women often used a concoction containing rice powder to whiten their skin, as per Sino-Vietnamese medical tradition.

“Crème Siamoise,” Phụ Nữ Tân Văn, May 16, 1929

Cosmetics gained significant traction in colonial Vietnam because it offered an avenue for self-expression for women. This was significant especially at a time when women sought to challenge traditional gender norms. In addition to challenging polygamy and the expectation of chastity for widows, women also began to reject the idea of arranged marriages and seek out romantic love instead. 

Cosmetics during the mid-late colonial era entailed a range of different products: lipstick, mascara, perfume, as well as powder and skincare products such as cream. Together, these elements constituted the aesthetic of the “modern girl.” In reality, however, only elites could reliably afford such cosmetic products, except perhaps for lipstick. Most cosmetics were likely manufactured at homes and local pharmacies. Regardless, the mere advertisement of such cosmetics commodities — most of them European, some Japanese — carried immense social force, for advertisements in newspapers and magazines were powerful sites of meaning-making with respect to gender and womanhood.

The cosmetics industry burgeoned in colonial Vietnam precisely by capitalizing on this appetite for social change with respect to gender norms and a yearning for modernity, as epitomized in the caricature of the “modern girl.” And skincare products were of course no exception to this. In one telling advertisement, Firpo points out, the Swiss brand Tokalon “assured women that men were fascinated by smooth white skin and promised that Tokalon cream would lead men to fall in love with them.” As Khanh Tran writes in a previous Saigoneer article, “well-off women in Vietnam cherished good, fair skin over any painted visage”

‘Tokalon,‘ Phong Hóa, October 26, 1934

Interestingly, even while targeting a Vietnamese audience, cosmetic brands most often featured white European models. As Christina Firpo explains, “In some cases it is possible that the companies simply never converted their original European advertisements for the local market, but it is likely that many deliberately used European models to capitalize on their associations with white prestige.” Firpo points out that even Vietnamese-owned businesses, such as the beauty institute Mỹ Viện Amy, featured French women to promote its products.

“Mỹ Viện Amy,” Ngày Nay, September 7, 1940

While the preference for light skin long predated French colonial rule, the terms through which lightness was made legible were shifting. Lightness was no longer legible only through class, but was now also being read through the lens of western modernity and proximity to whiteness, though, of course, the two were by no means fully separable.

The present

While the preference for light skin persists today, it is abundantly clear that beauty ideals are now increasingly modeled after women of East Asia — especially, of Korea. As NPR correspondent Elise Hu writes in her book Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture from the K-Beauty Capital, “the modern Asian face is increasingly defined by a Korean beauty standard, with Southeast Asian women especially looking toward Korea for the latest and most advanced beauty products and procedures.” This modern face is defined by ideals of clear, pearl-white skin, a V-shaped jawline, a high and slender nose bridge, and double eyelids — facial features around which now globally famous industries of skincare and plastic surgery have developed. 

It goes without saying that beauty ideals vary among individuals. At the same time, however, the broad enthusiasm for “K-Beauty” in Vietnam is not difficult to discern. One need only look at the leading fashion magazines such as Elle Vietnam and Đẹp Magazine to observe this, where articles and images of Korean stars, such as Jisoo of Black Pink, are frequently featured. Behind this lies the significant influence of Korean cultural and economic capital: the soaring popularity of K-pop and K-dramas, as well as the fact that Korean brands constitute the highest share of Vietnam's beauty and personal care market (more broadly, Korea is once again Vietnam’s largest foreign direct investor, as of this year). What set the stage for this shift was Vietnam's integration into the global economy following the Đổi Mới period, in conjunction with the subsequent rise of Hallyu, or the “Korean Wave”' which began in the late 1990s and has escalated dramatically since the 2010s.

Jisoo, a member of K-pop group Blackpink, on the cover of Elle Vietnam's September 2023 issue.

In Vietnam, the ideal skin complexion that so many desire during the decades after Đổi Mới, epitomized by Korean skincare, is perhaps best encapsulated by the word “sáng,” or brightness. The prominence of this word should be evident to anyone who has spent time cruising through shopping malls or surfing online in search of skincare products. It should be said that the emphasis on brightness is not ubiquitous across different geographies — as a start, we can note that the phrase “bright skin” itself already feels awkward in English. In comparing the websites of higher-end skincare brands across Vietnam, Korea, and the US, the same product is marketed differently on their Vietnamese websites, often centering its effects for brightening. 

Kiehl’s Clearly Corrective Dark Spot Solution

Take, for instance, one of Kiehl’s bestsellers in Vietnam. While its English name is “Kiehl's Clearly Corrective Dark Spot Solution,” on Kiehl’s Vietnamese site, the same product is advertised as a “brightening” serum, explicitly invoking the word sáng. The Korean brand Innisfree’s bestseller in Vietnam, “Cherry Blossom Glow Tone-Up Cream,” again features the word sáng in the SEO product title on its Vietnamese website. To be sure, “glow,” of course means bright too, but the difference is that the Korean name for the product transliterates the word “glow,” mainly for the purpose of manufacturing a kind of scientificity associated with English in Korea. One can find the word sáng peppered throughout the online stores of other major cosmetics brands like L'Oréal Paris, as well as Vietnamese-owned brands like Cocoon. Clearly, there is a kind of craze over sáng within the world of skincare.

Innisfree Cherry Blossom Glow Tone Up Cream

On one level, “brightening” is simply an alias or moniker for “whitening.” But the semantic difference between the two terms is significant and worth reflecting upon. The sociologist Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu writes, “sáng refers not to a skin color, but to a quality, a luminousness that radiates from the skin.” In contrast to a notion of fairness or even softness, sáng signifies a kind of strength that radiates from within, a quality not wholly reducible to the realm of aesthetics. This is evident from the fact, for instance, that sáng can also be used to describe brightness with regards to intelligence or even one’s future. During her visit to Vietnam, she recalls frequently encountering the phrase “sáng, sạch, đẹp” as a descriptor for ideal skin complexion — a mantra that, fascinatingly, echoes “xanh, sạch, đẹp,” a slogan that is oft-repeated by urban developers. 

If colonial-era advertisements featured European women to invoke the allure of western modernity, sáng points towards a different set of aspirations. It reflects a yearning for what sociologist Kimberly Kay Hoang calls “pan-Asian modernity”: aspirations for modernity that looks not to the west, but elsewhere in Asia for inspiration, especially as the influence and power of East Asia continues to rise, both regionally and globally, while the West’s is in slow decline. From this perspective, it becomes possible to read sáng not simply as a norm for beauty, but as a reflection of broader ideals for Vietnam’s socioeconomic posture. If sáng signifies whiteness, it is, as Linh writes, “surely whiteness of a different color.”

Trần Thị Thu Ngân on the cover of Harper's Bazaar Vietnam's November 2016 issue.

A comparative perspective of the present day and colonial era shows us the ways in which beauty ideals for skin are both shaped, and made sense of, by forces larger than “mere” aesthetics and beauty. Both then and now, the preference for light skin has persisted through its signification of social status, though the conception of modernity underpinning it has since shifted.

To end on a personal note: I myself am a Korean with tanner skin than most Koreans — a product of having lived in Vietnam for many years — and I feel entirely comfortable with this fact. In writing this piece, I’ve thought about why. Personally, I’d like to think of it as evidence of a rejection on my part of colorism as a form of social bias and discrimination. But if I’m being honest, I think my comfort speaks more so to two things: firstly, my gender as a man, which offers more lenience with respect to standards for skincare; and secondly, my socioeconomic class, in large part constituted by my position within Vietnamese society as a Korean — which places me firmly within the very sphere of modernity that sáng aspires for, thus, in a rather twisted way, making the need to signify it through light skin somewhat obsolete. From this perspective, my rejection of light skin is not a feat, but rather a feature of a deeper issue, of which colorism is one manifestation. Of course skin tone should not determine how one is perceived or judged. But when we say that colorism is a problem, we should be clear-sighted: the problem lies not so much in the fact that skin tone is used as an indicator of status, but in the fact that a hierarchy of social status — organized around rubrics of race, class, and modernity — exists at all.

The Saigon Hospital at 125 Lê Lợi was originally built in the late 1930s as the Polyclinique Dejean de la Bâtie. The French named it after French doctor Théodose Déjean de la Bâtie, who devoted his life to treating members of the Vietnamese community.

While the wealthy Chinese communities set up their own well-appointed hospitals in Chợ Lớn from as early as the 1870s, medical facilities in Saigon during the first half century of colonial rule were provided almost exclusively for the use of European settlers.

During that period, Vietnamese people living in Saigon had to travel to the Chợ Quán Hospital for treatment, or alternatively to visit the tiny Thị Nghè clinic of the Sisters of Saint-Paul de Chartres, which, according to one government report, “compensated, to some extent, for the lack of an Hôpital indigène in Saigon.”

The need to create a hospital “specifically designated for indigenous people” in Saigon was taken up at the turn of the century by Dr Théodose Dejean de la Bâtie (1865–1912).

A former director of Chợ Quán Hospital who developed a pioneering programme to improve standards of maternity care, Dejean de la Bâtie was elected to the Colonial Council in 1900 and lobbied vociferously for the government to provide more civilian doctors for the treatment of local people.

In April 1903, using his own money, Dejean de la Bâtie set up “a clinic on the rue d’Adran [Hồ Tùng Mậu], behind the Justice of Peace,” which offered “free medical and surgical treatment to all Asians who wished to benefit from European medicine.”

Dejean de la Bâtie personally funded the operation of the clinic for nearly two years, but its success nearly bankrupted him, and, in 1905, the municipal government took over its operation. In that year, the clinic received subsidies from the Saigon Municipality (1,200 piastres), Cholon Province (300 piastres) and Gia-Dinh Province (300 piastres).

According to a report of 1905 in the Annuaire général de l'Indo-Chine française, “Although recently founded, this institution has given brilliant results and seems to be destined to be of great service. For the first 12 months of operation, the free consultation room was crowded with 3,151 patients of all nationalities. In total, they came here 15,717 times to ask for bandages or medication, or simply for advice on their health. During this period, Dr Dejean de la Bâtie, assisted by his colleague Dr Flandin, carried out 166 surgical procedures under chloroform, 86 under cocaine and 21 under ethyl chloride. The free healthcare services are provided here by Dr Dejean de la Bâtie, assisted by a European nun, an Annamite nun, an Annamite nurse and a secretary-interpreter.

When Dejean de la Bâtie died unexpectedly in 1912 at the age of just 47, many tributes were paid to the man who had devoted his life to improving standards of medical care for local people.

Speaking in 1930, his former deputy, Dr Georges M L Montel, commented that he “cared too much for his patients and didn’t charge fees… It was only when his clinic became such a major undertaking, and his personal resources were no longer adequate to pay for it, that he consented to hand it to the municipality. He had a heart of gold. That’s why he died penniless, and his widow, instead of being chauffeured around in a car like so many other ladies, had to be content to live as a modest teacher.”

Two years after his death, the clinic founded by Théodose Dejean de la Bâtie was relocated to a larger building on boulevard Bonard, the site occupied today by the Saigon Hospital. Known initially as the Polyclinique du Marché or the Polyclinique du boulevard Bonard, it was placed under the direction of Dr Georges Montel.

However the demand for medical services by local people continued to grow, prompting Colonial Council member Trương Văn Bền in 1919 to urge the government to build a much larger Hôpital indigene in Saigon in order to cope with the “alarming growth” in the number of local patients.

Indochina – medicine before 1930.

As annual patient numbers at the Polyclinique du Marché rose from 28,982 in 1922 to 37,957 in 1924 and 45,161 in 1926, the authorities responded by opening smaller clinics at Tân Định (1925) and Khánh Hội (1930),

Finally in 1935, Cochinchina Governor Pierre Pagès (1934-1939) approved plans to rebuild the Polyclinique du Marché as a fully-equipped city hospital.

Constructed and opened in stages between 1937 and 1939, the new hospital cost 185,000 piastres (1,850,000 francs) to build. In February 1938, the Colonial Council decided that it should be named the Polyclinique Dejean de la Bâtie, “in honour of the devoted and selfless philanthropist who was the creator of the municipal polyclinique.”

A “colorized” image of the the Polyclinique Dejean de la Bâtie in 1949.

While most of the funding came from the city government, the Hui-Bon-Hoa family made a sizable donation of 38,000 piastres, securing for themselves the naming rights to the south wing (nearest the market), which became known as the “pavillon Hui-Bon-Hoa.” The north wing was named after Bâtie’s protégée Dr Georges Montel, who had become known in the 1920s for his groundbreaking treatment of leprosy, while other smaller donations were recognised by the naming of individual consulting rooms and operating theatres. A marble plaque was posted in the main entrance lobby, bearing the names of all donors and benefactors who had contributed to the construction.

A CFTI electric tram passes the Polyclinique Dejean de la Bâtie in the early 1940s.

After 1955, the Polyclinique Dejean de la Bâtie was renamed the Saigon General Hospital (Bệnh viện Đa khoa Sài Gòn). Since that time it has continued to function as one of the most important hospitals in the city.

However, in recent years the fabric of the building has become badly degraded and, in an article in Người Lao Động, the hospital was described as “seedy, dirty, with inadequate service and bad management.” The same article quoted a leader from the Hồ Chí Minh City Department of Health as saying: “It has all the necessary facilities and a convenient location, but the performance of the Saigon Hospital is very poor....This situation must be resolved. The Department of Health is considering whether the entire hospital personnel should be reorganised or the hospital should be closed completely.”

The Saigon General Hospital today.

This article was originally published in 2015.

Tim Doling is the author of the guidebooks Exploring Huế (Nhà Xuất Bản Thế Giới, Hà Nội, 2018), Exploring Saigon-Chợ Lớn (Nhà Xuất Bản Thế Giới, Hà Nội, 2019) and Exploring Quảng Nam (Nhà Xuất Bản Thế Giới, Hà Nội, 2020) and The Railways and Tramways of Việt Nam (White Lotus Press, 2012). For more information about Saigon history, visit his website, historicvietnam.com.