Ho Chi Minh Port Museum (Nha Rong Dragon Wharf) | HCMC, Vietnam

Before I say anything about Ho Chi Minh, I'd like to issue a disclaimer: I find him fascinating as a person and possessing of many superior intellectual and moral attributes. I've read Ho Chi Minh Thought and the Revolutionary Path of Viet Nam by General Vo Nguyen Giap. I've been to his mausoleum, childhood home, revolutionary office, and a pile of other sites dedicated to him. That said, perhaps culturally, definitely personally, I can't abide the dear leader mentality, no matter to whom it's applied.

The Ho Chi Minh Port Museum (otherwise known as Nha Rong or the Dragon Wharf), is just another Ho Chi Minh museum, which you can find in any (and every) large or midsize city in Vietnam. It's got a few personal effects, a couple pamphlets, and seems to exist solely to inculcate schoolchildren. to my mind, it's a waste of a good building; on the other hand, at least crowding and overdevelopment has been staved off around it, which is more than can generally be expected in Saigon. the entire Ba Son port area, with umpteen untouched architecturally and historically significant 1880s and earlier French buildings, was sold to a residential property developer in 2015 to build more quote-unquote luxury highrises, so the Ho Chi Minh connection is indeed the sole reason the building survives at all.

The building itself dates from 1860, though the site has operated as a mercantile port since at least the 1610s. 45 nautical miles from the sea, the port was never able to effectively compete with Hong Kong, Singapore, and Jakarta, but was so well-established in terms of infrastructure and renown that the French decided not to bother moving it. From 1861 to 1901 the wharf was operated by Messageries Maritimes, and in June 1911 Ho Chi Minh doubtless processed through the building as a kitchen worker on a steamer destined for Marseille. The area has not been landfilled at all, so the shape of the river here looks the same as it does in photographs from 150 years ago. The view is nice, and the grounds are nice. It is not a must, in my opinion, but it is a quick visit.

Quang Trieu Assembly Hall (Hội Quán Quảng Triệu) | HCMC, Vietnam

Originally built in 1887 by immigrants from Guangzhou and Zhaoqing, this assembly hall was partially destroyed by fire in 1920 but rebuilt totally by 1922. It is particularly notable for the enameled porcelain figurines, made from Cay Mai pottery and products of Thach Loan - My Ngoc glazed ceramics.

Thien Hau Thanh Mau is the central goddess here; on either side are Kim Hoa Niang (Kim Hoa Thanh Mau) and Long Mau Nun. Many other gods are worshipped here, including Bac De (Chon Vo), Van Xuong De Quan , Quan Am Bodhisattva , Ngoc Hoang , Quan Thanh De Quan , Tai Bach Tinh Quan , and Cuu Thien Huyen Nu.

If you wish to witness a religious holiday here, there are ceremonies on January 1st, 9th and the lunar new year; March 23rd, April 17th, May 8th, June 24th and July 22nd.

Saigon Skydeck | HCMC, Vietnam

I went here on the rec of a friend and it was a waste of time and money. I imagined it would be a lot higher up . . . as a New Yorker, the 49th floor doesn’t impress. I thought the views would be more beautiful, but Saigon is just as ugly a city from the 49th floor. Worst of all, the ticket was almost $9! Bitexco should be ashamed. There’s a souvenir shop, and it seems they offer small rotating cultural exhibits; when I was there it was a small history of ao dai room and winning toothpick art sculptures. This place is inexplicably the fourth google auto-suggestion result when you google “Saigon . . .”. Skip it and spend it on lunch!

Saigon Dinner Cruise: The Oriental Pearl | HCMC, Vietnam

I was really excited to try a dinner cruise down the Saigon river. It seemed like an old-fashioned luxury. I saw the Elisa from the balcony of the Ho Chi Minh Port Museum and thought, what an interesting old wooden junk, I’ll try that one! I later found out that the Elisa is too large to sail, so it’s just permanently docked as a restaurant boat. There are many dinner cruises, but I wanted one of the old wooden boats, and the Oriental Pearl was the nicest one running.

It’s not expensive; it seems like locals can get tickets for $16 but any non-Vietnamese gets charged about $10 more. For the money, the food is sufficient, but not good. There’s a Western menu and an Asian menu; I chose the Asian menu, which ended up being two oysters, two fried chicken drums, bland fried rice in a pineapple, a fried crab roll and glass noodles with a couple shrimp. Drinks, including water, are extra. The cocktails are weak, and the boat is extremely hot, even with the fans on, even in December. The views are, frankly, ugly, with mostly 2000s and 2010s poorly lit office buildings all along the shore at first; further out, there’s just no lights, nothing.

If those were all my gripes, it would just be a neutral experience I wouldn’t choose again. However, I couldn’t wait to get off the boat for two other reasons I hate Vietnam for in general: chainsmokers and noise pollution. Everyone is allowed to smoke everywhere on the boat, and they do. I’m allergic to cigarette smoke and people in Vietnam act like it’s 1990 and it’s all in my head, maintaining a disgusting attitude as well as a disgusting vice. Wake up, it’s 2023 and you’re in a public health crisis! The Western world banned this 20 years ago.

As for noise, they have different musical entertainment on each section of the ship- the rear dining room, center dining room, lower dining room, and upper deck. There are no walls between the spaces. So 4 different live bands or sound systems playing at the same time, all night, and you can hear all of them, loud and clear. The level of noise pollution in Vietnam in general is also a serious problem; even local karaoke places think it’s cool to jack the volume up to decibel levels literally considered torture by the CIA, and the strategy on this boat was no different. They actually had a charming traditional music troupe rotating through the spaces, and it makes me genuinely sad to know their talents are wasted here night after night.

Lastly, the crowd was fine in the center dining room, mostly couples on dates and tourists, but a bit trashy elsewhere. The rear dining room was taken up by some sort of corporate party where they were drinking to the point of bad behavior, and the lower dining room was dedicated to the occupants of two giant Chinese tour buses also getting really wild. Fun for them, not so much for the smaller parties onboard.

Well, yolo. It was on my list, I tried it. Traveling isn’t perfect!

Po Nagar Cham Towers | Nha Trang, Vietnam

The earliest stele discovered on the site of the Po Nagar Cham towers is dated 784, and references a mukhalinga decorated with jewelry and resembling an angel's head being carried off by Javanese pirates, “men living on food more horrible than cadavers, frightful, completely black and gaunt, dreadful and evil as death." It indicates that once the Cham King Satyavarman regained power in the area of "Ha-Ra Bridge", he restored the temple, but the jewels were never recovered or replaced.

Originally a Hindu place of worship, with each of four towers dedicated to a different god, today the temple is dedicated to Yan Po Nagar, the goddess of the country, who came to be identified with the Hindu goddesses Bhagavati and Mahishasuramardini, and who in Vietnamese is called Thiên Y Thánh Mẫu. Local Buddhists do pray here, but it’s mostly crowded at 25 minute intervals by Chinese and Korean tourists arriving on tour buses. For this reason, although the place is so small it would be difficult to spend more than 20 minutes there, there’s a security guard installed at the main tower to block anyone not part of the tour groups from entering for 10 to 15 minutes at a time. Don’t worry though; there’s nothing of interest inside.

Ongoing wars between the Cham and Khmer in the 9th through 12th centuries saw gold and stone statues and lingas offered and stolen over and over; no original artifacts remain here. The one room “museum” houses some low quality educational examples only. The towers were used continuously until the Vietnamese vanquished the Cham in the 17th century, becoming increasingly used by Buddhists as the Cham converted. The main sculptures, however, are Hindu, depicting the Hindu goddess Mahishasuramardini or Durga, the slayer of the buffalo-demon, and dating from the 10th and 11th centuries.

This site is not a must-see if you’ve visited other Cham temples. It is very convenient though: on the north side of Nha Trang, it’s at most a $5 grab ride from anywhere, and the admission ticket is less than $2.

FITO Museum of Traditional Vietnamese Medicine | HCMC, Vietnam

The Museum of Traditional Vietnamese Medicine (FITO) in Ho Chi Minh City is a privately owned museum detailing the development of Vietnamese herbal medicine, also known as Southern medicine, as a distinct tradition from Northern, or traditional Chinese, medicine. It also covers related traditional therapies like acupuncture, medicinal wine and footbaths.

Vietnamese traditional medicine differs from Chinese traditional medicine in that it uses far fewer animal products, relatively more fresh than dried herbs, generally less complicated decoctions, and there have been a series of famous Vietnamese doctors over hundreds of years establishing recipes different from those used in China and other neighboring regions. 

That said, Vietnamese traditional medicine originates from southern Chinese practices, and is far closer to Chinese traditional medicine than Indian traditional medicine in every way, unlike neighboring Cambodia and Thailand. Furthermore, Ho Chi Minh City specifically has a distinctly Chinese element to its culture thanks to centuries of Chinese immigration, intermarriage, and economic dominance in Cholon. So, the traditional medicine utilized here today is yet another degree closer to what might be encountered in southern China.

I’ve already covered the topic of TVM in some depth in my post about the traditional medicine museum in Hoi An, so please refer to that post for more information. I would say the subject is explored in greater depth at the FITO museum, but either place has more information than anyone not interested in medical history or personal treatment could ever care to know.

If you can’t tell, I’m not a believer in traditional medicine! However, I still think this museum is a must-see in HCMC- not because of its explanation of TVM, but because it is in fact an art history museum! The building is new construction, but a complex marriage of salvaged antique architectural and ornamental elements and necessarily new elements, handmade in the traditional way with traditional materials. There are countless priceless artworks, antiques, and artifacts, on display throughout, dating as far back as prehistory, and including Chinese, Thai, Korean, Cham and Khmer pieces in addition to the purely Vietnamese. All are arranged with care in as close to the traditional manner as possible; many examples are equal to or better than what they have in Vietnam’s national art museums. This is clearly the lifetime collection of a connoisseur.

My photos simply don’t do the place justice, due mostly to an overabundance of green toned fluorescent tube lights and very warm-toned, high wattage, small spotlights throughout that frustrated the color correction software of my iPhone; the video gives a more realistic impression.

Whoever assembled this place clearly has extensive knowledge of Vietnamese art and architectural history, a refined eye, and no budgetary concerns. Even the elevator is adorned with custom-carved, mother-of-pearl encrusted panels in the style of traditional room screens and cabinets. The collection here has clearly been thoughtfully assembled over decades, and the most I could get out of the guide was that it was ‘a hobby’. He was able to answer questions about specific pieces, but I found myself reading the various labels hoping to learn more about the age and provenance of the object, not what it depicted about traditional medicine. Spoiler: those details were usually not provided. 

I found this place so intriguing I visited twice. I think for decorative arts buffs, this is the most underrated hidden gem in Ho Chi Minh City. Also, while I typically decline the tea/avoid the shop, I tried it here in a moment of literal, physical weakness, and was very pleasantly surprised. The lotus and licorice tea is very sweet and warm and cost only 50,000 dong for a box of 20 teabags, very reasonable for the quality.

Mariamman Temple | HCMC, Vietnam

A fishing village colonized by the French in 1673, Pondicherry (now Puducherry), the capital of French India, was France’s oldest and longest surviving Indian colony, only legally merging with modern independent India in 1962. By the 19th century, Pondicherry was called ‘the French Riviera of the East,’ having become a terribly wealthy port and resort town. Indians there were permitted to rule themselves under Hindu law with French oversight, but in an effort to mitigate the worst effects of the caste system and create a class of loyal, semi-assimilated workers, the French issued the Pondicherry Decree of 1881, giving native Indian residents of the colony the option to renounce their Hindu personal and legal status, and instead be governed by the French Civil Code, effectively making them French citizens.

As expected, a new caste was born, commonly called “renouncers,” many of whom quickly used their new legal status as equal French citizens to migrate to France’s newer colonies in Indochina, where those fluent in French and educated in French schools were able to easily obtain government jobs as administrators, small claims judges, postal workers and policemen, and were exempt from the corvee system imposed on the native Vietnamese. Seizing the opportunity, Nattukottai Chettiars (a Tamil caste traditionally involved in money lending, banking, commerce, and various mercantile trades) followed suit, renouncing and moving to Saigon to set up businesses. It was these renouncers and chettiars who built the Mariamman temple around 1890, bringing in a proper architect from British Madras to create a modest Dravidian style temple.

Mariamman is the goddess of rain, one of the most popular village goddesses of Tamil Nadu, and was traditionally worshipped in order to ward off diseases featuring rashes and traditionally thought to be caused by heat, including chickenpox, smallpox, measles, etc. Over time, the temple attracted more ethnic Khmers living in Saigon and practicing the Hindu religion, and some intermarriages between Tamils and Vietnamese. Due to their higher social and legal status, Tamils in Saigon were referred to as ‘Bengali' or ‘Chetty’, while immigrants from British India were called ‘Bombay’.

The Tamil-origin descendants of Renouncers mostly left with the French in 1954, leaving the temple to the Chettiars and Khmers. During Reunification in 1975, the few hundred families still worshipping here mostly fled the country, and administration of the temple was assumed by the People’s Committee, which dictated no priest could receive a salary, only live off the charity of congregants. This anti-religion strategy worked, with only one Tamil priest able to remain thanks to the generosity of the few remaining families. This priest is said to have adopted two Khmer orphans, whom he trained as priests. They married Vietnamese women, and each had a son, who are the current priests at the temple. Only 50 families regularly worship here, none are of Tamil origin, and the grandsons of that last Tamil priest speak very limited Tamil. The temple survives mostly on donations from tourists; donations from wealthy Tamils living in Malaysia and Singapore finance a soup kitchen and festival days. Worship is daily at 10:00 AM. Visiting here is sort of like finding a bottle washed up on a beach, a bottle recognizable from decades ago but no longer made, a frosty piece of sea glass. . .

A Historic Walking Tour Around Hoan Kiem Lake | Hanoi, Vietnam

The Ho Chi Minh Memorial Complex | Hanoi, Vietnam

The Ho Chi Minh complex in Hanoi is probably the number one must-see place in the city. It’s made up of four main elements, and a loose fifth: the biggest draw is Ho Chi Minh’s Mausoleum, followed by the Stilt House, the One Pillar Pagoda, the Ho Chi Minh Museum, and the grounds of the Presidential Palace. 

Most people line up to circle the preserved corpse of Ho Chi Minh himself, which is treated as a religious relic: encased in glass, in a giant stone vault with low lighting, and maintained by the same Russians that handle Lenin.  No cameras are allowed, no hats are allowed; cleavage, shoulders and thighs must be covered, and a white-uniformed honor guard monitors everyone uncomfortably. One odd thing about it all is that Ho Chi Minh did not ask for or even imagine anything so gruesome at all, but if you're morbidly curious, check it out.

Speaking of Ho Chi Minh, his museum is way over-designed. It has the feeling of a 90s amusement park, but provides excellent insight into his life and philosophy nonetheless. The gist is that he grew up in a mandarin family, but his father lost his position in a distressing way. Realizing he wouldn't get a great education or job thanks to his dad's reputation, he traveled the world for 30 years, collecting ideas about political and economic systems of governance, and returned to Vietnam with three goals: independence, unification, and communism. 

There are many museums in Hanoi covering the practicalities, if you will, of the Indochina and Vietnam wars, like the Ho Chi Minh Trail Museum, B52 Museum, etc., but if you're actually looking for the reasoning behind it, that's better understood here.

Just outside the museum is the One Pillar Pagoda, perhaps Vietnam's most famous temple. Originally built by emperor Lý Thái Tổ in 1049, the pagoda was the site of an annual royal bathing ceremony for hundreds of years. The original architectural concept is called a lotus station, wherein a hexagonal building recalling a mandala sits on a single stone column in the middle of a lake, resembling a lotus blossom, a Buddhist symbol of purity. Over hundreds of years and many restorations, the temple came to its final architectural form in 1840. The original building was dynamited in 1954, so what stands now is a 1955 reproduction of the 1840 building. Over the past 20 years, there has been on-and-off debate over replacing the building with a reproduction of the original thousand-year-old design.

The Ho Chi Minh Stilt House, built in 1958 by architect Nguyen Van Ninh, is a modern super luxe version of the Tay stilt houses common in Viet Bac, where Uncle Ho built up the Revolutionary Army before taking Hanoi. It's both very stylish and very of its time; if you like mid-century modern, Danish modern, etc. you should really enjoy this luxe Asian version of it. 

The last few displays are in the outbuildings of the Presidential Palace. The palace itself was built by Vildieu in 1900 as the French Colonial Governor’s residence, and is not open to the public; it's only used for government meetings. After taking Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh refused to live there because he felt the optics were bad. However, one of the outbuildings, romantically called House 54, served as his home and office from 1954 until the stilt house was completed, and there are some truly boring rooms to look into there. There is also a small local restaurant on-site and a gift shop with the most extensive inventory of communist memorabilia I’ve ever seen.

Vietnam Museum of Ethnology | Hanoi, Vietnam

Built in 1987, The Vietnam Museum of Ethnology showcases the culture of the 54 ethnic minorities living in Vietnam, plus some inevitable exhibits on Kinh culture of the past. The museum has three main areas. The primary building shows the traditional costumes, instruments, language, crafts, and rituals of the various ethnicities. The secondary building expands beyond Vietnam to show the roots and presence of the various ethnicities elsewhere in Southeast Asia, and the connections between them. The third area, and definitely the most interesting of them, is the outdoor garden, featuring full-scale dwellings built by various tribes as they would have done in their villages. 

The 54 ethnic minorities of Vietnam are an intriguing subject. Composing roughly 9% of the population and divided into dozens of subgroups, photographers and anthropologists have spent decades motorcycling the country, finding, meeting, living with and studying them. 

Making up 88% of the population, Viet or Kinh people arrived in the red river delta from Southern China between four and five thousand years ago. Some of the ethnic minorities were already present in the area, but many were not. Over around 1000 years, the Kinh conquered or absorbed indigenous groups until they became the overwhelmingly dominant culture, moving ever further south. In Vietnamese creation myth, this history is described thus: The Dragon King of the South married Au Co, a beautiful northern princess, and she gave birth to 100 strong princes. However, missing his lowland home, he decided to return there. He left 50 sons in the highlands, where they fathered the tribes, and took the remaining 50 south, where they became the Kinh people.

Members of the highland tribes are distinguishable by physical features, language, dress, and customs, in that order. As an ignorant outsider, even when visiting them in their homes, some groups are more easily distinguishable than others. For example, the difference between Dao and Hmong was obvious to me, but the difference among subgroups- Red v. Black Dao, Black v. Green Hmong etc., needed to be explained to me. Relatively speaking, Westerners have a lot of cultural and linguistic overlap; if you understand one Romance or Nordic language, with a bit of relatively superficial study you can understand a good part of them all. It was wild to me that people living on either side of a single mountain in Northern Vietnam wouldn't understand each other or intermarry for hundreds or thousands of years. The origins and development of the related groups, their diasporas and distinctions, are a rich field of study for ethnographers. 

Based on language, there are 8 original peoples, if you will, who over the centuries have subdivided into the 54+ we know today:

1. Mon – Khmer (Ba Na, Brau, Bru Van Kieu, Cho Ro, Co, Co Ho, Co Tu, Gie Trieng, Hre, Khang, Khmer, Kho Mu, Ma, Mang, M’nong, O Du, Ro Mam, Ta Oi, Xinh Mun, Xo Dang, and Xtieng)

2. Tay – Thai (Bo Y, Giay, Lao, Lu, Nung, San Chay, Tay, and Thai)

3. Tibeto – Burman (Cong, Ha Nhi, La Hu, Lo Lo, Phu La, and Si La)

4. Malayo – Polynesian (Cham, Chu Ru, E De, Gia Rai, and Ra Glai)

5. Viet – Muong (Chut, Kinh, Muong, and Tho)

6. Kadai (Co, Lao, La Chi, La Ha, and Pu Peo)

7. Mong – Dao (Dao, H’Mong, and Pa Then)

8. Han (Hoa, Ngai, and San Diu)

At the museum, they are grouped as:

1. Muong, Tho, Chut

2. Tay-Thai Group

3. Kadai Group

4. Hmong-Yao Group

5. Sino-Tibetan Group

6. Northern Mon-Khmer

7. Truong Son Range - Central Highlands Mon-Khmer

8. Austronesian

9. Cham, Hoa, Khmer

According to the museum, what the ethnic minorities have in common is their traditional way of life: most of the groups rely on wet rice agriculture, combined with raising poultry, hunting, and fishing. They also typically practice handicrafts including weaving, forging, pottery, and carpentry for personal consumption and local barter, and only participate in commerce on a limited basis. Most ethnic groups consider the village as the most important social unit; however, village organization, house styles, family, society, and religious traditions are diverse. Spiritual beliefs remain genuine, and rites shape calendars.

The role of the ethnic minorities in recent history, and their degree of assimilation to Viet, American, French, and Chinese culture, politics and religion is left untouched. I was shocked to learn that many Hmong are some degree of Catholic, for example, and had to visit them to learn it; it's not in this museum. Also, the Montagnards rather famously allied with the French during the Indochina wars, in exchange for the promise of an autonomous homeland, but their role in this recent history and in modern Vietnamese politics, where they are well represented in the party congress, is not explored.

As for the museum itself, I think it's a good jumping-off point but rather too superficial. If you're coming in with a total ignorance of the topic, I'd recommend you visit the bookstore first, read up, then hit the museum to match the objects of material culture with the info and photos you've absorbed. In terms of costume, jewelry, shamanistic and cultural objects, you can see much of the same at the history museum and the women's museum. However, the ethnology museum really sets itself apart in the garden. 

If you are not going to make it to every mountain village during your trip to Vietnam, you can rest assured that the houses here are full-sized, rather luxurious dwellings built by the ethnic minorities themselves, who were paid dearly to come to Hanoi and do the job. The houses and the objects in them are the real thing, and immense fun, especially for kids. 

The bookstore is also excellent, and the gift shop, while expensive, is a Craft Link shop, with excellent quality souvenirs made by the ethnic minorities themselves, and other underprivileged populations, ensuring your money flows back to them, at least in part. The restaurant employs students at a vocational school for underprivileged youth, training them for hospitality jobs, so it's certainly worth patronizing. Lastly, there's an excellent daily water puppet performance. I've been to the famous water puppet theater in Hanoi as well, and this performance is equally wonderful, if not better, because it provides a booklet explaining each of the stories, which are hundreds of years old and well known by all, rather like Punch and Judy shows in the UK. 

If you have kids, this museum is a must-see in Hanoi. If you don't, it's not an absolute must, the information can be gleaned elsewhere, but I did truly enjoy it.