Exploring Saigon and Beyond - Saigoneer

A Recuperating Vietnam in 1980, as Documented by Philip Jones Griffiths

2026-10-14T16:00:00+07:00

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]

Gỏi Khô Bò Lê Văn Tám Connects Generations of Saigoneers Over Papaya Salad

2026-10-14T12:00:00+07:00

My favorite genre of Saigon food places is most definitely address-less street vendors. With no name, no fixed location, no menu, no contact information, before Google Maps and smartphones, whether you can satisfy your craving for their food purely depended on the strength of your memory (to find them again) and the level of luck the universe bestowed on you that day.

While Gỏi khô bò Lê Văn Tám’s schedule is a little more dependable than the average street vendor, a tiny jolt of delight still swells in me whenever I turn the corner at Hai Bà Trưng Street to find their usual glass display filled with shredded papaya there. Also known as xắp xắp or xấp xấp — an onomatopoeia for the clanking of scissors cutting pieces of beef jerky — gỏi khô bò is one of Saigon’s oldest street snacks.

According to dì Sáu, the main proprietor of this cart, she started working here as a young lass about half a century ago, when it was run by her aunt and a plate was 50 xu (VND0.5) — this currency denomination doesn’t even exist anymore, just to show how historic the place is. After the aunt retired, she took over and has been serving countless papaya salad portions since, right at the same spot on Hai Bà Trưng Street overlooking the lush foliage of Lê Văn Tám Park.

The cart’s longevity has turned it into a rare culinary intersection of generations of Saigoneers: my Gen X dentist knows it, my Gen Y friends know it, and my Gen Z coworkers have also shared plates with her classmates. Everybody went through the exact same experience: settle down on the park sidewalk across the street, yell out your orders, and someone will cross the traffic to deliver your food.

Today, the operation has been upgraded to include a park-side satellite serving station run by her relatives for dine-in guests, and dì Sáu’s original cart is only for takeaways. The “dining area,” however, is still the raised cement edges of the street trees, and the “seats” are cut-out pieces of linoleum. Less than five minutes after we order, the gỏi khô bò arrives on iconic aluminum plates, as timeless as the operation itself.

Gỏi khô bò comprises finely shredded young papaya, chunks of black five-spiced marinated beef, a heap of golden shrimp crackers, a sweet-and-sour soy dressing, and optional chili sauce. At VND28,000 a plate in 2026, it’s not meant to be a full meal, but a refreshing snack to quell the summer heat. Here, the papaya is shredded more thoroughly, allowing it to soak up the sauce wonderfully — an excuse to consume a somewhat excessive amount of lip-smackingly umami dressing.

We finish our plates just in time for a bout of drizzle to sweep through the area. The street is suddenly filled with a rainbow of raincoats. Metallic plates of leftover sauces clank under the trees. This is the quintessential Saigon street food scene unfolding right before our eyes, like a carefully reconstructed museum diorama.

To sum up:

Opening time: 12pm–8pm
Parking: Use the park's parking lot
Contact: N/A
Average cost per person: $ (under VND100,000)
Payment: Cash, Transfer
Delivery app: ShopeeFood

Gỏi khô bò Công viên Lê Văn Tám

Opposite of 259A Hai Bà Trưng, Xuân Hòa Ward, HCMC

Art Project ‘The Lottery of Forgotten Dreams’ Is a Wild Alchemy of Vé Số and Photography

2026-10-13T11:00:00+07:00

Vé số ticket number 984430 yields a magenta fish contorting atop a ghostly image of an apartment high-rise in Tân Phú in “The Lottery of Forgotten Dreams – Topographies of the Unseen,” an art project by photographer Christian Berg. The experimental project, available to view in full online, employs computer technology to combine photography, numerology, and mythology and playfully reimagine how one visualizes Saigon.

The image produced by lottery ticket No. 984430

The process to achieve the surreal images is relatively straightforward. Berg purchased 100 vé số tickets from local vendors and created an algorithm to randomly assign a fixed and repeatable number to coordinates on a map of Saigon, the city he has called home for nearly 20 years. He then traveled to the locations and took photos with the rule that he wasn’t to get off his motorbike. The last two digits of each lottery ticket would determine an AI-generated creature inspired by Albrecht Dürer's famous 16^th-century works.

“The Lottery of Forgotten Dreams – Topographies of the Unseen” online interface.

Selecting Dürer, a fellow German, was meaningful to Berg for several reasons. While he first considered using Đông Hồ paintings, he said being mindful of cultural appropriation and his positioning as an outsider was important. Moreover, Dürer was one of the first artists to produce and sell prints of his work, providing a fruitful entry point for the discussions of art, commerce, technology, and ownership that exist at the forefront of current-day discussions of creative production. In addition to selecting an animal, the algorithm Berg designed uses the vé số number to select a color and 3D spatial orientation after pixilation. The resulting images aim to offer aesthetic intrigue while suggesting the overlap of the spiritual world and the tangible one via vé số's relationship with numerology and cosmic beliefs.

Images corresponding to lottery numbers 359927, 521951, 233240 and 485496 (from left to right).

“Once you make the game, you can make your own house rules,” Berg told Saigoneer of the two-year project. He thus skipped tickets that yielded coordinates that would send him into the middle of the ocean. Similarly, he weighted certain locations to ensure that the visually diverse center of the city would receive more attention than the somewhat homogeneous outskirts.

“The Lottery of Forgotten Dreams” comes as a logical next step after Berg’s “All the Places I have Lived” project. For that one, he trained AI on photographs he had taken of all the Saigon neighborhoods he has called home and then had the computer generate images for each. The glitches and errors, including impossible shadows, nonsense signage, and illogical physics, speak to the fallibility of memories as well as falsehood’s place in feelings of nostalgia.

Two photographs from “All the Places I have Lived.”

“Stop playing it safe,” Berg’s supervisor advised as he was formulating the project as part of his PhD coursework at RMIT Melbourne’s School of Art. For the majority of Berg’s time in Saigon, he has practiced conventional photography as a documentary photographer, commercial photographer, and lecturer at RMIT Vietnam. This PhD program allowed him to go beyond his comfort zone and discover what he could learn via experimentation and adoption of new, sometimes radical techniques and schemes. Particularly, the system he devised forced him to act counterintuitively and put together ideas and images that he normally wouldn’t, and in the process discover new means of creative convergence.

In its application of AI, the project reflects Berg’s larger approach to technology. While an ardent supporter of human creativity and credit, he says one cannot just shut themselves off from the existence of new technologies. He explains to his students that “The hardest and most important lesson is to be curious about the world,” and that “saying no outright is not the approach of a curious mind.”

“The Lottery of Forgotten Dreams – Topographies of the Unseen” as featured at the RMIT's Vietnam Festival of Creativity & Design.

The place of AI in art is and will continue to be the subject of intense debates. Projects like “The Lottery of Forgotten Dreams – Topographies of the Unseen” serve as not only examples of what can be done, but also how curiosity is driving artists to play with it.

The Tragic Story of Cầy Vằn Bắc Is Why You Shouldn't Buy Civet Coffee

2026-10-12T10:00:00+07:00

While Saigoneer’s Natural Selection series has already covered a number of iconic species and types of animals, including the tiger, Asian elephant, dogs and cats, there’s a good chance most of the people reading this haven’t heard of today’s critter.

Cầy vằn bắc (Chrotogale owstoni), or Owston’s civet, is a member of the civet family, which spans over a dozen species across tropical Africa and Asia, with Southeast Asia accounting for most of this diversity. This particular civet is named after Alan Owston, a British wildlife collector who lived from 1853 to 1915. The cầy is identified by four black-and-white stripes on its back, and they feed on earthworms, sweet fruits, small animals and insects.

Civets are small, omnivorous mammals that are largely nocturnal, and in Southeast Asia they are best-known for their link to civet coffee, which is largely produced in Indonesia as kopi luwak, the Philippines under different regional names, and here in Vietnam as cà phê chồn — sometimes you may see it sold simply as “weasel coffee.”

To create this coffee, an Asian palm civet (Paradoxurus hermaphroditus) is fed coffee cherries, which they partially digest and then poop out. The cherries are fermented during this process, and then turned into coffee. This practice — which raises serious ethical questions in its modern form — began in the 19th century amongst locals who resorted to them after not being able to afford the beans they harvested for the Dutch.

But we’ll return to that later, as the Owston’s civet isn’t actually used for cà phê chồn.

To create cà phê chồn, an Asian palm civet is fed coffee cherries, which they partially digest and then poop out. The cherries are fermented during this process, and then turned into coffee.

According to a report titled “Conservation Strategy for Owston’s Civet 2019-2029” compiled by five major conservation organizations, this species was listed as Endangered on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species in 2016, and has among the smallest distribution area of any omnivore in Asia. Vietnam accounts for most of its natural range, though Laos and a section of southern China also host Owston’s civets.

Trinh Thi Mai, Owston's Civet Programme Coordinator at Save Vietnam’s Wildlife (SVW), tells Saigoneer in a call that there is discussion of whether the species should be upgraded to Critically Endangered, as experts estimate that their population has declined by 50% over the last 15 years thanks to habitat loss and indiscriminate hunting and poaching.

“In 2020, we set camera traps in four national parks, and we only found Owston’s civets in Pù Mát [in Nghệ An Province], though there is recorded history in Cúc Phương,” she says. “We got seven pictures in Pù Mát, but this is an elusive species that is hard to capture by image.”

An Owston’s civet (Chrotogale owstoni) photographed in captivity at Cúc Phương National Park, a major partner in the international cầy vằn bắc breeding program. Photos by Robert Marc Lehmann.

Mai adds that there have been recent reports of cầy vằn bắc in Kon Plong, a district in Kon Tum Province that is an emerging biodiversity hotspot, which is a positive sign, but more research is needed as a population in the area has not been confirmed yet.

“This means there are still some surviving habitats we don’t know about, and we haven’t estimated their population, but it seems there are some animals there,” she says.

Sadly, the species is a victim of extremely bad luck. Unlike the pangolin, it is not specifically targeted for meat or medicinal practices with zero scientific backing; and unlike the Asian palm civet, it is not targeted for coffee production: but it is caught in the deadly crossfire of these trades.

The coffee threat

“Because civet farming operations depend on wild civets to restock, and because the most common hunting method is snaring, we can assume that this supply chain will impact all ground-dwelling civet species, including species which are not used in civet coffee production,” explained Daniel Wilcox, Chair of the IUCN Small Carnivore Specialist Group, in an email.

Snares are cheap traps that close around an animal’s leg and either hold it in place until it dies from dehydration or starvation, or leave it mortally wounded even after escaping. They are a huge driver of wildlife loss in Southeast Asia.

Did you know?

The WWF estimates that over 12 million snares are in place at any time across forests just in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam

According to Wilcox, most endangered wildlife species in Vietnam have almost no presence outside of protected areas, so hunters largely focus on these spaces, and there is no precise targeting when it comes to a snare: if one was set in order to supply palm civets to a civet coffee farm, it will still close around the leg of an unwitting Owston’s civet. Civet coffee farms don’t need the Owston’s since they are difficult to raise, but there is still a connection.

“Civet meat is another commodity in the country, so it is easy to imagine hunters illegally snaring inside protected areas and then selling civets that produce civet coffee, with all the other non-coffee eating species being sold for their to meat to restaurants, or possibly to civet farms,” Wilcox says.

“In 2020, we conducted research focusing on coffee farms in order to search for the Owston’s, and we found that among 57 farms in Lam Dong and Dak Lak, none had this species, but people from at least two farms said they had seen them in other provinces,” Mai recalls.

In 2019, SVW rescued three Owston’s civets from a farm in Lâm Đồng. This incidental link between the civet coffee industry and the Owston’s civet is deadly for the latter, but it’s worth taking a moment to highlight the sector’s impact on the civets it does use as well. According to Mai, the conditions at civet coffee farms are generally poor, with the animals kept together in very small enclosures.

“These are solitary animals, except during mating season, so it’s very stressful for them and they can attack each other,” she warns. “They are also fed industrial food, and are force-fed coffee fruit during coffee harvesting season, which can be poisonous when they are fed continually.” A common palm civet may naturally eat some coffee fruit in the wild, but only as a nutritional supplement to its normal diet: “When they are force-fed coffee, it’s not good for their health at all,” Mai adds.

Experts’ message for anyone considering civet coffee, either in Vietnam or elsewhere, is simple: “Don’t buy it!”

Given this, Wilcox’s message for anyone considering civet coffee, either in Vietnam or elsewhere, is simple: “Don’t buy it! We know it impacts wild civets, and the conditions that civets are kept in are horrendous…Even if one can close their eyes to the conservation and animal welfare impacts, then the public health risks that this industry poses are enormous.”

Mai notes this last aspect as well, explaining that a virus at one civet farm in southern Vietnam killed every civet there, and viruses can easily jump to other species — including humans, as we have all been made well-aware of over the last two years.

The future of the Owston’s

Given the complex nature of the threats facing this species, conservationists are pushing for a concerted effort largely within Vietnam to prevent it from extinction.

The most prominent angle of this is the creation of a sustainable breeding program. In fact, an ex-situ program does exist through cooperation between Cúc Phương National Park and several zoos in Europe, including the Newquay Zoo in the United Kingdom, but the involved population is too small.

As the 2019 conservation strategy report notes, reducing demand for wild meat and strengthening protection from hunting would greatly benefit the Owston’s civet, in addition to countless other species, but these are incredibly difficult tasks that will take decades to accomplish.

Mai explains that breeding is a major focal point of SVW moving forward, and they are already working with the Saigon Zoo — which has seven cầy vằn bắc — to eventually move the individuals to Cúc Phương for breeding. “We are planning to work with other zoos across Vietnam so that when they receive an Owston’s, they contact us and work on the breeding program,” she says. “We’re also working with wildlife farms to raise awareness.”

A cầy vằn bắc at the Saigon Zoo. Photos by Michael Tatarski.

This includes a website called NoCivetCoffee.com and a Facebook page called "No Civet coffee - Không sử dụng Cà phê chồn" that “raise awareness of civet coffee consumers on civet conservation problems, as well as civet welfare and zoonotic diseases that might associate with civet (coffee) farms in Vietnam.”

SVW has also come across some evidence of Owston’s civets being sold online as pets, though the extent of this — as with so many aspects of the wildlife trade, both legal and illegal — is unknown.

Breeding is seen as the most viable path forward, with Mai explaining that conservationists want to start now, instead of waiting until the species nears extinction — an outcome that is plausible given ongoing levels of hunting in its range and the fact that we don’t know how many cầy vằn bắc remain in the wild.

While the conservation report features a number of specific goals for the next decade that will require intense work from both the public and private sectors, there are two simple steps to help the Owston’s civet, and other species, that anyone reading this can take: don’t buy cà phê chồn, and tell other people why they shouldn’t consume it either.

Unless you visit the Saigon Zoo, you may never see a cầy vằn bắc in person, but know that the small, uniquely striped-and-spotted animals will thank you for doing so.

Graphics by Hannah Hoàng, Phan Nhi and Simona Nguyễn.
Photos by Matthew Maran, Newquay Zoo, Shaldon Wildlife Trust, Curriculum Nacional, Michael Tatarski, Zoochat.com, iucnredlist.org.

Hẻm Gems: Wake up Early, We're Getting Hủ Tiếu Cá for Breakfast

2026-10-10T19:00:00+07:00

When I used to live in Hanoi, I always knew that if an eatery only opens for half a day, the food is probably certified, at least by the locals, to be not only good, but excellent. There is something written in the local traditions that specific dishes should be served at particular times of the day.

Editor's note (2026): Hủ tiếu cá Anh Mai has relocated to 153 Lê Thị Riêng, the photos in this article depict the eatery's previous location.

For example, in every Hanoian’s consciousness, cháo sườn is strictly quà chiều, a cozy snack for the afternoon, although guests still come at any time of the day whenever their hearts desire. In some cases, perhaps the restaurant's reputation has built up so well over the years that the turnout is so consistently immense that they simply run out of stock in half a day. Therefore, you always have to put a certain amount of effort into scheduling, almost as if the meal itself is a special occasion.

Waking up late runs the risk of having no fish for your noodle bowl at Anh Mai.

Now, to a person whose concept of hủ tiếu cá was completely foreign until last Sunday, I do not know if this is a dish for which certain temporal rules apply. I have only discovered recently that a hundred ingredients could be combined with the chewy noodles — pork, shrimp, squid, satay, beef meatballs, even bones, and the list goes on including either with-broth or dry variations. However, there was something about a plain and earthy bowl of fish hủ tiếu that piqued my interest. Hủ Tiếu Cá Anh Mai, which served this dish specifically, came highly recommended online.

The Sunday breakfast crowd.

Online reviews specify that the store would close at around 12pm, so I was determined to pick myself out of bed and get there by 10am, hoping it would not be unbearably crowded. Anh Mai is located on Lê Thị Riêng, one of those rare streets in District 1 that is neither riddled with traffic nor high-rise buildings. Every table was filled, but the great thing was that the owners never seemed particularly frazzled during our visit. Like every good restaurant that has been in operation for over ten years, Anh Mai has their regulars. The woman in Table 4, for example, briefly mentioned to the smiling owner how she was running late that morning and did not have the time to drop by earlier. It was a familiar sight: families with small kids, office workers, and teenagers came in and out every 40 minutes or so.

A big portion (VND75,000) gets you a substantial amount of fish fillet.

After a short wait, our order of three hủ tiếu cá with broth and one dry hủ tiếu were served to Table 0 where we sat. With a generous amount of flaky white snakehead meat, garnished with scallion, pickled radish chopped into minuscule speckles, some bean sprouts, and a splash of soy sauce, my hủ tiếu bowl held the piping-hot soup within like a secret. Upon the very first bite, the fish let me know that it was the star of the dish — firm and moderately sweet in a tenderly seasoned broth.

Dry versus broth versions.

I learned from locals that this snakehead’s freshness was almost unparalleled across Saigon. As my chopsticks sank beneath, ample noodle layers were unveiled. The chewy texture of hủ tiếu seemed to take a step back to let other ingredients shine. No sooner had I thought that was the extent of the experience than a jolt of saltiness touched my palate in the most pleasant way imaginable. Was it from the pepper? I am still not quite sure, but the hide-and-seek game of flavor persisted until the last bite.

For your slurping pleasures.

We finished our meal at 11am and nodded our heads in contentment, even with the VND75,000 per person bill. It was simply worth it. As new customers started to flood in, we quickly parted ways so as not to overstay our welcome. Like every good meal, hủ tiếu at Anh Mai requires one to take their time — waiting, enjoying, and collecting themselves from that enjoyment. It's thus a good thing we waited until Sunday instead of going on Friday like the original plan. While there’s more for me to learn about the customs of eating hủ tiếu from Saigoneers, hú tiếu cá is now for me, perpetually, without debate, a Sunday dish.

To sum up:

Opening time: 6am–11:30am
Parking: Bike only
Contact: 0906783242
Average cost per person: $ (under VND100,000)
Payment: Cash, Transfer
Delivery App: ShopeeFood, Grab Food

Hủ Tiếu Mì Cá Anh Mai

153 Lê Thị Riêng, Bến Thành Ward, HCMC

In MARG1N, a Resolute Return to Print Media That Dissects Southeast Asian Cinema

2026-10-10T18:00:00+07:00

The joy of reading, for most of my life, had been primarily grounded in the joy of learning, feeling, and thinking through words, independent of medium. That is, until college, when I found myself repeatedly longing for Thursday mornings, when the week’s freshly printed student newspaper would arrive neatly folded and stacked, ready to be spread over the dining-hall table like wrapping paper. I came to realize then that the joy of reading was not simply about words; it was also about the tactile touch of paper and of the inexplicable satisfaction of flipping through pages bigger than my hands could reasonably manage.

When it comes to the pleasures of the tactile, material dimensions of reading, nothing, in my opinion, surpasses print magazines. Reading a print book offers the soft touch and the wafting scent of paper that digital versions cannot replicate, but even books with the most beautiful covers are inevitably too wordy (or most often, exclusively so) on the inside. Magazines, however, swirl ideas, illustrations, and images alongside the words, all brought together to life by the beat of color. As we become ever more subsumed by a digital world increasingly cannibalized by AI, print mediums like magazines can only become more precious.

Excerpt from Issue 2, where the focus is Vietnam and Singapore.

For such reasons, I was elated to recently find out about the existence of MARG1N, a print-only Southeast Asian film magazine based in Cambodia — the discovery of novel magazines in the region is always a delight! For cinephiles in Vietnam and across Southeast Asia in particular, MARG1N will surely be a treasured find, for there exists nothing quite like it for devoted filmheads. Supported by the Cambodian film production company Anti-Archive, the project is envisioned to consist of five issues, with each issue focused on a pairing of two or three countries in the region under a particular theme. The upcoming third issue, titled “Cosmos,” is set to release later this year, exploring the titular theme across the regions of Brunei, Thailand, and Timor-Leste.

The core team behind the magazine consists of three members: filmmaker and editor-in-chief Savunthara Seng (Thara), based in Cambodia; Alyssandra Maxine (Max), based in the Philippines; and graphic designer Sonich Touch, who was previously based in Cambodia but has recently relocated to Spain. As Max recounts in an interview with Minh Nguyen on Public Parking, the origins of the project trace back to when Max and Thara first connected on Letterboxd, where Max corresponded with Thara about how to pirate Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz’s eleven-hour film Evolution of a Filipino Family (2004).

Excerpt from Issue 2, where the focus is Vietnam and Singapore.

Given this history, it was perhaps natural that the theme of the first issue, published in 2024, would be piracy, focused on Cambodia and the Philippines. Titled “pirate.lov3r.2024.mkv,” Issue 1 brings together a cacophony of voices and perspectives, from filmmakers, artists, critics, and mourners of DVD stores, presenting piracy as something more than simply “an open secret” — tabooed, given its unlawfulness and illegitimacy; yet open, given its ubiquity. “Name me one Filipino filmmaker whose film education did not involve piracy,” writes Khavn De La Cruz in the opening piece, who describes piracy as “a form of film preservation.” The theme of piracy highlights well MARG1N's general approach to engaging with film not simply as a form of art that exists in the abstract, but as one lives and breathes through dynamic social formations, like piracy markets and DVD stores for instance, for which Phnom Penh, as with the Philippines, is a “notorious haven,” as Thara writes in the introduction.

Issue 2, titled “Traces,” focuses on Vietnam and Singapore. The subjects covered in the second issue are diverse, but all possess qualities shared with that of the trace: spectral, fleeting, fragmentary. In “Regarding Latent Cinema,” Daryl Chong reflects upon unfinished films within the context of Singapore. In “Minor Observations of Trần Anh Hùng’s Trilogy,” Lanah Chu offers fragmentary, bullet-pointed reflections of Hùng’s widely celebrated films, perhaps more aptly described as poetry than prose. In “Cinemas Are Battlefields,” TN Đan goes through public archives in Singapore to present the history of cinema bombings in Vietnam from the 1940s through the 1970s. In “Microbecinema,” Grace Song writes of the parallels between microscopy and cinema as a means to reflect more broadly on microcinemas and independent film screenings. The issue also contains a visual script, a letter, and a comic strip.

Excerpt from Issue 2, where the focus is Vietnam and Singapore.

Readers may find the specific combinations presented in each issue as surprising. But as the editors described in their interview with Saigoneer, the pairings are an intentional choice. Rather than pursuing what might be clichéd pairings — such as Thailand and Cambodia, for instance, given the geopolitical context — the MARG1N team tries to bring together countries without significant shared histories in order to “force” histories together in surprisingly productive ways. “When the countries are unified under a theme, we expose how similar we all are, despite very different forms of government and culture,” Thara remarked.

The idea of marginality behind the name of the magazine is core to the identity of the magazine. I sometimes find the notion of marginality to be somewhat tricky. If what is considered marginal cannot but be relational — namely, marginal to some other center or core — who is to say what constitutes such a core or center? To what and to whom, to be concrete, is Southeast Asian film marginal? As the MARG1N team points out, certainly to the “West” — especially given the sheer difference in available resources for the film industry and culture across geographies — but also to the “Asian” canon. As Thara explains, “When the West refers to Asian cinema, it’s only a couple of countries talked about as if representative of the whole of Asia.”

Excerpt from Issue 2, where the focus is Vietnam and Singapore.

But even within Southeast Asia and within specific countries, there exist internal dynamics of centers and peripheries, given Thailand, Vietnam, and the Philippines’ status as the “powerhouses” of the film industry within their region. But zooming in even further, Thara explained: “Even in the festival circuit, when the art house crowd refers to Thai cinema, for example, they think of only one name or representative… but it’s not just Apitchapong. The margin is spread throughout.”

Importantly, the magazine also conceptualizes marginality as a mode within film criticism as well. “When we imagine film criticism, we think of a kind of serious academia. We try not to do that because film criticism is also an amalgamation of other things, like poetry, visual essays, photography, collages,” Thara commented. “When combined together, they create dissonances and discourses that make a film magazine a film magazine. What is film criticism? It’s not just The New Yorker or MUBI. It can be more.” Remarkably, in reading the magazine, marginality does not feel as though it merely exists on the margins, but rather as permeating and dispersed across multiple layers, through and through, like dense rings of trees. Key to this quality is the magazine’s sustained attention to marginality in its various forms without, necessarily, the kind of self-marginalization often found in discourses on the subject.

Excerpt from Issue 2, where the focus is Vietnam and Singapore.

During our chat, Max described MARG1N also as a project to produce “cinematic memorabilia.” As one might expect from this vision, MARG1N’s magazines are gorgeous, with a distinctive style that I would characterize as simultaneously eclectic and dreamy. The MARG1N team emphasized that the visuality and materiality of their magazines are a huge part of their identity and the reading experience they try to emulate, via unconventional formatting of texts, play with fonts, as well as the scattering of images, textured and granular. Indeed, some of my favorite pieces were those that were heavily visual, including Nguyên Lê’s “Season of Changes” in Issue 2, in which he writes about re-tracing scenes from Tony Bui’s Three Seasons (Ba mùa, 1999) in present-day Saigon. Accompanying his commentary are pairs of photographs for each location re-traced: a still shot from the film alongside a photograph of the same place in the present day, taken at a similar angle.

I read MARG1N’s issues in the form of digital review copies, and I can only imagine what it must be like to hold and read the magazines in print, a feeling I dearly miss living in a city where English-language print magazines are difficult to come by. The element of print “completely changes what is written,” Thara remarked, reflecting upon the place of print in the age of AI. As he astutely put it, “the digital almost becomes dated when you really touch the pages.”

Images courtesy of MARG1N.

The MARG1N team have told Saigoneer that a limited number of copies of Issues 1 & 2 will be available at Dogma Collection in Saigon, beginning mid-October. One can find more detailed information about the availability of copies in other parts of Southeast Asia on their website.

By Preserving Tradition, Honoring Creativity and Showcasing Sustainability, Young Vietnamese Chefs Excel at Ngon Challenge by Marriott International

2026-10-08T17:11:33+07:00

The glossy menus, sleek decor, and iconic logos of international hotel restaurants often obscure the human stories behind each dish. While catering to global guests, these restaurants often serve meals with origins in family kitchens and regional culinary traditions. Young, local chefs balance nostalgic associations with contemporary techniques and creative expression to create these menus. Returning for its second year this past September, Ngon Challenge continued to celebrate and nurture Vietnamese culinary talent across Marriott International’s hotels and resorts in Vietnam.

Reflective of Marriott’s commitment to showcasing authentic experiences, Ngon Challenge’s most important criterion was that entrants revive a traditional dish with thoughtful use of preserved and fermented elements. Similarly, dishes were judged based on sustainability and local sourcing, as well as culinary execution and creativity.

The contestants were eager to impress the celebrity chefs on hand.

From 76 entries across Marriott International hotels in Vietnam, 11 finalists gathered at JW Marriott Hotel & Suites Saigon for the September 25 Final Round, following a menu creation workshop to refine their dishes and presentations. Amid an audience of foodies and industry luminaries, each chef arrived honored to compete and determined to win. Only three could be named Ngon Masters.

“Honestly, Hanoi cold snail noodle soup is gradually being forgotten. I want to bring it back so that people can enjoy it and rediscover it, after all the changes and adaptations it has gone through from one person to another,” shared Top 3 Ngon Master Phạm Xuân Thắng of Sheraton Hanoi Hotel, of his Hương Ốc – Ký Ức Hà Nội. He elevated his beloved grandmother’s snail noodle dish by replacing traditional noodles with handmade rice rolls and a delicate consommé that balanced fermented rice vinegar and lá lốt-wrapped snail sausages.

Phạm Xuân Thắng's Hương Ốc – Ký Ức Hà Nội's flavors were as precise as its presentation.

While his creation may not resemble the humble bowls his grandmother prepared for him growing up, her love and passion are in each bite. He noted, “It has been with me from my childhood through adulthood, and even now, it continues to bring me success. I’m very grateful to my grandmother.”

Hương Ốc – Ký Ức Hà Nội allowed Phạm Xuân Thắng to honor his grandmother while meeting expectations of contemporary diners.

While Thắng looked to personal memory to revive a disappearing Hanoi dish, Top 2 Ngon Master Trần Minh Phụng of The Westin Resort & Spa Cam Ranh turned to his family’s culinary tradition and the fermentation practices found across Vietnam.

Phụng’s bánh xèo tacos with Bình Ba lobster reinterpretation gracefully reimagined Central Vietnam’s iconic street food dish via impressive creativity. Instead of serving the dish only with nước mắm chua ngọt, he accompanied it with a small amount of concentrated caramelized fish sauce with chili that united sour, sweet, salty, and rich flavors. This was paired with a reinterpretation of a family favorite, cá um cà. The threadfin bream fish was transformed into a succulent filling and brilliantly returned to its own skin for an ingenious presentation atop fermented tomato juice that honored home-cooked flavors.

Trần Minh Phụng's bánh xèo tacos achieved a balance of creativity and tradition.

While relying on novel techniques for the dishes, Phụng said that “Vietnamese people, and anyone who knows about these techniques, understand that fermentation has existed in Vietnam for a very long time, along with many other traditional techniques. Whether you’re in the North, Central, or South of Vietnam, people across the country use some form of this technique.”

For Top 1 Ngon Master Nguyễn Xuân Hiển of Sheraton Saigon Grand Opera Hotel, the relationship between tradition and innovation was expressed through local ingredients, resourcefulness and a low-waste approach rooted in Mekong Delta cooking.

Nguyễn Xuân Hiển's medley of Mekong Delta flavors won him the contest's top spot.

Sustainable ingenuity was on full display in Hiển’s southern Vietnamese sour soup with fermented rice. He explained: “Back in the countryside, people used whatever ingredients they had available. For example, when cooking rice, we would save the leftover rice and the rice water instead of letting it go to waste. We could combine the leftover rice with the rice water to make cơm mẻ, which could then be used when cooking fish. As for the fish, in the past, when we caught fish from the canals and rivers, we would simply clean it, cut it into pieces, and put it into the soup. We would combine it with local vegetables that grew around the house or along the canals, such as điên điển flowers, water lilies, lotus flowers, and typical Southern Vietnamese herbs.”

Local ingredients brings hometown flavors for Nguyễn Xuân Hiển while being mindful of sustainability.

While he elevated his winning version by using grouper and crab, he also relied on familiar, locally grown vegetables and herbs. “For example, water spinach, green bananas, and ngò gai. I use green chuối xiêm because it gives the dish a slightly crunchy and chewy texture, which is really interesting to eat. These are ingredients that we can grow at home, or that naturally grow around us, so we don’t need to transport them long distances and consume extra energy.”

The dish’s low-waste approach was further established by using fish bones and crab shells to build the broth, allowing Hiển to share the Mekong Delta’s flavors and memories without losing the soul of the original dish.

Trần Duy Quang's rice cake was praised for its delicate handling of bold flavors.

Beyond the three Ngon Masters, the judges also recognized Trần Duy Quang of Renaissance Danang Hoi An Resort & Spa with the Best Dessert Award for his contemporary interpretation of Hoi An rice cake. Inspired by a childhood memory of the rice cake his grandmother would buy, Quang preserved its fermented flavor and characteristic airy texture while introducing coconut, mango and contrasting contemporary textures.Now in its second year, Ngon Challenge is continuing to build a longer-term platform for Vietnamese culinary talent, carrying the chefs’ stories from the competition into dining experiences for guests across the country. Each dish will connect diners with the culinary legacies of Vietnamese families and regional traditions, while revealing the passion and creativity of the chefs working across Marriott International’s hotels and resorts in Vietnam.

The Ngon Challenge finalists, judges and VIP.

Lycée Chasseloup-Laubat, the Saigon School That Taught Marguerite Duras, Norodom Sihanouk

2026-10-06T10:00:00+07:00

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.

Review: ‘Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell’ Is a Soul-Searching Mission in the Lâm Đồng Mist

2026-10-05T10:00:00+07:00

On the pastures of slow cinema where Andrei Tarkovsky, Tsai Ming-liang and Theo Angelopoulos reside, Phạm Thiên Ân's debut feature, Bên Trong Vỏ Kén Vàng (Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell), has made its mark as a notable entry for its distinctly Vietnamese vistas, tones and essence.

To see myself crying while watching Bên Trong Vỏ Kén Vàng — which Ân is credited as director, writer and editor — is something I never thought was possible. When the film's lead, Thiện (Lê Phong Vũ), indulges an elderly woman (NSƯT Phi Điểu) in a chat about presence and reincarnation, all I could do was let the tears run. Maybe it was because of Madame Điểu's delivery, a perfect balance between impassioned and dignified that convinced me that everything is more reality than senility. Maybe it was because she echoed my late bà ngoại's belief that a person's return to this harsh plane after they have exited it, should that happen, could be a chance to save others from hardship.

Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell is an expansion of Phạm Thiên Ân's previous award-winning short.

In a way, the newest Caméra d'Or winner Bên Trong Vỏ Kén Vàng is a return. The expansion of the 2019 short film Ân made, 14-minute Hãy Tỉnh Thức Và Sẵn Sàng (Stay Awake, Be Ready) won an award at Cannes as well. Yet, in the Bảo Lộc native's second and lengthier exploration of his world, more details are available. This version of the motorbike crash now specifies who has died, Thiện's sister-in-law Hạnh, and who has survived, Hạnh's young son Đạo (Nguyễn Thịnh). This version now has a proper central perspective, introduced in a tragicomic manner embedded in so many of life's designs — Thiện has to stop his massage session short of its “happy ending” because of the call about the accident.

Phạm Thiên Ân (middle) is a Bảo Lộc native, so he decided to base the story in his home province.

I must admit, explaining this film is not easy. Attempts to simplify and provide clarity can also be means to reduce and demystify it. There's a flow, simultaneously factly and divine, across all these following points, but I have to break it up so it might make sense: Thiện's journey from Saigon to Lâm Đồng Province to return Hạnh's ashes prompts him to relive matters that can make, or even have made, him somewhat aimless and reserved. He finds himself in an environment where faith is strong and the people's investment in it is unwavering. He again sees his girlfriend, Thảo (Nguyễn Thị Trúc Quỳnh), but in the robes of a nun. He also finds out where his brother, Đạo's father, is located.

It's best to enter Bên Trong Vỏ Kén Vàng equipped with the connotations behind the transformation a cocoon undergoes, as well as Ân's implication behind the imagery; he told French newspaper RFI in Vietnamese that the pupa within is “similar to a person's soul.” This is because Ân has really focused on the searching aspect of Thiện's soul-searching. This, in turn, validates how the endpoints of plot threads can be absent or undefinable. It even embeds time's immunity to manipulation to the runtime. Through Ân's vision, I get to see that, while Thiện and Đạo are the film's emotional hooks and the setting's enlargers, its anchor is in the navigating of concepts that humans have understood or have yet to. Perhaps that would explain why when Đạo asks Thiện where his mother is now, Đinh Duy Hưng's camera doesn't focus on nephew and uncle but instead the luminous hands of the alarm clock.

Thiện (Lê Phong Vũ) embarks on a journey to deliver his sister-in-law's ashes from Saigon to Lâm Đồng.

Speaking of the camera, I'm of the opinion that it also does more than its brethren in more conventional films. It doesn't just observe, but also gathers life. Per foreign critics and previews abroad, Bên Trong Vỏ Kén Vàng is an Eden of long takes, some featuring the most delicate tracks or pans as if they are imitating the winds of Vietnam's ethereal highlands. But even if the camera prefers to be stationary, it understands that dynamism and energy still exist through other bystanders, sounds and naturalism. Hưng's cinematography seems to be capturing existence as opposed to scenes.

Consequently, it feels apt to call everything that makes up Bên Trong Vỏ Kén Vàng — from technical aspects to its narrative themes — as “vessels” more than “components,” as they seem so willing to become secondary to grander, yet-established concepts. This seems to correspond better with the film's vision and an awareness of a higher power that, the closer to the end of the 182 minutes, I stop rationalizing and just accept. It's not that I have given up, but instead, I'm listening to the film. It seems to be advising me to be humbled by greater forces, named and unnamed or seen and unseen.

Catholic paraphernalia is often spotted in the movie, even though Yellow Cocoon focuses more on spirituality and faith than religion.

Does this necessarily make the film religious in design? Not necessarily, even when figures of Mary, Jesus and crosses are prevalent. In a memorable shot that might also be a nod to Tarkovsky's also nature-rich Solaris, a son of God figurine, submerged, is seen resting beneath brushing grass blades. There's also the feeling that, despite heavenly presences on walls at ceremonies, on shelves, above doors and the like, none of our characters has an overt or devoted connection to them.

This “giving in” nature also allows the illusory to cohabit and gain prominence. In one stunning sequence that epitomizes Bên Trong Vỏ Kén Vàng's dedication to aural excellence, Thiện rouses himself from sleep and wanders around under the heavy rain and darkness. Is this still Lâm Đồng, or a drenched purgatory? A camera that normally stays or trails now moves as if sentient. Is it as confused and exhausted as Thiện? Then comes respite, assuming the form of a tree with white butterflies as its leaves and flowers. Is this a variant of the unburnt bush that Moses comes across? The film doesn't answer this, it just moves on.

Bên Trong Vỏ Kén Vàng might not appeal to casual viewers due to its long running time and slow pace.

Bên Trong Vỏ Kén Vàng will alienate viewers because of its respectful ambiguity. They might wonder why Ân seems to adore the bumps and sounds along the road that surround Thiện's Honda Astrea more than the ride's point or resolution. They might register the elderly lady's words as, as Thiện was warned, elderly speak. I can't fault them for these interpretations, as the film does not ease itself into the deeper matters that the footage truly represents. Unlike the also lengthy Japanese Oscar winner Drive My Car, that also deals with deciphering one's place in life, everything in Yellow Cocoon, but especially its characterization, starts out as deep and naturally contemplative. In his performance as Thiện, I feel that Vũ shifts between uncertain and passive, as if it's the result of him being ever-prepared for the moment the camera and narrative focus on something else besides him. But when I pick up on the idea that Thiện is meant to be an avatar of Ân, Vũ's acting makes sense. As mentioned earlier, Thiện has been on a search, and not once has life stopped to confirm, deny, explain or guide him after he has gained or lost a thing. With that in mind, what gets portrayed is more human being than dramatic character.

Overall, Bên Trong Vỏ Kén Vàng gives me more confidence to interpret the gray that characterizes life. I hope its appreciators will feel the same, even if they might be hard to find. Aside from being a captivating and heartfelt experience, the film allows me to feel fine to never know where a stream starts and ends; I can just lie in it, with both ears underwater — just like Thiện — and know that there is a flow. Sometimes it's enough, the ability to view much of the world free from absolutes, from what one “do know” and “don't know.” Seeing as reality has yet to open itself to this notion, could this be the hardship my bà ngoại was referring to? If I do return, let me be your hero and break you out of the limitations that are cocooning you.

Photos courtesy of JK Film.

This article was originally published in 2023.

The Search for Vietnam's Largest Lacquer Artwork, Nguyễn Thế Khang’s 36 Old Streets of Hanoi

2026-10-04T10:00:00+07:00

The story begins in 1996. Before leaving for a month-long journey to Vietnam with 30 other Norwegian teachers, I had searched through books and online sources for hidden stories and overlooked places, an interest born from my experiences teaching Vietnamese refugees in Norway in the late 1970s and 1980s. One name caught my attention: the artist Nguyễn Thế Khang, who had conceived an ambitious plan to recreate Hanoi’s 36 Old Streets in a monumental lacquer work. The day after I arrived in Hanoi, I was welcomed into his home at 47 Triệu Việt Vương.

Khang was 74 years old at the time. He received me politely, but his excitement quickly overtook the formalities. Within minutes, we were standing before sketches for his great project: a vast visual reconstruction of Hanoi’s 36 streets set in approximately 1850, before French colonization. The work was to be created in sơn mài.

The scale was extraordinary. The completed work was planned as 16 large panels, together measuring 1.70 by 10.08 meters. A raised decorative border, filled with motifs illustrating important historical events and characteristic features of Hanoi’s culture, would run around the sides. The work would also include inscriptions in classical Chinese characters and in Vietnam’s old Nôm script. With the frame included, the total size would exceed 22 square meters.

Author Olaf Husby (left) and Nguyễn Thế Khang (right) in his Hanoi home in 1996.

Khang intended to use coromandel lacquerware, a technique with origins in China wherein several layers of black lacquer are applied to a prepared wooden surface. Once the lacquer has dried, the motifs are carved or incised into the surface, then colored, gilded, or inlaid with decorative materials such as mother-of-pearl. The images emerge vividly from the dark background.

Khang unrolled a sketch about a meter and a half long. Soon the table was covered with scenes from everyday life in old Hanoi: city gates, houses, markets, trees, canals, boats, bridges, monuments, temples, and pagodas. In its completed form, the work would show around 400 low buildings and approximately 2,000 people from all layers of society — working, bargaining, conversing, attending ceremonies, or practicing popular forms of religion and devotion. The detail was so extensive that even this vast work required simplification. Hàng Đào Street, for example, had once contained 120 houses; in Khang’s reconstruction, only 25 could be shown.

Reconstructing old Hanoi

The preparation was painstaking. Khang had spent years studying the period around 1850 and collecting information about a world and its customs that had largely disappeared. The tools, techniques, and working practices that once defined streets such as Hàng Bạc, Hàng Đào, and Hàng Bông had faded from living memory. Detailed information about architecture, clothing, and daily life had also become fragmentary.

Khang stressed that the work should be accompanied by a carefully prepared catalogue, placing the historical scenes, the structure of the Old Quarter, and the cultural references in a broader context. Much of his knowledge came from his history studies at Thăng Long Private School, one of Hanoi’s oldest educational institutions. His history teacher had been Võ Nguyên Giáp, later general and commander-in-chief of North Vietnam’s forces. After leaving school, Khang continued to study old Vietnamese and French texts about Hanoi.

Khang's lacquer work up close.

Nguyễn Thế Khang described his own style as neoclassical, though he had no formal art degree. As a child, he became familiar with embroidery and gilding and later developed his skills in modern artistic circles, becoming known for his lacquer and silk paintings. His artistic career truly began after he retired from the Vietnamese postal service in 1980, at the age of 58. At first, he copied Chinese calligraphy, but the rise of Vietnamese national feeling during and after the Sino-Vietnamese War of 1979 led him toward older Vietnamese traditions, especially depictions of folk festivals.

“I will begin the work in six months, in October 1996,” he said as he rolled up the sketch.

But there was one problem: money. The project was so large that he would have to hire assistants. To pay them, he had already begun selling his private works, pieces he loved and had never intended to put on the market. Even that would not be enough.

I was completely captivated. To my eyes, the proposed work was unlike any Vietnamese lacquerware I had seen before. Khang noticed my enthusiasm and asked directly: “Can you help me find funding?”

He had calculated the amount precisely: US$78,200. The sum would cover completion of the work, wages for two assistants, exhibition equipment in Hồ Chí Minh City and Hanoi, media promotion, and the printing of 1,000 high-quality catalogues.

When I left 47 Triệu Việt Vương, I carried with me notes, sketches, photographs, and written material that I could use in my search for support. In Khang’s own English version, the project was titled “The 36 Old Street Quarter of Hanoi in the XIXth Century.”

The search for funding

I returned to Norway in early April 1996 and immediately began looking for financial support. Raising half a million kroner from colleagues, friends, and acquaintances was out of the question. I knew no art patrons with a special interest in Vietnamese art. Norwegian artists’ organizations responded positively but could offer no concrete advice.

Then an opportunity appeared. In 1995, Vietnam’s prime minister Võ Văn Kiệt had visited Norway. At the reception dinner, Norwegian prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland had spoken of strengthening cooperation with Vietnam and announced that Norway would open an embassy in Hanoi in 1996. Diplomatic relations between Norway and North Vietnam had already been established in 1971.

Nguyễn Thế Khang.

In August 1996, the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (NORAD) announced a funding programme for cultural cooperation with developing countries. At the same time, it was announced that the Norwegian embassy in Hanoi would open during Brundtland’s return visit to Vietnam on October 8, 1996.

Suddenly the timing seemed urgent. I sent all the material on Nguyễn Thế Khang to the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and to Jens Kjell Otterbech, newly appointed ambassador to Vietnam. Since there was so little time to prepare and process a formal application, I suggested that a direct Norwegian grant to Khang’s project would be simpler. It would also be a meaningful way to mark Norway’s new presence in Hanoi.

On September 12, Khang was received by Ambassador Otterbech in Hanoi. Soon afterwards, I received his report. He had presented the project, brought documentation and a large sketch, and had been told that he should not worry about the application deadline. The embassy would contact Oslo, since it could not make such a decision alone. The conversation had been friendly, and the ambassador had promised to visit Khang’s home and workshop.

I felt relieved. The matter, I thought, had reached the right people.

But by then Khang’s ambitions had grown. He had begun planning a private gallery where the work could be exhibited. Property prices in Hanoi were rising quickly, and he believed action was needed. He estimated that US$200,000 would be required to construct a five-story building with modern facilities. It would contain rental space, living quarters, exhibition rooms, a gallery, a lacquer-painting studio, and a handicraft workshop.

Khang regarded the plan as an excellent investment. The building, he proposed, would belong to the Norwegian embassy, while he would supervise and manage it. If he sold the monumental lacquer work, he would repay the investment to the Norwegian government and create a second, slightly different version for a private museum.

That was the last correspondence between Nguyễn Thế Khang and me. I felt I had done what I could. As for investing in Hanoi’s real-estate boom, that was far beyond anything I could take part in. Eventually, I accepted that the project had not received Norwegian support. Little by little, the story slipped into the background.

Panel of Khang's ambitious work.

What became of the work?

Almost 30 years later, as I was preparing to return to Vietnam, the question suddenly came back: What had happened to Nguyễn Thế Khang’s great project?

An online search produced little, but one result was invaluable: an interview with Khang published by VnExpress on February 22, 2001 under the title “The Fate of the Largest Painting of Hanoi.”

After eight years of work and a budget of VND300 million, the work had been completed. Khang valued it at VND1.2 billion, four times the production cost, but because the intended buyer was the Hanoi Department of Culture and Information, he had reduced the price by half.

Completed panels of Khang's ‘The 36 Old Street Quarter of Hanoi in the XIXth Century.’

The painting had been exhibited in central Hanoi during the celebration of the 990^th anniversary of Thăng Long–Hanoi in 2000. After the exhibition ended, it was placed in storage while a professional committee considered whether the city should purchase it.

Opinions were divided. A purchase would recognize the artist’s dedication, but might also provoke criticism from the professional art world. Khang’s artistic competence had been questioned. Some professionals regarded him as an amateur. There was also a broader question: should the work be considered art, or handicraft?

Khang held firm on the price and suggested that he was prepared to sell the work elsewhere, even abroad, if the Hanoi authorities did not buy it. The situation was made more painful by his declining health. He was seriously ill and needed costly weekly treatment. He seemed caught between bureaucratic hesitation and personal hardship, while the fate of his life’s work remained undecided.

A second VnExpress article, published on May 9, 2001, reported that Nguyễn Thế Khang had died during the months of waiting. His family argued that the authorities should respect his wishes and purchase the work. A government representative expressed sympathy and praised the painting’s ability to recreate the atmosphere of the past. Yet the size of the work remained a serious obstacle. There was no suitable place for permanent display.

Searching for the painting

A cafe at 47 Triệu Việt Vương next to Nguyễn Thế Khang's former home.

So this past summer, in Khang’s spirit, I booked a hotel on Chân Cầm Street — the “street of stringed instruments” in Hanoi’s Old Quarter — and began searching for museums or exhibitions where the panels might now be displayed. I found no trace. I would have to search more directly.

Number 47 Triệu Việt Vương, Khang’s home, was only half an hour away on foot. The house number led to a quiet courtyard. Next door was a modest café. When a young employee brought my iced coffee, I asked in clumsy Vietnamese whether she knew the former resident, Nguyễn Thế Khang. I wrote down his name, the words “painting of Hanoi’s Old Quarter, 36 streets,” and made a rough sketch. She opened Google Translate and showed me one word: “Wait.”

When she returned, I understood that she had learned from a neighbor that Khang had a son named Nguyễn Thế Duy. She had neither an address nor a phone number. It was a step forward, but still far from the goal.

Then Trịnh Lan Hương, a creative director in Hanoi, became interested in the search. Soon she was in contact with Nguyễn Thế Duy, who confirmed his relationship to Khang. We visited him after a drive from old Hanoi, where he greeted us with warmth. The family’s artistic talent had clearly been passed on: Nguyễn Thế Duy was an established musician, and his apartment resembled a gallery, filled largely with his own works. Among them were lacquer paintings bearing Nguyễn Thế Khang’s signature.

Nguyễn Thế Khang's signature on one of his many works kept at his son's home.

When asked about the lacquer panels, Duy kept us briefly in suspense, then opened the website of Old Streets Gallery. The entire artwork appeared before us. It was not 16 panels, but 21. The two outermost contained texts; the other 19 depicted old Hanoi in panoramic form, stretching from Hàng Than to Hàng Khay and from the Red River to Hàng Gai and Hàng Quạt.

But where was the original? The answer came quickly: it was on display at Hồng Ngọc Fine Art, 110B Ngọc Hà, in Ba Đình District.

Hồng Ngọc Fine Art, 110B Ngọc Hà - the current site of Nguyễn Thế Khang's great work.

Rediscovery

Stepping into Hồng Ngọc Fine Art on a warm April day was pleasant. The shop made a strong impression, with embroidery, clothing, sculptures, gold, silver, and gemstones. But our goal was near the entrance, beside ordinary souvenirs. On a long wall behind a counter hung the panels, next to a sign announcing “the largest lacquer ware [sic] artwork in Vietnam,” titled ‘36 Streets of Thang Long Hanoi in the 19th Century.’

Unfortunately, the presentation did not do justice to the work. More than 15 meters long, it almost disappeared among large photographs and goods aimed at tourists. The glossy lacquer reflected the shop interior. A wide counter prevented viewers from seeing the work as a whole or moving close enough to study the details properly. Some documents offered supplementary information, including translations of the text panels written in Chữ Nôm.

The current presentation of ‘The 36 Old Street Quarter of Hanoi in the XIXth Century.’

We had rediscovered the artwork, but had our task really been completed? We wanted to contact its owner, who, according to Nguyễn Thế Duy was an art lover who had admired Khang’s work for many years. After Khang’s passing, he convinced Khang’s widow to sell it to him, and he displayed it in his shop. A series of personal events led to him no longer owning the shop nor living in Hanoi. Our attempt to make contact with the current owner absorbed us, but we did not succeed. For now, our questions remain unanswered.

Still, we did not want to leave the story of this unexpected journey — what Vietnamese people often call duyên, or fate — unfinished. The journey became a thread, weaving together my connection with the land and people of Hanoi in particular, and Vietnam more generally.

And perhaps the journey does not have to end here. Now that the story has been told, other doors may open — not only for us, but for the wider public. Our hope is that one of them may lead to an exhibition space more worthy of Nguyễn Thế Khang’s vision: a place where the public can encounter the original work, explore it through digital technology, and learn more about old Hanoi through a carefully produced art book. In the meantime, it remains available for interested visitors able to look past the unsatisfactory presentation and witness a spectacular work of vision and dedication.

Sugar, Ice, and Everything Nice: On the Mekong Delta's Love for Trà Đá Đường

2026-10-02T09:00:00+07:00

The pitcher of miền Tây-style sweet tea is like a boat ride taking me away from the exhaustion of the city back to the memories of my hometown amongst the canals of the Mekong Delta.

It’s a sweltering noon. I’m busy finding my uniform and preparing my backpack for this afternoon’s extra lesson. My midday napping habit has caused trouble for keeping up with the school schedule many times. I rush towards the Honda Cub in the front yard and see that my mom has already hung a familiar plastic pitcher on its side. She shows up behind me as if by teleportation and chastises my tardiness, as usual: “You sleep too much, so I made you trà đá đường to sip on while you go to class to continue sleeping!”

Just like that, pitchers of trà đá đường have quenched my thirst during every humid lesson and indulged my laziness during downtime when I sip while watching TV. It’s also my go-to order whenever my friends and I hang out at a streetside cafe.

Trà đá đường is self-explanatory: it’s made of tea, ice, and sugar. Photos via Facebook page Đồng Tháp Mười.

When typing these memories, I called my mom to share with her my intention. I told her that I would love to write about her pitchers of trà đá đường, about the pitchers we order at cafes, and, above all, about the familiar sweet tea of our hometown. She laughed at me through the video chat: “Oh dear, what is there to write about trà đá đường?”

When I think about it more, I get what she meant. It’s not too bold to claim that trà đá đường is like the lifeblood of delta folks. It shows up in every corner of life, when we’re thirsty, when we’re tired, when our appetite wanes. It exists as an assumed default beverage, so commonplace that it might seem that there’s nothing to discuss or debate over.

Transparency right from the name

Right from the name, this drink is already as transparent and straightforward as can be. “Trà đá đường” is simply made of trà (tea), đá (ice), and đường (sugar). Still, it’s not just any sweetened tea like some believe. There’s no official recipe for sweet tea, but the most popular method is steeping tea leaves really intensely to produce a strong brew with distinctive aroma and tannic taste. Then, add as much sugar as your heart desires. Many might be alarmed by this rather generous amount of sugar, but worry not; the concentrated sugared tea is then tempered by an equally generous amount of crushed ice. In the extreme heat of the delta, the ice will quickly melt to balance out the cloying sweetness of the tea.

A classic pitcher of trà đá đường. Photo via Măm Măm Sài Gòn.

Enjoying trà đá đường has never been a procedural or structured activity: you can take sips, use a spoon, or slurp loudly through a straw. Or, if particularly parched, just put the teaspoon handle across the pitcher opening to stop ice cubes from flowing into your mouth, and then chug. It also doesn’t require a table or special occasion. A pitcher of sweet tea can appear at any time on any surface to do its God-given job: bringing relief to dry throats.

In my opinion, a good trà đá đường should retain the slightly bitter and tannic notes of strong tea, followed by the sweetness of sugar. In one sip, one should be able to sense the faint grassy notes of tea, as well as the crunchy texture of crushed ice and some undissolved sugar crystals.

Of course, these are my preferences based on the best tea pitchers I’ve experienced, but each household, cafe, or person will no doubt have their own set of standards. Some prefer brutally strong tea with minimal sweetness, while others choose to dilute the tea with tap water to increase the drinkable volume. My family only uses móc câu tea by the Thiên Hương No. 9 brand, but my friend’s is faithful to Thái Nguyên jasmine tea.

Trà đá đường in the Mekong “sweet tooth” universe

On the other hand, not all Mekong families are into this tea. A high school friend used to complain to me about the trà đá đường ban at her home, as the parents were deadly afraid of diabetes. They scared her into abstinence by warning her that if she drank this stuff too much, ants would find her at night in bed.

Every family develops its own tea from a range of local brands. Photo via Tạp Hóa Tá Lả Miền Tây.

I couldn’t help but burst out laughing when I heard the story. I still remember her gaze of admiration when she saw me chugging the tea pitcher I brought to class. Sometimes, I even sneaked her some, just as a treat, saying: “I think your mom worries too much. I had lunch at your house, and every dish was sweet. I don’t think we can live without sweetness.”

We realized the unspoken truth behind that offhand claim. Our palates would not be content without sugar. A pot of pepper braised pork, as savory as it is with lots of fish sauce, would not achieve its enticing shine without caramelized sugar. A plate of cơm tấm sườn must be accompanied by a viscous bowl of sweetened nước chấm. Trà đá đường is just one of many ways southern people sweeten our lives.

Many treat trà đá đường as a default way to hydrate. I have yet to reach the level of one pitcher a day, but I have heard of people who are already there — wherever they go, whatever meal they have, trà đá đường must be on the side. To me, it’s not a must-have everyday drink, but after a few days without it, I feel a craving.

Since that one time I let my friend drink my tea, she started asking me to make her some when I came to class. As I watched her painstakingly scrubbing her water bottle to remove any tea trace to hide it from her mom, I couldn’t help wondering who invented this addictive drink that stole the hearts of miền Tây people and pushed my friend into this subterfuge.

A recipe for a tea mix that went viral on social media. Image via TikTok user @nguyenthithaoquyen97.

According to my grandmother, in the 1930s and 1940s, during her generation, trà đá đường had already existed in the Mekong Delta. There is no written record confirming its origins, so my personal theory is simply that, in a land where sugar is so abundant that it appears in nearly every dish, iced tea is no exception.

Where I live, the elders believe that trà đá đường is a very potent energy drink. Just drink it, and you will feel healthy and awake immediately, they rave. Tea does contain caffeine, and sugar indeed gets turned into energy, so trà đá đường was born to be the countryside’s cheapest form of energy drink. Just imagine: after a whole morning laboring away in the field, you hunker down to rest and gulp up a huge sip of ice-cold, refreshing tea. How satisfying would that be? Perhaps, providing temporary relief from the back-breaking labor of agriculture was how trà đá đường first found its way into our hearts.

The delta’s choice of energy drink.

Today, trà đá đường is not beloved by just people who farm, but also cà phê võng patrons, children napping after school, street vendors in markets, ferry workers on a break, and xe ôm uncles waiting at intersections. A pitcher of trà đá đường is present somewhere by their side.

Now, living in the city, I tend to think of milk tea when the word tea is mentioned. It, too, is familiar and relevant to my current environment, yet, there is still a small corner within me for the pitchers of trà đá đường Mom made for me to take to school.