When I pitched a review of Hà Nội’s massive new Vietnam Military History Museum to the Saigoneer editorial staff, I expected to find the museum somewhat boring. After all, although I am a historian, I am not really that interested in military stuff, and I’d been to the original location on Điện Biên Phủ Street several times — how could this new museum improve on the old one? What could this new museum say that the old one didn’t? What could I learn here that I haven’t already learned at Saigon’s War Remnants Museum and Hồ Chí Minh Campaign Museum, at Điện Biên Phủ’s war museum, at Hải Phòng’s naval museum, and at the countless other shrines to Vietnamese martial prowess across the country? Quite a lot, it turns out.
Opened in early November 2024, the museum covers 386,600 square meters and cost approximately 2.5 trillion VND (US$98.5) to build. Within the severe concrete walls are 150,000 objects related to several thousand years of conflict in Vietnam. Construction, hampered by Covid-19-related delays, took almost five years. The opening roughly coincided with the 80th anniversary of the People’s Army of Vietnam, which was founded on the 22nd of December 1944.
The museum campus’s architecture is something one must experience in person. The main building and the Victory Tower soar higher than they look in pictures; cameras can’t capture the scale of the new campus’s courtyards and hallways. The main building rises from the plains of Hanoi’s southern suburbs like nothing else nearby. The only other structure close to the museum is a Vincom Megamall, which is hidden behind an elevated highway. The museum is a symphony in concrete, so far beyond Soviet-style Brutalism that it becomes almost neo-Neolithic, a cement Uluru in dull grey. The museum is more than half an hour’s drive from Hanoi’s city center, and it is worth taking the journey just to marvel at the building. As many of the north’s old Socialist Brutalist buildings fall to the wrecking ball, there is something heartwarming in seeing new constructions taking those classic design principles to new heights. It seems especially fitting that the military museum’s architecture and its contents both owe so much to the ghost of the Soviet Union.
The next thing that hit me, quite literally, was the crowd. On a Wednesday morning, the museum’s courtyard had more than a thousand guests already, all Vietnamese, milling about and marveling at aircraft, tanks, and artillery pieces. Many of them were school groups on field trips. I was invited to join several photos — I stopped counting after thirty — and told a hundred kids that my name was David, I was from America and that I loved Vietnam very much. I was soon overwhelmed and had to take refuge behind a mask and a pair of sunglasses. This did not help much, but I was able to float around the rest of the outdoor exhibits mostly unbothered.
In front of the museum are two large collections of vehicles — the western courtyard holding French, American, and RVN equipment, with the DRV, Soviet, and Chinese in the eastern courtyard. Highlights in the west include a Chinook twin-rotor helicopter, a Lockheed Martin C-130, and the amazingly sculpted tower of French and American aircraft debris that used to rise above the old military museum. To the east are some T-34 and T-54 tanks, Soviet aircraft like the AN-26 and some MiG fighters, and various SAM missiles. The Victory Tower, 45 meters tall, looms over the whole space. Though I’d seen the photos and heard the reports of unruly crowds climbing over everything when the museum first opened, that behavior seems to have stopped. The visitors I saw were well-behaved and respectful, though perhaps that was due to the watchful eyes of the many museum guards in full military uniform sitting around every major exhibit.
Moving inside the main building, it was clear to me that despite having opened a few months ago the museum is still very much a work in progress. Stairs and hallways were cordoned off with caution tape. Plywood and construction tools lay piled around dusty corners of rooms filled with empty display cases. Half of the exhibit halls on the map were not yet open. Because of this confusion, I ended up looping around through several five-and-a-half-minute hallways, wandering in search of an exit or an exhibit, before I finally found where I was supposed to go. The crowds of schoolkids and army officers did not make navigation any easier, though being a head taller than anyone else sure helped me keep my bearings in the sea of uniforms. I ended up going through the main historical exhibit halls backward, just because it was not clear where I should start my tour.
The museum exhibits are laid out in chronological order in four main halls, beginning with 900 BCE and ending in the present day. All the exhibitions’ messages are variations on a theme: for thousands of years, the Vietnamese people have fought to remain free. This message is neither new nor surprising; it was the main theme of the older military museum in the center of Hà Nội, and it is an important element of modern Vietnam’s foundational mythos. In its previous incarnation, the military museum showcased many objects but often neglected to contextualize them within the broader arc of Vietnamese history or explain their use. The new museum does not make this mistake: the informational panels, videos, and audio guides are a big improvement to the way that this museum tells its stories.
To keep history personal, every gallery is full of small panels about individual heroes throughout history who were committed to the Vietnamese cause, many of whom sacrificed their lives for the nation. I stopped to read as many of their stories as I could, but I would have run out of time trying to read them all. Even people with the loosest grasp of Vietnamese history can follow along and, hopefully, learn something new. Around me, plenty of other people were. Though the museum had its share of the ever-present TikTok selfie squads, the diverse group of Vietnamese visitors around me — elementary school kids on field trips, teenagers in their trendy jackets, military service members in uniform, older aunties and uncles, and grandparents — were all engaged in reading the signage and marveling solemnly at the martial artifacts imprisoned in glass displays.
The first exhibit hall focuses on ancient, medieval, and early modern Vietnamese history. Through interactive displays and little cartoon shorts, I learned about several important battles in early Vietnamese history. Display cases along the wall held rusty spearpoints and sword blades, sharpened stakes pulled up from northern riverbeds and Đông Sơn bronze drums, long entombed and oxidized beneath paddy fields. Larger artifacts include a crossbow and some cannons. As a scale modeler myself, I loved exploring the intricate models of Cổ Loa Citadel (3rd Century BCE) and the Battle of Bạch Đằng River (938 CE). Naturally, the common thread running through these exhibits is Vietnamese resistance to various Chinese dynasties’ invasions; though some attention is given to inter-Vietnamese conflicts like the Period of the Twelve Warlords (965–968 CE) and the Tây Sơn Wars (1771–1802 CE), there is little information on Vietnamese military interventions into Khmer, Cham, or Highland spaces, which I was interested in learning more about.
After that came the struggle against the French. The exhibits breezed through some of Imperial Vietnam’s early defeats and instead cast a spotlight on various resistance movements after the French colonial takeover in the latter half of the nineteenth century, most of which were unsuccessful. The part of the exhibition on the First Indochina War from 1945 to Điện Biên Phủ covered the creation of an independent Vietnam and the successes of the People’s Army against the French colonial forces. Most of the exhibit space in this hall is filled with display cases holding rusted guns, but the signage is interesting, and I learned more about some lesser-known revolutionary heroes like Đội Cấn (for whom my home street is named) and highlander Đinh Núp. One spot that I found particularly affective was a life-size recreation of a barricaded street during the 1946 Battle of Hanoi, in which almost a third of the city was leveled, the event dramatized in last year’s hit film Đào, phở và piano. I was also interested in an exhibit on the “Deer Team,” a group of American spies with the OSS (the precursor to the CIA) who parachuted into northern Vietnam towards the end of WWII to assist Hồ Chí Minh in fighting the Japanese occupation. At the end of the hall is a semi-circular minitheater with a scale model of Điện Biên Phủ and an audiovisual light show that goes through the definitive battle of the First Indochina War, which was a beloved fixture of the old museum campus. I was delighted to see that it had survived the move.
Then came the Second Indochina War, variously called the American War and the Vietnam War. I’ll admit I didn’t really pay close attention here. As an American and a historian who has lived in Vietnam for a while, I am getting tired of being asked about this conflict. Nonetheless, I suspect that ongoing domestic and international fascination with this tumultuous period of Vietnamese history will make it a favorite hall for many visitors. Different subsections of this hall covered the usual main points: Ap Bac, the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, the Tết Offensive, the war for the Central Highlands, the Hồ Chí Minh Campaign, and the Liberation of Sài Gòn. Within this hall are plenty of guns and uniforms, as well as larger and more notable objects like a SAM missile launcher from Hanoi’s air defenses, a Renault Juvaquatre car, a MiG 21 fighter plane, and T-54B tank number 843, which played a critical role in the liberation of several southern cities during the Hồ Chí Minh campaign in 1975.
The final hall, which covered the period from 1975 to today, was more interesting to me. The two major sections here explored the border wars with China in 1979 and with Cambodia from 1979 to 1989 and the ongoing troubles in Vietnam’s East Sea islands, delving into the rationale and method behind the literal nation-building projects in the Hoàng Sa and Trường Sa archipelagoes. At the end of the hall, a coda explains how the People’s Army of Vietnam is not just for fighting wars but also is ready to assist the public in case of natural disasters. This is the smallest of the historical exhibit rooms and has fewer artifacts than the preceding three halls, but I was engrossed in reading many of the panels here because I am less familiar with the history of the recent border wars than I am with the older anti-colonial conflicts.
The map I had showed several other exhibit halls, most of which were still under construction. The only other one I was able to see was a gallery featuring military-themed artwork. The gallery was seemingly unfinished — the floor was just exposed concrete and dust hung in the air, swirling around the spotlights — but the art was interesting. Like the rest of the museum’s exhibits, subjects ranged from ancient Vietnamese history to the modern day, and materials varied from painted canvases to sculptures. My favorite painting here was one depicting the Vietnamese victory at Điện Biên Phủ in 1945, with three scared-looking Frenchmen surrendering in the center of the canvas.
The one inconvenience (besides the fact that the museum is more than twenty kilometers from downtown Hanoi) is that, like many of Vietnam’s other museums, this one closes from 11:30 to 2:00 for lunch. I don’t usually mind these long lunchtime closures, since so many of Vietnam’s museums are located in semi-urban areas where it’s easy to find a meal and a café to wait out the siesta, but this museum is truly in the middle of nowhere. It’s also so expansive that it takes several hours just to walk briskly through the exhibits – way more if you want to actually stop and read the signage or sit and watch some of the many videos playing throughout the halls in small semi-circular cinema rooms. I had to cross several lanes of busy highway to get to an overpriced and air-conditioned lunch at the Vincom Megamall nearby, though there were a handful of carts selling trà đá and various other refreshments by the museum entrance. The museum map said that there was a café on site somewhere (allegedly in the basement), but I never found it or the souvenir store.
Having finally visited the museum, I understand the hype. Though parts of it are still under construction, I can tell that a lot of care went into every step of the exhibits’ designs. These are not the dusty halls and wonky translations that characterized a visit to the old museum. There are 3D interactive models, exhibits that utilize light and sound, searchable touch screens, and more than sixty different videos, both animated and live-action. With a phone and mobile data (only one of the exhibit halls has free Wi-Fi), a visitor can access a whole extra layer of multimedia experience. There are QR codes and audio—guides available to stream for those who wish to dig deeper.
Despite my general disinterest in military history, this massive stone cathedral to steel and gunpowder is now my favorite museum in Hanoi. Although I liked the charm of the old military museum on Điện Biên Phủ Street in the old pale-yellow French colonial office building, this museum has weight and presence in a way that hits deep in my Brutalism-loving heart. It would have been so easy for the government to just build some generic glass-and-steel museum full of airy, well-lit atriums. I am glad that they did not. I’ll be back.
[Top image by Dương Trương]
