Vietnam National Museum of History

Picture yourself at the head of Tràng Tiền street, just behind the Nhà hát Lớn opera house, close to the river. Among the rooflines, one octagonal mass rises up and pulls your eye. Step inside and that mass turns out to be the great hall: octagonal in plan, open through the storeys. The shape was not invented by a European architect. It is borrowed from the nhà bát giác, the eight-sided pavilion long familiar in East Asian timber architecture. Here it was handed a very ordinary job: gather the crowd as it comes in, then send it out towards the galleries.

The building is an exhibit too

Work began in early 1926, on the site of the former museum of the French École française d'Extrême-Orient, the colonial research institute. An economic crisis stretched the build to six years, so the opening came only in 1932, presided over by Pierre Pasquier, Governor-General of Indochina, and the building took the name Louis Finot Museum, after its first director. The architects were Ernest Hébrard and Charles Batteur, and the result is counted among the works of the Indochinese style, the movement that tried to marry European structure to Asian form.

Are you curious where a house built to display the past stands in the story once it becomes the past itself? This site tells Vietnamese history from prehistory to the end of the Nguyễn dynasty in 1945, which means the very years its builders were at work fall inside that span. Out in the yard stand more than a hundred stone and terracotta pieces dating from the 2nd to the 20th century, among them a collection of Chăm stone sculpture and a collection running from the Lý dynasty to the Nguyễn. Indoors, the pre-1945 period alone accounts for close to 110,000 relics and antiquities, and 30 objects ranked as National Treasures.

The name it carries today dates from 2011, when the Museum of Vietnamese History and the Museum of the Revolution were merged into the Vietnam National Museum of History. It is open on almost every day of the week, and it is still doing its work: archaeological excavation, collecting, conservation, authentication, training. It heads the country's system of history and society museums. Which is to say the past here does not lie still behind glass; it is still being dug up, read again and given a place. So if an old colonial building now holds thirty National Treasures, who exactly is telling whose story?

Enough to decide whether to go

What it is

Vietnam National Museum of History, site 1 — Vietnamese history from prehistory to the end of the Nguyễn dynasty in 1945

The building

Begun 1926, opened 1932; architects Ernest Hébrard and Charles Batteur

Style

Indochinese architecture, European and Asian combined; great hall octagonal in plan, open through the storeys

Most worth seeing

The open-air yard: over 100 stone and terracotta pieces, 2nd to 20th century, including Chăm stone sculpture

National Treasures

30, within the prehistory-to-1945 holdings

Entry

Ticketed, a few tens of thousands of đồng