Ben Duoc Tunnels

The poet was Viễn Phương. He did not write about Củ Chi from a distance. After his release from prison in 1962, he went into the Củ Chi battlefield to keep fighting and writing poetry, and he has a whole book of stories and reportage called 'Quê hương địa đạo' (Homeland of Tunnels, 1981). His text 'Đời đời ghi nhớ' (Remembered Forever), chosen through a competition, is now carved on a stele cut from a block of stone taken from Ngũ Hành Sơn (the Marble Mountains, Đà Nẵng) and housed in the stele pavilion of the Bến Dược Temple. The temple and the tunnel area are part of one heritage site. It is open to visitors, and tickets are sold.

Bến Dược Tunnels: where people still come looking for a name

Bến Dược is one of the two preserved sites of the Củ Chi Tunnels Historical Site. It was the base of the Khu ủy (the regional Party committee) and the Military Region Command of Sài Gòn – Chợ Lớn – Gia Định. The Củ Chi tunnels go back to the resistance war against the French, when they were only short stretches for hiding documents and sheltering cadres. A secret shelter with a single opening was easy to surround, so people extended it into a tunnel with many exits. The whole Củ Chi system eventually ran to more than 200 km of tunnels, some sections two or three levels deep, some so narrow, called 'eo' (waists), that you had to squeeze through sideways. All of it was dug with nothing but hoe blades and 'ki', woven bamboo baskets for carrying soil. The spoil was dumped into flooded bomb craters, shaped into termite mounds, or spread over fields and planted with crops. In January 1967, US forces launched Operation Cedar Falls, known in Vietnamese as 'Bóc vỏ trái đất' (peeling the earth's skin), with about 30,000 troops over 19 days, and one of its targets was this very base. The site's heritage dossier records that between 1954 and 1975 about 500,000 tonnes of bombs and shells fell on Củ Chi, roughly 1.5 tonnes for every resident.

Have you ever wondered how a tunnel entrance that many people went in and out of every day could stay hidden, so hidden that even a broken blade of grass had to be put right? In the tunnel area, visitors do not wander on their own. After a documentary film in the hall, a guide leads each group and explains every stop: the bunkers where the leaders of the Khu ủy and the Command lived and worked, a medical bunker, a surgery bunker, A-frame shelters built not to collapse when bombs and shells burst nearby, a well, a weapons workshop, and a Hoàng Cầm stove, a kitchen that hides its smoke underground. The guides wear guerrilla clothing and show how people slipped into the tunnels and camouflaged them. Visitors can taste cassava dipped in 'muối đậu' (salt with peanuts), the food of the guerrillas. At the Bến Dược Temple, more than 45,000 names of fallen soldiers and Heroic Vietnamese Mothers (a state honorary title) are carved on a wall stepped into eight staggered tiers, lit from below by lamps hidden in the steps so the names can still be read from the ground. Behind the temple, the granite monument 'Hồn thiêng đất nước' (Sacred Soul of the Nation) by sculptor Phan Thị Gia Hương faces the Sài Gòn River: up close it is a falling teardrop, and from further back the teardrop becomes a pen.

So what does this heritage still mean today? It is still doing its job. People still come to find the names of their relatives on the wall, and the temple's management board provides information on the names of the fallen. The temple still holds silent tributes and incense offerings for groups, free of charge. On some moonlit nights, the site runs an evening visit called 'Trăng Chiến Khu' (Moon over the War Zone), recreating tunnel digging, basket weaving, rice pounding and call-and-response folk singing under the moon. In 2025, Bùi Thạc Chuyên's film 'Địa đạo: Mặt trời trong bóng tối' (literally 'Tunnels: Sun in the Dark') brought the Củ Chi tunnels to cinemas. Its character Tư Đạp is modelled on Tô Văn Đực, a Hero of the People's Armed Forces who helped create the 'mìn gạt' mine used across the Củ Chi battlefields. The director sums up the resistance in Củ Chi in one line: a war fought inside the earth. Yet the film crew could not shoot inside the real tunnels. To know how dark and tight that earth is, you have to go yourself. And when you stand before Viễn Phương's stele, will you read it as words carved in stone, or as the voice of someone who once lived on this very battlefield?

Enough to decide whether to go

What it is

Base of the Khu ủy (regional Party committee) and the Military Region Command of Sài Gòn – Chợ Lớn – Gia Định; one of the two preserved sites of the Củ Chi Tunnels Historical Site

Address

Phú Hiệp hamlet, An Nhơn Tây commune, Hồ Chí Minh City

Heritage status

National historical and cultural relic (1979); part of the Củ Chi Tunnels Special National Relic (ranked at the end of 2015)

Today

Open to visitors, tickets sold; the tunnel area is visited in guided groups

Most worth seeing

The base's tunnel area, the Hoàng Cầm stove, the wall of more than 45,000 names in the Bến Dược Temple, the 'Hồn thiêng đất nước' monument