Jade Emperor Pagoda, HCMC | Vietnam

Though Buddhism took off in Vietnam during the 3rd century BC, and is still the largest organized religion in the country, Taoism and the concept of the Jade Emperor entered Vietnam between three and four hundred years later (during Chinese occupation) and have become an integral part of Vietnamese folk religion.

In Chinese mythology, the Jade Emperor is the closest thing to what monotheistic Westerners would identify as God: the omnipotent ruler of heaven and earth, the precipitator of destiny and creator of life. Unlike in Western religion, the Jade Emperor has a backstory: it took him approximately 3.3 million years and several reincarnations to evolve from an untalented but benevolent local prince into a god, and an additional 9 trillion years spent fighting off evil to establish himself as the supreme god-king, ruling over the three realms (Heaven, Water, Hell).

Saigon’s Jade Emperor Pagoda was built in 1909 by the local Cantonese congregation. Though it’s on the opposite end of town from Cholon, it is right on the water, opposite the Nha Rong port; it was positioned to cater to a community actively involved in that era’s merchant trade. This temple is more famous than other temples constructed by 18th and 19th century Chinese immigrants, and I honestly can’t discern why. Yes, it has lovely woodwork, but so do others. I believe it is so popular due to the money ritual: supposedly giving a small donation to the City God, then rubbing his hand with red paper, will cause him to give the money back to you many times over.

The Jade Emperor’s birthday is the 9th day of the lunar year, so if you want to see monks and congregants in traditional dress kowtowing and chanting, that’s the best day to visit.

Pagoda Hopping in Cholon: Part 2, HCMC | Vietnam

Fifty years later, the Qing officially permitted the emigration of Chinese as per the first Treaty of Peking; additional tens of thousands moved to Cholon without giving up their Chinese nationality. Privileged over the native Vietnamese in the new French colonial system, these immigrants were typically single men who married local women, building the existing Sino-Vietnamese merchant class into an economic elite that dominated the finances of the South until reunification in 1975.

That’s one of the reasons the names for these places can be so confusing; they not only have a Chinese name and Vietnamese name, but are interchangeably called a guildhall, temple, assembly hall, pavillion, or pagoda. In China, these would be separate institutions within a community; in Cholon, the assembly halls are one stop shops, with most not more than a five minute walk from the next.

4. Ong Bon Pagoda - Nhi Phu Temple, 1765

(also known as Er Fu temple, Chauzhou Guild Hall and Sheng Mu temple)

Ni Phu (two cities) assembly hall was built by Hokkien immigrants from Xuanzhou and Zhangzhou. This is the only temple in Cholon where Ong Ban, the god of the soil, is worshipped. The best days to visit are the last day of the lunar year, and the second day of the new lunar year. On these days, traditional Nanyin music is performed on vintage instruments.

Next door is a high school built in the French colonial era that still teaches Chinese language classes; various Chinese dialects and standard Mandarin are still commonly spoken in Cholon, and the Chinese minority population here is still considered somewhat privileged and unassimilated. That said, the Hokkien worshippers at this pagoda are minorities even among the ethnic Chinese of Cholon, most of whom are Cantonese or Teochew.

5. Ming Dynasty Ancestors Village Hall, 1789

This temple is only open between 8:00 and 12:00 on weekdays, because there’s an elderly caretaker/tour guide (Mme. Vuong) who speaks English well, and this is when she prefers to volunteer. A lifelong worshipper here, she explains the history of the temple and its renovations. The temple was damaged in 1962 and the rear house was largely rebuilt at this time.

6. Sanshan Hokkien Temple, 1796

(also known as Hội Quán Tam Sơn, San Hui Temple, Fuzhou Guild Hall and 三山會館)

Built by immigrants from Fuzhou to worship the Lords of the 3 Mountains, this temple also holds a shrine to the goddess of fertility, Me Sanh, and is known locally as the right place to pray for a baby. When I was there, a couple of the tiniest puppies were cuddling in front of an altar.

Pagoda Hopping in Cholon: Part 1, HCMC | Vietnam

As early as 1698, as many as 40,000 Chinese immigrants were recorded as living in Cholon (roughly equivalent to present day districts 5,6, and 11), then the largest Chinatown in the world. Known as the Ming-Heung, they were political refugees from the fall of the Ming dynasty, and formed the first intermarried Sino-Vietnamese community in the South. Chinese immigration continued at low, stable levels through the 18th century, despite the massacres of ethnic Chinese that occurred after every intercession of the Qing dynasty into the wars between the various kingdoms and duchies that make up modern day Vietnam, including those of the Trịnh lords, Nguyễn lords, Lê dynasty, and Tây Sơn brothers.

The Tây Sơn army in particular alternately massacred and recruited Chinese, with sanctioned pogroms in 1776, 1783 and 1792. The Chinese community didn’t emigrate; they simply changed their allegiance to the Nguyễn lords. So did the Qianlong emperor, whose troops helped enthrone them as the Nguyễn dynasty in 1802. Under their rule, ethnic Chinese enjoyed equal status under the law.

Currently only 5% of the population of Cholon identifies as Hoa; whoever stayed after the purges during the Sino-Viet war is now completely assimilated. Even so, the halls are still very active. So let’s take a look! For ease of use, I’ve titled them as their name appears on google maps. I’ve also sorted from oldest to newest.

1. Teochew Guan Yu Temple, 1684

(also known as Nghia An Hoi Quan Pagoda, Guan Di Temple, Yian Clan Hall, Ong Pagoda)

Originally built in 1684 by Teochew immigrants, Guan Di/Yu (the god of war and literature) is worshipped here. The temple is famous for its traditional woodwork. The best night to visit is the 15th day of the lunar new year, when an annual full scale traditional opera is performed.

2. Quan Am pagoda, 1740

(also known as the Ôn Lăng temple)

Built in 1740 by Hokkien immigrants from Quanzhou prefecture, the Quan Am pagoda is the biggest and flashiest of Cholon’s Chinese halls. Three gods are primarily worshipped here: Guanyin (the goddess of mercy), Mazu (the Fujianese sea goddess and queen of heaven), and Amitabha Buddha (the Buddha of immeasurable light and life).

3. Ba Thien Hau Temple, 1760

(also known as Guangzhou Guild Hall, Matsu Temple, and Cholon Po temple)

Supposedly the oldest surviving Taoist temple in the district, Mazu (the goddess of seafarers) is worshipped here. Mazu is one of the most commonly worshipped goddesses in the Chinese diaspora because it was customary for immigrants to set up a temple in her honor once they arrived at their new destinations safely. The temple is famed for its ceramic sculpted finishes.

Hội An Cuisine and Where to Eat It, According to Locals | Vietnam

Lastly, I MUST mention 2 truly outstanding “Western” restaurants . . .

BEST Italian:

Good Morning Vietnam

I spent two months straight in Hội An, and visited a few times over the course of 7 months. It was enough time to get to know the ladies I was staying with, and I was delighted to find that not only were they Hội An born and bred, they are also intrepid travelers themselves, and one trained as a chef in Saigon! I simply could not have been luckier in sourcing local restaurant recommendations.

I requested restaurants that are old and highly regarded, places popular with locals, their personal favorites, and (most importantly) true Vietnamese cuisine with strong emphasis on local specialities.

CLICK HERE TO SEE THIS LIST ON GOOGLE MAPS

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BEST ONE STOP SHOP:

Mót Hội An

150 Trần Phú, Old Town

The local food at this tiny restaurant is excellent and cheap, and the place is always packed. Their menu has all of Hoi An’s greatest hits: bánh mì, cao lầu, thịt nướng, cơm gà, bánh vạc bông hồng trắng, hoành thánh chiên, and mì quảng are all on the menu; plus phờ, spring rolls, and wonton soup.

Their popularity, however, stems from the traditional Chinese medicinal drink sold here for just 12,000 dong. Sometimes called lemonade, sometimes tea, the bare bones ingredients for chanh sả (which literally translates as lemongrass lime) are lime, lemongrass, cinnamon, ginger and honey. At Mót they incorporate several additional ingredients according to an old family recipe, originally formulated to soothe digestive ailments. It’s incredibly refreshing and delicious!

This restaurant is also smack in the middle of the Old Town, the most centrally located of any on this list. If I only had one day in Hoi An, I would just come here and order one of everything!

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BEST Bánh Mì:

Bánh Mì Phượng

2b Phan Chu Trinh, old town

Obviously, bánh mì is an ubiquitous food that didn’t originate in Hội An. Equally obviously, it tends to be a street food rather than a restaurant food. Yet, foodies seem to agree the best bánh mi in the country comes from two shops here, this being the more famous.

The back of their bags quote the late, great Anthony Bourdain as saying: “The world’s best delicious bread brand” . . . which he obviously didn’t, being a native English speaker. I’m sure whatever he did say was positive though, because the bánh mì here is fantastic, and the scene aired on his Travel Channel show. I probably saw it and forgot it myself, years before I ever imagined coming to Vietnam.

I always order the vegetarian (chay) because it’s so damn delicious: tofu marinated in local soy sauce (Vietnamese soy sauce is sweet, yellow/brown and thick, not at all like the Japanese sort imported into the US) then lightly fried; avocado slices; peanut pâté, sautéed eggplant; a stalk or two of rocket; a leaf or two of lettuce; chili sauce; and chili jam; all on a perfect Việt baguette (crispy but not tooth-cracking like its Parisian ancestor).

Lunch here is a truly class-free society moment: jetsetters, schoolboys, street cleaners, and office ladies all queue up. They have a seating area, but sometimes the owner’s husband is the only one there, chainsmoking and people watching, so I tend to order through Grab.

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ALSO THE BEST Bánh Mì:

Madam Khánh

115 Trần Cao Vân, old townish

Foodies are always pitting Phượng and the Madam against each other in some sort of perpetual bread battle. How dare they! They are both superb, though it appears the Madam’s daughter does the cooking these days. My personal favorite bánh mì of all time is Madam Khánh’s bánh mì trứng chiên. Pâté, slightly runny fried eggs, chili sauce and cucumber (on another great baguette) make this a breakfast favorite. I love it with their fresh blueberry juice.

The vibes in the seating area are way less hectic than at Phượng’s; it’s farther away from the tourist area, so there are more motorbike pickups than seated customers. Around 1pm is nap time and the lights go out, but you are welcome to sleep sitting up across two chairs with the fam if you need more time to digest.

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DON’T BOTHER:

Bale Well

45 Ngõ 51 Trần Hưng Đạo, old townish

Every other restaurant on this street is called Bá Lễ Well something or other, referring to the ancient well behind Bá Lễ’s house. Though there are 80+ wells in Hội An, this particular well is famous for a few reasons. First, it is truly ancient, constructed by the Champa in the 10th century. Also, it’s never run dry, and so has been the go-to well for locals, soldiers and sailors for hundreds of years; when you drink a cup of well water, you are presumably tasting a bit of history. Lastly, it’s mineral richness (particularly aluminum) gives the water a slightly sweet taste that is considered the make or break ingredient for the local specialty, cao lầu.

Bá Lễ is 90 odd years old, but still kicking around and locally famous. He maintains the well and that’s why it’s named after him. Another local elder, Nguyễn Dương, has delivered the well water to local restaurants and households since 1975, so people my age grew up on this well water. I’ve had tasteless cao lầu and very tasty cao lầu, and now I wonder if the well water really did make the difference!

At any rate, this particular restaurant is not known for its cao lầu, but for the local styles of bánh xèo and thịt nướng. Both are foods that are served nationally, but with distinct regional differences, so these are the central coast versions. I believe this place is popular because they have a set menu with displayed prices, provide all the sauce and veggie extras, and demonstrate to foreigners how to assemble the rolls properly. It was honestly nothing to write home about. I’ve had better bánh xèo from street vendors and found the thịt nướng slightly revolting, but that could be because I’m already not a pork person, and this I would barely call pork, it was more like strips of burnt pork fat.

For reference, bánh xèo are fermented rice pancakes colored yellow with turmeric. The Hội An version is relatively small; you get 3-4 pancakes where in Saigon you’d have the same amount of food in one giant pancake. The fillings also vary regionally and by taste; here there’s typically a lot of bean sprouts, a small square of bacon and a whole (shell, legs, and tail still on) grilled shrimp in each pancake. You can eat it as is, or open it up and pile on fresh and pickled veggies (usually lettuce, mint, cabbage, papaya, carrots, cassava, cucumbers), chili jam, fish sauce, mint, even peanuts, and re-roll in rice paper. Bale Well didn’t include the bacon, so despite all the fresh veg it was relatively bland, lacking the salty/sweet contrast of its competitors. It was also a bit spongy inside, not fried crispy at all, which again takes something away from the best versions of bánh xèo I’ve had.

Thịt nướng just means pork meat, and refers to grilled fatty pork. It’s assembled in much the same way, rolled in lettuce leaves and rice paper wrappers, having been dressed with veg and sauce. It’s the sibling of bún thịt nướng, which is the same thing over white rice vermicelli-like noodles, and the cousin of bún chả, the Hanoian iteration with minced pork meatballs and a soup base. Just the smell of this on people can make me feel nauseous, so for me it was a YOLO fail. Your mileage may vary!

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BEST Bánh Xèo & Thịt Nướng:

Sông Hoài

An Hội island

There are only four items on the menu here; all dishes are 35,000 dong and all are meant to be shared. I found the bánh xèo and thịt nướng here to be far superior. The bánh xèo was still a bit oily for my taste, but the least greasy out of all the places I tried. They also used the highest quality pork of any place so far, alternating between squares of melted bacon type cuts and tender, soft strips. The thịt nướng here was likewise the best I’ve eaten for the same reason: the pork was simply higher quality and cooked with more care, and therefore tastier. There’s also an incredibly cute bulldog here, whose presence is guaranteed to cheer you up!

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BEST Mì Quảng:

Mì Quảng Bích

272 Hùng Vương, outskirts

Mì Quảng is named for Quảng Nam province, so it’s a true local specialty (as opposed to a local take on a common food). Mì Quảng is composed of thick rice noodles in a savory broth made with garlic, shallots, black pepper, fish sauce and turmeric, in addition to the local herb infusion found in all Việt noodle soups.

The added protein varies, but in Hội An, if no request is made, you can expect thinly sliced pork or whole shrimp, topped with green onion and peanuts. A deluxe version will have both, and/or hard boiled quail eggs. Some places allow special orders for chicken, but it’s not really the best in this dish. As with all other Việt noodle soups, mint, lettuce, bean sprouts, limes, chilis, and fish sauce are served on the side and can be added to taste. It’s also served with bánh tráng mè (toasted sesame rice crackers) that you can break up and add for crunch. Growing up with Stella D’Oro breadsticks, that toasted sesame taste resonates with me!

Mì Quảng Bích’s recipe is absolutely delicious. Her place is very local yokel, the kind of place where you get the impression the young kids and ancient ladies staring at you may never have seen a foreigner up close and personal before. From the center of the old town, it’s a 40-50 minute walk along the river; it’s nice on a temperate day but I had trouble getting a Grab to drive me back. She only serves two dishes, mì quảng and cao lầu, and her mì quảng has shrimp, thinly sliced roasted pork and quail eggs, and tastes very fresh and slightly spicy. It’s super busy at breakfast and lunchtime, and I would happily go back any time I’m out that way.

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I WON’T BE BACK:

Mì Quảng Ông Hai

6A Trương Minh Lượng, old town

Locals and bloggers alike agree that Mì Quảng Ông Hai is the place in Hội An to have this dish. Unfortunately, I was refused service there. I’d like to believe it was a terrible misunderstanding, but it seemed to be xenophobia; they had recent reviews posted from Vietnamese people, and people eating outside, but turned me away one Wednesday night. I thought I just got there too late . . . a lot of mom and pop shops around here close at 8. So I went back early Friday evening, and again there looked to be people eating outside, and again I was told they were closed. I asked if they’d be open on Monday and was told no, they’re closed “because of coronavirus.” So . . . they’re open for Vietnamese people but closed to me, “because of coronavirus.”

To be clear, borders closed March 22nd and I was trying to eat on November 17th. One would assume I live here, not that I somehow illegally entered the country within the past nine months and have been spreading deadly, yet unreported disease ever since. No one in Vietnam has tested positive since September, and the last positive case was community transmission between Vietnamese people. The only people allowed in the country are Vietnamese nationals, so the only people importing coronavirus into the country are Vietnamese nationals. Brutal question: do they really think I’ll make them sick, because they are old/uninformed/don’t understand . . . or have they always loved tourism money while still resenting tourists, or white people, or Americans, or whatever I look like to them, and this is their rare opportunity to say no to someone like me, with fewer of us around lately?

More importantly, is their food worth all that? I’LL NEVER KNOW BECAUSE I WON’T BE BACK.

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BEST Hến Trộn with Bánh Đập
. . . BUT DON’T SAY I DIDN’T WARN YOU:

Quán Ăn Bến Tre

Xuyên Trung, Cẩm Nam island

This place is known for three things: hến trộn, bánh đập, and scamming tourists. Yet it remains the go-to place, frequented by locals because it’s a third generation business that’s been serving the island’s signature dish for over 50 years. There are many google reviews mentioning the scam: first the proprietress hands you a professionally printed English menu where the price is double the prices on the Vietnamese sign; later, when she presents you the bill, it’s again somehow more than you were expecting. I believe I paid $12 for the clams, smashing rice paper and a single beer, which by local standards is absolutely ludicrous. I don’t always mind being scammed; for example,15,000 dong (65 cents) doesn’t matter much to me, but can really help out a street fruit seller..

This lady, on the other hand, has clearly inherited and expanded a longstanding family business, and had the audacity to debate me on Trump (her for and me against, obviously). I explained I disliked him for many reasons, but primarily the diabolical wealth transfer executed during the pandemic. FYI, the Fed printed exponentially more money than ever before in history, so billionaires could double and triple their net worths while the average American received a single $1200 check many months into the crisis, or never received one at all, because this type of relief is only available to people with permanent addresses and bank accounts in good standing, who also filed their taxes properly in 2019 . . . in other words, cruelly excluding those who need help the most.

This lady posited that according to her sister in Texas, the US government was sending weekly relief checks. I explained that only if you already qualified for unemployment payments, you got an extra $600 per week for a few months, but that ended 5 months ago. Also, due to lockdowns and backlogs at already poorly run state agencies, many people were unfairly denied, or made to wait for weeks or months for their first payment, or sent debit cards to old addresses and just never got paid. When filing my 2020 taxes I was informed by New York State that I had received relief funds that must be declared, when I never received a cent. And again, this method excludes the neediest people in the country, those who didn’t qualify for unemployment and were already struggling before the pandemic.

This is where the conversation went left, with the restaurant owner repeatedly insisting her sister told her it’s $1200 every month and they’re still getting it thanks to Trump. We went back and forth several times, with me responding that it’s just not the case (thinking that perhaps she didn’t understand me due to the language barrier, or that she had misunderstood her sister), and her suggesting I was either ignorant because I was not physically present in the US, or just not believing Trump was doing something good because I didn’t like him.

And this was all before I had touched the food! I found myself slightly hungry, more than a little annoyed, and wondering: why is she asking me questions when she clearly has answers she likes? Why does she need to “win” a casual chat with an American, also a paying customer, about America? Does Trump pay her bills as well as her sister’s? But of course, an argumentative scammer with no time for facts would like Trump.

Back to the food! Hến trộn is tiny river clams sautéed with mint, onion, peanuts, and perhaps some spices or fish sauce. It’s served with bánh đập, which is a super thin three layer rice cake: the outer layers are crisp, but the inner layer is left soft and translucent. You crack a stack of it into pieces with your palm before dipping it into an ultra concentrated local fish sauce, and scooping up the clams with it. The fish sauce is strong enough that it’s served to foreigners with soy sauce to dilute as necessary, because many people can’t stomach ít.

The rice crackers were fun, the fish sauce really was a bit putrid, and the clams were just OK. To be clear, I love clams. As a partially Sicilian New Yorker, clams are in my comfort zone: straight out of the shell in their own liquor; raw with a dab of ketchup; spaghetti alle vongole, oregenata at restaurants . . . we even had Clamato juice in the fridge growing up (which sounds gross until you learn anchovy paste exists). Maybe I need to try a different restaurant, maybe I just prefer my own way over the Vietnamese version, same as snails. I thought they could use a little garlic ;)

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BEST Cao Lầu:

Trung Bắc Restaurant

87 Trần Phú, old town

Cao lầu is Hội An‘s most iconic dish, and making it is quite involved. The water used to make the noodles must come from the Bá Lễ well; those noodles are then soaked in lye leached from the ashes of herbs grown on Cham Island. The complicated process of making the noodles gives them a slightly chewy texture, faintly smoky flavor, and yellow color. The typical topping is sliced char siu pork, bean sprouts, onions, lettuce, and various herbs, with just enough pork broth poured over top to wet the noodles, plus deep fried squares of the noodle dough.

This was unexpectedly delicious. We know I’m not a pork person and the first bite was hard for me, but this was melt-in-your mouth good. The noodles were delicious, the taste was simultaneously fresh, savory and warming. I truly enjoyed it. I also have no doubt that theirs is a wholly authentic version; the only people there were me and 4 really old local dudes taking a break from their card game on the stoop next door. We often hear the words subtle, fresh, and nuanced in reference to Vietnamese cuisine; when done poorly it’s painfully bland, but when done well, magic can happen, and this was it.

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THE LITERAL ONE AND ONLY White Rose Dumpling (Bánh Vạc Bông Hồng Trắng)
& Wonton (Hoành Thánh Chiên) PLACE:

White Rose Restaurant
(Nhà Hàng Bông Hồng Trắng)

533 Đ. Hai Bà Trưng, old townish

This restaurant only makes two dishes: bánh vạc bông hồng trắng and hoành thánh chiên.

Bánh vạc bông hồng trắng, or “white rose dumplings”, are more than a local dish, they are a recipe closely guarded by a single family that’s been manufacturing them for generations. They own this restaurant, and they supply all the other restaurants in town. So, no matter where you eat them, this is where they came from.

There are no roses in the dough; the name comes from their resembling a fully bloomed flower when cooked, and was supposedly bestowed by a French patron in the colonial era. The dough is prepared with water from the Bá Lễ well, and the filling is a proprietary shrimp paste. They also include a few with minced veggie filling for variety. Fried onions are sprinkled on top,and the dipping sauce is a bit sweet, made with lemon juice, sugar, chilis, and shrimp broth. These are subtle and delicious!

Hoành thánh chiên is often lumped into the “Hoi An pizza” category by bloggers, but it’s nothing like bánh tráng nướng. It’s actually the same white rose dumplings, but deep fried into wontons and topped with a sweetened ratatouille of tomatoes, oyster mushrooms, white onions, tiny bits of mango and grilled shrimp. In the restaurant it’s served opened faced and gets too soggy for my liking. I prefer to order it to go and put the ratatouille in a bowl, breaking up the wontons and dipping them in like chips.

Both dishes are simple and satisfying, as long as you don’t mind slightly sweet food.

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BEST Cơm Gà:

Cơm Gà Bà Buội

22 Phan Chu Trinh, old towN

The history of cơm gà is interesting: in the 17th and 18th centuries, Hội An was Vietnam’s largest trading port, and many Chinese (and a few Japanese) families moved to the town and province for business reasons. With them came their cuisine, and some of it stuck around. This dish hails from Hainan island, and uses their “white cutting” method for preparing chicken: first boiling it in herb and onion infused water, then shredding it and dressing it lightly in salt, pepper and lime juice. The rice is cooked in the resulting chicken broth, sometimes with garlic or shallots added. The meal is served with a small cup of the chicken broth, a small dish of shredded papaya and carrots, herbs on the side, and if requested, a small bowl of cooked innards.

With such a simple meal, the highest quality ingredients and the right blend of herbs is everything. Bad cơm gà is bland verging on inedible; great cơm gà is still quite boring in my opinion, but refreshing in its simplicity, the kind of food I would eat if I had a sick stomach and needed to cut sugar, spice and grease. That’s probably why Vietnamese people are usually thinner than Westerners, the mentality isn’t about seeing everyday food as an opportunity to overindulge, but as a tool to stay energized.

This restaurant has been the go-to place for the dish for over 50 years, and theirs is the best I had. They also serve corn milk and black sesame milk if you need an exotic hit of carbs.

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ALSO THE BEST Cơm Gà:

Cơm Gà Bà Hồ

16 phan chu trinh, old town

In business since 1969 (side note: wow what a tough year to hang out a shingle in Vietnam), this restaurant has their own well, and the cơm gà is cooked by a granny. Who could ask for more? It will never be my favorite dish (too boring) but the version served here is tasty and authentic. Of particularly good quality was the broth; it was incredibly familiar to me, tasting just like the chicken broth at old school Chinatown restaurants. It makes sense given the southern coastal Chinese diaspora of 200 years ago, and it was wonderful to discover that these dishes I’ve eaten literally across the world from each other are so true to the ancient original.

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BEST Bánh Bèo:

Bánh Bèo Bà Mỹ

Nguyễn Thị Minh Khai, old town

Bánh bèo hails from slightly further north in Huế, but the two cities were closely entwined as long as Hội An was a primary port, bringing in luxury imports for consumption at the royal court. The dish consists of glutinous rice and tapioca flour shells, topped with with a bit of dried shrimp and onions, pork skin or sliced cinnamon sausage, and topped with a sweet nước mắm pha dipping sauce. This is more of a snack than a meal; it’s best shared with friends and washed down with iced tea. It’s a bit bland for me; I find myself filling the cups with the sweet dipping sauce. However, this restaurant has been serving them up for over 20 years, so if you’d like to try them, it’s a great choice.

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BEST Bún Đậu Mắm Tôm:

Quán Dâu Bắc

71 Đào Duy Từ, old townish

Bún đậu mắm tôm is not for everyone! The central flavor of the dish comes from extremely pungent fermented shrimp paste, served with Vietnamese type salad greens, sliced cucumber, fried tofu, fried and boiled pork belly, fried spam, and fried new rice cakes. If you can’t tell from the preponderance of fried elements, this is kind of a late-night-drinking-with-friends food. The dish originated in Hanoi, but this is the wildly popular central coast version.

Run by two ancient ladies and an English fluent daughter, a cadre of elderly local women hang out here in the daytime, and invited me to snack on the tiniest snails ever with them. Fun!

Hội An Street Food | Vietnam

I typically shy away from street food. Of course the hygiene is questionable relative to a restaurant . . . Where does the server wash their hands, particularly after using the restroom? How are they washing utensils? Also, as a Westerner, any stand without posted prices will charge me much more than a local: walking in Hội An Old Town with my Vietnamese friends, a serving of anything is 15,000 dong; on my own, it’s 30,000 or 40,000. For reference, a sit down meal can be bought at a non-tourist restaurant for 35,000.

Even when I’m willing to risk my health and accept being scammed in the name of experiencing local culture, the element that typically makes me skip street food is the street itself: squatting at exhaust pipe height amongst chainsmoking locals, trash bags piled around every tree and sometimes burning in the street, is enough to make me feel ill before eating at all. The setting makes it pretty difficult to appreciate good flavors, and anything aggressively pungent can quickly become nauseating.

I was recently willing to give street food a chance in Hội An, because this discomfort factor has been mitigated by the Covid pandemic. Nine months after borders closed, and less than a month after several severe floods, this extremely tourist reliant town is dead, hands down the quietest of any I’ve visited in the country. There is no crowding and very little traffic; I could easily take my street food, walk a block and eat quietly in front of a boarded up museum, without aggressive scooter drivers or souvenir hawkers bothering me.

Hội An is also particularly well known for its local specialties, and with no tourists the street food is currently in its totally authentic state (sometimes food served to white people in tourist areas is prepared extra bland, extra sweet, or drowned in soy sauce, which obviously doesn’t appeal).

Spoiler alert: I still greatly prefer restaurants, and I’ll cover the best restaurants and must-try local dishes of Hội An in a separate post. Still, there is such vlogger/blogger/foodie fervor over Vietnamese street food that I’m glad I tried a lot of it.

I have 4 ‘ratings’:

• Yuck

• Meh

• Would Eat Again

• Wow

Here are my thoughts!

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Bánh Bột Lọc

MEH.

These tiny dumplings have stretchy, tasteless rice wrappers and are filled with either a tiny, unshelled shrimp (you eat the head, tail and all, for a crunchy effect) or a lump of meat paste that I later learned was pork but was honestly indiscernible to me by taste alone. These were boring and made edible solely by the generous topping of fish sauce, chili jam and fried onions.

---

Bánh Xoài

MEH.

These are the infamous mango-free “mango cakes”: thick, glutinous rice balls dusted in powdered sugar or flour (very mochi-like) and filled with roughly ground peanuts, granulated sugar, and a bit of cinnamon if you’re lucky. If Bánh Mì is the Việt equivalent of a breakfast sandwich, these are Việt donuts: you snag one or two and eat them standing up on the corner, coffee (or tea) in the other hand, regretting it more with every bite. The sugar is so rough that I was genuinely concerned about cracking a tooth! And dare I say they don’t look like mangoes either?

---

Chè Bắp

would eat again.

There are about a trillion kinds of chè; the wikipedia page is quite illustrative if you are curious. The most common is definitely Chè Bắp, a corn and tapioca starch pudding drizzled with coconut cream. It’s served hot and cold, and is tasty both ways. It’s sweet, but not too sweet, and was good enough for me to experiment with some other types of chè . . .

---

Chè Thịt Quay

WOULD EAT AGAIN.

These are small glutinous rice balls filled with tiny bits of roasted pork, floating in a hot sugary broth seasoned with sesame, ginger and sometimes cinnamon. The contrast of sweet and salty is great; this reminds me of the flavors in a traditional moon cake.

---

Chè Hạt Sen

Would eat again.

To me, the least interesting types of chè are those served with jellies over ice. However, I approach my food listicles as a completionist, and these were clearly the most popular versions. I heard somewhere that lotus seed chè was trendy cuisine in the 19th c. Imperial City, which is almost correct: the imperial chè was actually lotus seed stuffed longans in vanilla and jasmine flower soup (needless to say, too expensive and time consuming for street vendors to bother with). I still really enjoyed my poor man’s version, which was a nice balance of sweet and starchy. As the ice melted into the syrup, it became a really refreshing drink. It opened my mind to the various bean iterations on offer . . .

It’s official: I’m a chè convert.

---

Đậu Hũ 

Meh.

Đậu Hũ, Đậu Phũ, Tào phớ and Tàu phớ are all transliterations of “tofu”, and refer to the same dish. The dessert features a slightly sweet soy custard topped with oversweet runny caramel syrup, miscellaneous jellies, and occasionally a spoonful of chè (the above pictured has chè đậu xanh, or mung bean pudding) or shaved coconut. It’s served either hot or over ice. It’s so pretty that I really wanted to like it. It also tasted so familiar, so nostalgic, that I bought it from three different vendors despite not really liking it, trying to place it . . .

Flan. It’s the mediocre flan your second generation Puerto Rican aunt would bring to your birthday party and everyone ate because she tried and she’s an RN and no one is good at everything so be nice! A forgettable prelude to the Carvel cake. My favorite was Fudgie the Whale. Also, this could be a lot better with half-frozen berries on top instead of almost flavorless jellies. Anyway . . .

---

Bánh Tráng Nướng

Wow.

Your choice of seasoned dried beef, shrimp or chicken (I chose shrimp and chicken) are layered with green onions atop a thin fermented rice shell. The heat is turned on, a quail egg is cracked on top and cooks as it flows into and blends the other ingredients, and the whole thing is finished with a drizzle each of mayo and chili sauce. If you’re sitting down to eat it’s served open faced; if you get it to go it will be folded over, quickly flipped and handed to you in a paper pocket. Yet another Việt street food with a hmmm . .. kinda I guess? English nickname, this is commonly referred to as ‘Vietnamese pizza”. It’s much closer to a tostada, in my opinion. Delicious!

---

Bánh Khọt

Wow.

Dung is the place in town to go for bánh khọt, with foodies and locals packing her stand all day. She also has two employees frying and packing the shells for wholesale to restaurants. The shells are made of rice flour, corn starch, and coconut milk, tinged yellow with turmeric, and fried in a griddle. The filling is typically fried egg, and deluxe versions can include a shrimp or shredded chicken. The whole thing is topped off with fresh veggies, and enough nước mắm pha to make a soup at the bottom of the bowl. This meal gives the satisfaction of fried food, but I find it much less heavy and oily than bánh xèo. Dung doesn’t serve shrimp or chicken, but tops her dish off with a generous slice of fried pork, for a salty/sweet contrast and a really filling meal.

---

Xí Mà

Would eat again.

This sweet black soup is surprisingly elusive. It’s served by one family only; they grow sesame plants in their garden and make the soup with water from the Bá Lễ well, which is only a few steps from their home. It’s served to tourists as part of a cooking demonstration in their kitchen, and to locals on the sidewalk across from the Catholic Church.

It’s considered a special occasion when the octogenarians (who started selling the soup 50 years ago) get out on the sidewalk and sell themselves; it’s usually the younger generation who will do it now. The simplicity of this soup and it’s low price (10,000 dong/bowl) have made it a popular local breakfast for many years. I like it enough to buy if the family is out that day and I happen past, but not enough to look and look for it on different days, at different times, many days in a row, as I had to.

---

Trái Cây

Wow.

Probably the healthiest street food ever, fruit cups are simple: pick your fruit (mango, guava, watermelon, avocado, dragonfruit, pineapple, etc.) then choose sweet or spicy. Sweet is dressed with a drizzle of chocolate or caramel syrup; spicy is dressed with a red pepper or chili based syrup, then shaken. My favorite (pictured here) is spicy mango.

---

Bánh Dừa Nướng

Would eat again.

These are French crèpes in a different shape; it’s the exact same taste and texture, but instead of the folded envelope/cone I’m used to, the dough was artfully shaped into a sort of clamshell. The filling is shaved coconut, toasted peanuts and a bit of chocolate syrup; nothing special, but satisfying nonetheless if you like sweets.

---

Kem Khói Hàn Quốc

Yuck.

Hàn Quốc means Korean, and this dessert is definitely as flashy and trendy as everything else that seems to filter down to Vietnam from Kpop culture. I had to look up what exactly this is, because it wasn’t ice cream as advertised! Truly light as air, fried yet completely flavorless, the brightly dyed balls are drizzled with chocolate syrup and disgustingly sweet strawberry flavored syrup. Then, the whole thing is sprayed with liquid nitrogen, instantly freezing it and creating the smoke effect.

If you eat it before the smoke dissipates, the smoke will come out of your nose and mouth while you eat and breathe, so this is marketed as ‘dragon’s breath ice cream.’ It looks cool, but could look a lot better with more sophisticated shapes and colors. It tastes awful; all I could taste was the saccharine over-sweetness of the fake strawberry syrup. I was done after 3 or 4 balls, but it still left my mouth feeling numb and coated. This is more an edible toy for children and Instagrammers than food.

---

Khoai Tây

Meh.

These seemed to be the least popular option in the tourist area and the most common option in the non-tourist area, so I was curious. They’re grilled cakes of mashed sweet potatoes mixed with a few small bits of banana, coconut, or green beans. They don’t taste great and they don’t taste bad; they really don’t taste much different than the rinsed and grilled whole sweet potatoes you can buy for the same price three feet away.

They would taste a lot better deep fried, or at least buttered before they were grilled; they could really take off with both bigger bits of fruit and more creative choices, like pineapple, or caramelized peppers and onions, or blueberries. However, these are an old-fashioned subsistence food for locals who need to eat on $1-2/day, not an experimental foodie culture item.

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Where to Buy Street Food

Street food is truly ubiquitous in Hội An; I genuinely don’t think you could walk down a single block without passing a vendor. If you have as little as 20,000 dong (less than $1) you will not go hungry here. It’s sometimes difficult to find the same vendor twice because most will rotate within the same couple blocks just for variety, and others get shuffled off their corners every now and then by police officers cracking down on unlicensed sellers. However, if you are looking to try a large variety of foods without walking too far, these are the hubs:

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All Hours:

Châu Thượng Văn, for the whole block north of the Bridge of Lights, is packed with sellers at all hours; they spread out heading towards the Japanese covered bridge along the river, and stretch west along Trần Phú for a few blocks before turning northwards on Lê Lợi for a block or two.

Early Morning Only:

Chợ Hội An (the Hoi An market) has a really large indoor food court where local specialties are sold to locals (so extremely authentic foods and a lot of variety). However, it empties out after 10 AM, with 3/4 of the sellers going home, and by noon it’s just a few local businessmen eating lunch. On the north front of the market, and for a couple blocks of Trần Phú on either side of the entrance, are many more sellers.

Evening Only:

On An Hội island (across the Thu Bồn river from the old town) there is a nightly evening market on 2-3 blocks of Nguyễn Hoàng. They sell the local classics as well as more modern sweet treats like Nutella pancakes. There are also a couple bars here with live music and a nice evening scene. Things start up around 7:00 PM.

Phát Diệm Cathedral | Vietnam

In The Quiet American (a book all expats in Vietnam are obligated to read, it seems), Graham Greene describes an early 1950s procession at Phát Diệm Cathedral:

“Past the white statue of the sacred heart that stood on an island in the little lake before the cathedral, under the bell tower with spreading oriental wings and into the carved wooden cathedral, with its gigantic pillars formed out of single trees, and the scarlet lacquerwork of the altar, more Buddhist than Christian . . .”

Thankfully, the cathedral wasn’t significantly damaged in the ensuing 20 years of war, and stands today exactly as described, a unique monument to Catholicism in Vietnam. Built between 1875 and 1899, one might assume the cathedral was constructed as part of French colonization efforts; in fact, it is entirely the work of an already long established local Catholic community.

Jesuit missionaries, primarily from Portugal and Japan, first built small communities of converts in North and Central Vietnam in the mid-16th century. Soon, French and Spanish Jesuit and Dominican missionaries entered the fray. By the early 1600s, Catholicism had gained enough of a foothold to make ‘toleration of Christianity’ a political issue. In 1630 Trịnh lord Trịnh Trang decreed from Đông Kinh that the French Jesuit mission (led by Father de Rhodes, the inventor of the modern Vietnamese alphabet using modified European letters) represented a threat to Vietnamese society, and expelled it from court and country (or Đàng Ngoài, at least). Throughout the north, Trịnh sanctioned pogroms in Catholic communities were regularly used to limit Catholic influence and expansion.

The Nguyễn lords in central and south Vietnam (Đàng Trong) were more tolerant of Catholic missionaries, because unlike the Trịnh (who purchased their artillery from Holland and England), they relied on Catholic Portugal to supply cannons. Nevertheless, ten thousand Catholics were martyred during the Tây Sơn rebellion (which temporarily bested both Trịnh and Nguyễn dynasties from 1778 to 1802). These local Catholics were both specifically targeted as traitorous collaborators with Nguyễn Ánh, and more broadly scapegoated as harbingers of Vietnamese colonization.

The Nguyễn dynasty relied on Catholic missionaries to arrange for European cannons and soldiers to put down the Tây Sơn rebellion, defeat the Trịnh, unify Vietnam, and conquer most of Cambodia. This was done by 1802, and as long as Nguyễn Ánh (installed in Huế as Emperor Gia Long) lived, Catholicism spread unchecked. At the time of his death in 1820, 4% of the Vietnamese population, including his firstborn son, had converted. However, Emperor Gia Long saw this tolerance as the repayment of a personal debt of gratitude, not a purposeful theological or philosophical expansion beyond Buddhism and Confucianism. So, he skipped over his firstborn to make a strictly Confucian and isolationist son, Minh Mạng, his successor.

Emperor Minh Mạng expelled and banned all missionaries just 5 years later, in 1825. He went as far as inspecting French merchant ships for non-sailors, banning French and Spanish interpreters from working, requiring all priests to gather at Đà Nẵng and henceforth depart, and executing those who would not. It’s important to note that these efforts weren’t specifically anti-French nor even particularly anti-Catholic, Minh Mạng simply shunned all Western influence and contact, also denying British and American overtures. Unlike his father, he preferred fighting Siam and Qing unaided to accepting foreign influence alongside foreign weapons.

It’s possible that Emperor Gia Long’s suspicions weren’t misplaced, or perhaps they acted solely out of desperation to survive, but in 1833 two thousand Vietnamese Catholic troops led by Father Nguyễn Văn Tâm rebelled against Minh Mạng, holding Saigon for two years while attempting to fight northwards and install Prince Cảnh (Gia Long’s firstborn) as a Catholic emperor. Though that particular effort failed, Vietnamese Catholics collaborated with French colonizers and fought against Nguyễn armies from the 1850s through the 1880s, and were rewarded with government jobs and formerly royal lands after France’s success.

Of course, just as the Nguyễn dynasty had come to perceive their Catholic allies as dangerous interlopers within a single generation, so did the French. This is the generation, from 1875 to 1899, when Phát Diệm Cathedral was constructed: when Vietnamese Catholics were still proudly reaping what they had sown, and only beginning to perceive their privilege would not outlive their usefulness. Though European elements were inevitably incorporated, the architecture here was never intended to imitate foreign churches, and the bishops here were never foreign born.

A Catholic never gained the Annamite throne; the French considered it more useful for the puppet emperors to remain Buddhist and Confucian, thereby appeasing the majority of Vietnamese. And France itself had just buried its last monarch (the defeated and exiled Napoléon III) in 1873, finally and permanently transitioning to Republicanism.

The nun who showed me around was a young woman named Rose, and she was earnest in her beliefs, an intellectual, eager to learn the English names for everything (I supplied ‘sacred heart’, ‘immaculate heart of Mary’, ‘order of nuns’, and ‘stations of the cross’, among others I forget). She hoped to eventually be deployed to Europe or America or elsewhere she could see our cathedrals and hear our masses. She showed me how to ring their bell, which doesn’t have ropes; you strike it on one side with a wooden log in the manner of Buddhist temple bells. She showed me how the columns of the church were made of massive ironwood trees, in the manner of Vietnamese traditional houses; how the gongs are sounded to begin processions (where in the West, a table bell serves); how the angels’ faces had been carved and painted to reflect the local Catholic population at the time: 11 cherubim with Asian features, one with European.

The priest who oversaw the cathedral’s construction is buried in its courtyard, with a carved stone dragon bed fronting his grave in the manner of Vietnamese emperors. The clouds painted on the ceiling are in the Asian curlicue style; the prayers overheard from the chapels are loud, uniform, continuous and monotone chants in the Buddhist manner, not the singsong intermittent mumbles of the West. In the West, three doors on the front of a church are for the convenience of getting people into the building, nothing more; here they are made in the Confucian tradition, so scholars can enter on the left, military men on the right; or women on the left and men on the right; or students on the left, teachers on the right, etc. The more you know about both temple and church architecture, the better you can appreciate the incredibly special blend of this place.

Part of the Kim Sơn rural coast district, Phát Diệm is approximately a 45 minute drive from Ninh Binh city (about $20 on Grab) and so worth it. If you have some hours to explore, the village has several small old churches and restaurants serving local seafood specialties.

Hanoi Craft Villages | Vietnam

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According to Voice of Vietnam, within a two hours’ drive of Hanoi are 1350 craft villages, where families have passed down local artisanal skills for hundreds of years.

The most famous among them are:

• Bát Tràng Pottery

• Vạn Phúc Silk

• Đông Hồ Woodcut Painting

• Làng Vân Rice Wine

• Non Nước Stone Carving

• Ngũ Xã Bronze Casting

• Phú Vinh Rattan and Bamboo Weaving

• Đào Xá Traditional Musical Instruments

• Quất Động Embroidery

• Định Công Jewelry

• Chuông Conical Hat

• Chàng Sơn Carpentry & Fan

As a lover of material culture, I very much wanted to visit at least a few. Based on my current shopping interests, I ended up choosing Đồng Kỵ wood carving, Hạ Thái lacquer, Chuyên Mỹ mother of pearl inlay, Quất Động embroidery, and Bát Tràng pottery.

I paid a local tour guide $100 to drive me around to all five villages in one day. I do think it’s possible to do it on your own and have the same experience if you are comfortable on a motorbike; my tour guide had clearly not prepared anything special and we were more or less successfully walking in on craftspeople at work during the week. That said, if you plan on Grab taxi-ing it (like I would have otherwise done), even a sort of incompetent tour guide is more efficient, less stressful, costs the same, and you have someone to translate if you want to buy something.

Speaking of shopping, I didn’t do any. I was fully prepared to spend hundreds on something special, but didn’t see anything. The villagers were mostly working to fill large, expensive, local, custom orders; what they had on offer at retail didn’t appeal. I’ve always noticed that Hanoi souvenir shops and galleries have heaps of the few same uninspiring wares. There seems to be no effort whatsoever to understand what tourists would buy. I wondered if the craft villages were really where these unremarkable things are made, and that seems to be the case.

Once upon a time I owned a designer vintage shop, and recently I’ve been bitten by the retail bug again. The world has changed so much since I was in the game 15 years ago! Now, businesses can survive solely on social media. I’ve been toying with the idea of selling triple bottom line products I source as I travel.

I believe there is potential in these villages to transform heritage savoir faire into modern luxury product, if I could find a local partner to handle communication and logistics. However, it would have to be built from absolute scratch; there is currently zero supply chain infrastructure in place. I also have zero capital, so it would be a slow and painful bootstrapping venture. Le sigh! I’ll get there eventually.

Cat Cat Village, Sa Pa | Vietnam

There’s no nice way to say it . . . Cat Cat Village is fake. It’s an entirely modern tourist trap built as a combo souvenir shop/Instagram set. Can you see ethnic minority people there? Sure. Can you buy genuine handicrafts from them? Yes, assuming you know what to look for. 

90% of the place, however, is Vietnamese shopkeepers selling junk souvenirs and costumes to Vietnamese tourists, who spend the day taking photos for social media. The costumes are about as close to what local minority women wear as Disney’s Princess Jasmine outfit is to traditional Kurdish costume.

No one lives in the “H’mong family houses,” they just sell batik outside. To add insult to injury, Vietnamese pop music blasts through loudspeakers, and every couple hours there’s a ridiculous dance show supposedly featuring ethnic minority performers doing traditional dances in traditional costume (nope, definitely not, and barely).

The village is more or less a convenience. If you are:

• too old or infirm to hike to a real village, or

• you want to pick up Western style clothes “inspired by” the craft processes of the region (rather than wear things made by and for H’mong and Dao), or

• you only travel for the ‘gram so you’re trying to get as many picturesque selfies as possible in one day

this is the place for you.

Personally, I only had two hours to spend here, and almost burst into tears when it seemed like the paths of shit shops would never end, and any good landscape shot was occupied by at least 3 couples inanely posing.

My best advice for Cat Cat village is:

#1 It’s better under the influence. The food is better, the trash souvenirs are funnier, the people taking their social media personas way too seriously seem less of a nuisance, and when you inevitably overpay for something, it bothers you less

#2 Do it backwards. The main entrance is right next door to the Sapa Sky hotel. Pay for your ticket, get a map, and then walk down the hill for 20 minutes to the other entrance and go in there. If you want to buy authentic clothes and snacks from local ethnic minority people, they occupy the far less trafficked backend of the park, probably because the rent is cheaper. 

Temple of Literature, Hanoi | Vietnam

The Temple of Literature (Vietnamese: Văn Miếu) is my favorite respite in Hanoi proper. Strolling through helps me forget the overwhelming noise, pollution and business outside, and I can easily spend a couple hours here relaxing.

Founded as a Confucian temple in 1072, by 1076 Quốc Tử Giám University was built over an area just south of the temple, now taken up by 12 city blocks. The school/worship center was where civil servants were trained to serve the Lý dynasty.

The Confucian education system was inherited from the previous thousand years of Chinese occupation (111 BC to 980 AD) and therefore initially derived most of its content and structure from the Chinese system of educating mandarins.

Students generally studied for 3-7 years, learning classical Chinese, Chinese philosophy, Chinese history, and poetry composition. Among others, students read The Four Books (Tứ thư, 四書): "The Great Study" (Đại Học, 大學), "The Golden Means" (Trung Dung, 中庸), "The Analects" (Luận Ngữ, 論語) and "Mencius" (Mạnh Tử, 孟子); Five Pre-Confucian Classics (Ngũ Kinh, 五經): "Book of Odes (Kinh Thi, 詩經), "Book of Annals" (Kinh Thư, 書經), "Book of Rites" (Kinh Lễ, 禮記), "Book of Change" (Kinh Dịch, 易經) and "Book of Spring and Autumn" (Kinh Xuân Thu, 春秋).

The Trần dynasty (1225 - 1400) opened up civil service to commoners, and during this time the famously difficult and competitive exam system developed into its 3 stage form. At specific fortuitous intervals on the Lunar calendar (around 2-3 years apart), exams were administered at provincial, national, and finally royal levels, with the national level schooling and exams taking place at the Temple of Literature. The royal exam was administered by the emperor personally and took place at court.

Four ranks were awarded to successful applicants:

Trạng nguyên (狀元) – first place, reserved for the best scholars

• Bảng nhãn (榜眼) – second place

• Thám hoa (探花) – third place

• Tiến sĩ (進士) – all the other successful applicants

First place was reserved for exceptional genius, not simply scoring the highest in any given exam year. In roughly 800 years of educating scholar/servants, the trạng nguyên rank was only awarded to 55 men.

Though the Vietnamese adapted Chinese script to create their own language (Chữ-Nôm) in the 10th century, it was only in the 12th and 13th centuries that Chữ-Nôm was systematized as the official language of government (and recognized as part of meaningful literature), with appropriate bilingual study materials issued. The classical Chinese characters visible throughout the temple today are Chữ-Nôm, and therefore unintelligible to Chinese readers.

During the Lê dynasty, successful examinees were honored by having their names inscribed on the stone steles still displayed today. The stones tell us that between 1443 and 1778 over a hundred exams were held, with about 20 successful candidates emerging from each exam.

The school limped past the 1770 fall of the Lê dynasty, but eventually closed in 1779 during the Tây Sơn era of decentralized dynasties and peasant revolts. Coming to power in 1802, the Nguyễn dynasty moved their capital from Hà Nội to Huế, opening the new imperial academy there. The former Quốc Tử Giám was reopened as a Hoài Đức district school.

By the time Hanoï was made the capital of French Indochina in 1902, the school had emptied of students and fallen into sufficient disrepair for the French to nickname it “the pagoda of crows,” both a metaphor for its death as a cultural center, and a literal description of the multiple crows nests in old mango trees throughout.

Despite registering the temple as a historic monument in 1906, the French first phased out imperial exams from 1913-1916, and then destroyed large sections of the site during the First Indochina War (1945 - 1954). What stands today is the restored temple complex, but not the outlying school and dormitory buildings.

The layout of the temple was modeled on that of the temple at Qufu, Shandong (Confucius’ birthplace). In Confucianism, morality means respecting the 5 essential social relationships:

1. Ruler and Subject

2. Father and Son

3. Elder Brother and Younger Brother

4. Husband and Wife

5. Friend and Friend

Furthermore, there are five essential elements that form the world: metal, wood, fire, water and earth.

Therefore, there are five consecutive walled courtyards connected by gateways, though in terms of exploration there are really seven main sections:

1. the entry with 4 pillars and Văn Miếu gate

2. the first courtyard and Đại Trung gate

3. the second courtyard with the Khuê Văn Các (Pleiades pavilion)

4. the third courtyard with the Thiên Quang Tinh (heavenly light well), stele pavilions, and Đại Thành (gate of great success)

5. the fourth courtyard with East and West shrines for Confucian disciples and the Ceremony House

6. the fifth courtyard with a shrine to the god of the place and East and West guard houses

7. and finally the Đền Khải Thánh sanctuary and academy building

The four pillars that form the street entrance famously warn riders to dismount. Entry tickets and audio guides are sold just next to the flag lined area. The bronze bell in the front Văn Miếu gate dates from the Trần dynasty, is inscribed with a phoenix and dragon symbolizing the emperor and empress, can only be touched by monks, and was only rung to announce the entry of very prestigious visitors. Walking under the bell to hand your ticket to the security guard, you are on the central path, once reserved solely for royalty (all others had to enter through either of the side gates and walk down those paths).

At graduation and back-to-school seasons, you can find busloads of Vietnamese students of all ages racing through the first courtyard to pose at the various gates. The first gate, connecting the first and second courtyards, is the Đại Trung Môn, translated as “great middle gate”. It is so called because it combines the names of two important works of Confucianism: Đại Học (Great Learning) and Trung Dung (The Doctrine of the Mean). T

The carp symbol at the top references a Chinese proverb explaining that while many carp swim against the stream, the few that manage to jump over the waterfall become dragons. The left side gate is the gate of Accomplished Virtue (Thành Đức), and the right side gate is the gate of Attained Talent (Đạt Tài). In Chinese tradition, the left side is more important than the right, so these gates serve to remind students that talent will only get you so far, hard work has to take you the rest of the way.

The second courtyard is my personal favorite area of the temple, and is where students traditionally spent their time studying and relaxing outdoors. The waterlily ponds and lawns remain incredibly soothing!

The Khuê Văn Các (constellations pavilion) is named to symbolize the Temple of Literature’s role as the brightest star in the Vietnamese educational and cultural firmament. The circle and square ornament enclosing the bell symbolizes sky and earth, yin and yang.

In the third courtyard, the Thiên Quang Tinh (heavenly light well) served both as a literal mirror for scholars to dress themselves appropriately and as a symbol for calm and careful reflection.

There are 82 steles of doctors (9 of the original 91 have been lost to war and natural disasters). The bases of the steles are carved as tortoises who literally stand for longevity and wisdom, ensuring the names of the successful students last forever.

The Đại Thành Môn (gate of great success) connecting the third and fourth courtyards is the architectural distinction between the areas meant for relatively casual student use, and the areas intended for worship.

In the fourth courtyard, the once Eastern and Western shrines for Confucian worshippers are now dedicated to tourist retail and offices. Formerly the Eastern building was devoted to Confucius and the Western building to Chu Văn An (the most famous historic master of the Imperial Academy). Now you can buy a bottle of water or an artistic bit of calligraphy here. Every effort is made to prune the potted plants into animal shapes, with little success.

The Đại Bái Đường (House of Ceremony) is the first really impressive interior, where new doctors kneeled and prayed for both physical longevity (symbolized by the crane) and eternal acclaim (symbolized by the turtle). Just beyond the House of Ceremony is the Đại Thành Sanctuary, where locals still come to worship and bring offerings for Confucius and his four greatest disciples. In the past, emperors and other eminences have worshipped here.

The fifth courtyard is oddly empty and unornamented. There’s a second street exit on the south west end. The buildings on the side are shuttered. I have met one person who visited on a Saturday afternoon/evening and happened upon a classical Vietnamese musical performance of some sort happening here.

At the far end are the former guard houses, which now house little local art exhibits and a stand where you can purchase? or rent? (I don’t know, I’ve thankfully evaded them to date) scarves so as to not offend the religious old ladies squawking in loud disapproval of your shoulders/arms/cleavage/miniskirt.

Beyond the guard houses is the old Imperial Academy administration building. Downstairs there are displays of relics that once belonged to scholars and students, including books, calligraphy brushes, ceremonial robes, scrolls and their lacquered cases, royal decrees etc. There are also a few very very old photos of the buildings and grounds from the turn of the last century. It’s incredible to see how this rather visually empty area has become a very densely populated urban neighborhood.

One current use of the building that connects with its past is its role as the site for judging entries in national contests of various traditional Vietnamese art forms. I have seen elderly, traditionally dressed judges carefully examining the finalist entries for annual ceramics, waterolor, and calligraphy contests here.

Upstairs is dedicated to the worship of the three emperors who contributed the most to the temple and university:

• Lý Thánh Tông (1023–1072), who founded the temple in 1070 (middle altar)

• Lý Nhân Tông (1066–1127), who founded the Imperial Academy (right altar)

• Lê Thánh Tông (1442–1497), who introduced the steles in 1484 (left altar)

There’s a little balcony in front with a great open view of the old sections of the city.

Back outside, there’s a pagoda bell that was cast in 2000, when the fifth courtyard was renovated. I’ve never heard it rung! In Buddhism generally, the belief is that ringing the bell awakens the mind, reminding Buddhists to share love and pray for peace. Supposedly when the bell’s peals reach heaven, the dead rest in peace; when the peals reach hell, sinners are temporarily released from their suffering. In traditional Vietnamese bronze casting, it’s known that mixing in a certain proportion of pure gold helps the sound of the bell carry farther. In Vietnam, donors are proud to donate real gold (at great expense, obviously) for pagoda bells, considering it a family honor.

If you can’t tell, for me this a Hanoi must-do. Tickets are 30,000 VND (less than $2 USD) and audio guides (which are totally worth it!!) are an additional amount.

TC Cannon: At the Edge of America

TC Cannon was a Native American (Kiowa/Caddo/French) painter, poet, musician, and Vietnam vet. His Kiowa name was “he who stands in the sun”, he trained in the Southern Plains style of painting at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, and he passed away in 1978 at the too young age of 31. During his lifetime his work was often interpreted as political and subversive; now it’s clearly so much more: earnest and insightful portraiture; aesthetically emblematic of its era; plaintive and relatable on a personal level. The feeling strongly impressed upon me by his work was patience.

TC Cannon with his father in Vietnam

If you’re interested in all the academic takes on TC Cannon, and want to hear his poetry read aloud, this is a great playlist

I care deeply for the preservation of indigenous American peoples and their cultures. It has taken so long for mainstream perceptions of colonization to change from ‘a fight they lost and we won’ to . . . .the genocide it was. Going to the annual Bear Mountain powwow with my grandfather (who also snail-mailed me related anthropology and archaeology articles, yup, I’m old) helped me learn the difference between considering a cultural outgroup and consuming it. Decades later, as the cultural appropriation debate rages, I find myself reaching back for clarity in the distinction.

This is a TC Cannon song ‘handed down’ in the family of one of his buddies

I’ve never visited the Southwest or the Plains but hope to someday. In his work I see a lot of Gaugin, a very little Catlin. I’d love to see the settings.

His sister still sells his work and manages his estate: http://www.tccannon.com/

Support the Native American Rights Fund: https://www.narf.org/

Go to the Powwow I went to as a little girl: https://www.crazycrow.com/site/event/bear-mountain-powwow/