On the international tourism dance floor, Dalat looks like a wallflower. Peel off the cheap labels stuck to her skin. Take her gently by the hand. And brace yourself: while the other spots scream themselves hoarse over novelty dance routines, Dalat glides into an exquisite, skin-to-skin slow dance. Because everyone else wanted to dance fast.…

Overlooked by international travellers condemned to ticking off the same tired bucket list, and ignored by travel companies recycling identical itineraries year after year, Tuy Hoa has far more to offer than six kilometres of golden sand and tuna eyeballs masquerading as a local delicacy. The city tells a very different story. How can an…

The history of this region is steeped in rebellion. It was here, in Bình Định Province, that the three Tây Sơn brothers launched their uprising in the eighteenth century, overthrowing rival lords and reunifying Vietnam. This is a land of fighters, martial arts masters, defiant poets and quiet resilience carved in stone. Today, the city…

For centuries, Hanoi moved on water. Then it climbed onto a bicycle. Then the French arrived, sold it the automobile, and parked Citroën Tractions outside their villas. Yersin got there first. After the war, the French handed back the keys. The chrome went with them. So did the curves. Hanoi climbed into a Lada. A…

Hue can wear almost anything without ever betraying itself: the imperial grandeur of tombs and palaces, the weathered wounds of colonial neoclassicism, the insolence of Art Deco, the tropical modernist concrete of the 1960s and 70s, decaying villas, austere pagodas, anonymous houses eaten alive by moss. Elsewhere, it would feel like an urban accident. Here,…

Hang Dao street, cutting north from Hoan Kiem Lake to Dong Xuan Market, is the aristocrat who ended up working the stalls without losing a shred of her arrogance. On the surface, she plays the peddler of junk. Knock-offs, fake leather belts, trinkets of every kind. Ephemera negotiated with a blade between the teeth. But…

Long before Warhol churned out Campbell’s soup cans, Khai Dinh was mass-producing shattered porcelain and crushed glass motifs to the point of overdose. He understood before anyone else that repetition isn’t laziness, it’s hypnosis. And it works. Pre-emptively psychedelic: relief dragons, twisted columns, kitsch celestial ceilings… a sensory overload bordering on visual intoxication. I’ll say…

While French neoclassical architecture certainly bestowed upon Hanoi that photogenic “French Quarter” south of Hoan Kiem Lake, a far more martial intent lurked behind those cheerful facades. These palaces, these colonnades, and this overt monumentality were anything but innocent: it was France, clad in a costume of stone, proclaiming the gravity of its colonial project…

By 1954, France no longer had the means to sustain its own colonial war. It was surviving on American money. Washington was already footing nearly 80 percent of the bill. The engine was seizing up. The disaster of Cao Bang should have been lesson enough. Marshal de Lattre de Tassigny was sent to save appearances.…

Every time I’ve tracked the mountain paths of Cao Bang, I’ve been hit by a double-blind of emotion: awe at the raw splendor of the landscapes—an inextricable wilderness of limestone peaks cloaked in dark forests—and horror at the violence once vomited into that suffocating, trap-ridden jungle, perfect for ambush. This tormented nature, born from some…

In Vientiane, the colonial is not a backdrop trying to impress or loom large. It’s a family. A tired, mismatched lineage that never chased glory or spectacle. No empire on display here, just figures sharing space, tolerating one another, sometimes ignoring each other altogether. Some still stand upright, others have let themselves go; a few…

With Operation X, we step into the darkest, most compelling folds of the Indochina War. This is the moment when the civilizing mission locks away its fine principles and climbs down into the mud of trafficking—where spotless stripes rub shoulders with dirty hands, where the military aristocracy learns you don’t win a colonial war by…

I genuinely delighted in devouring the chronicles of this flamboyant freak, a clash of raw exploits and grandiose lies, a testament to an era where distance and total lack of oversight let the wildest, most toxic destinies breathe. Had cinema shown an ounce of imagination, it would have found in him the ultimate material for…

Dictionaries, encyclopedias, and biographers alike must have torn their hair out trying to define a man like Alexandre Yersin. He escapes all categories, slips between labels, and refuses frames that are too narrow. Explorer yet scholar, physician yet agronomist, inventor as much as a solitary figure, Yersin remains unclassifiable. He was a free spirit, entirely…

Long Biên Bridge is an old duchess who refuses the tomb. She still stretches her carcass of rust and steel between the two banks of Hanoi, corseted in weary rivets, dragging her skirts of girders, her spine bowed by more than a century of crossings, bombs, and polite indifference. They say she’s obsolete, too slow,…