The Museum of Vietnamese History

Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it, or so they say to reticent history students and US presidents from Texas. I didn't care one bit about history until I became a part of it as a media analyst in Iraq. I might have kept on not caring if it weren't for my boss, also a good friend, who lent me a book that changed my life.

Reading that book made me realize an incredible fact about Iraq. This fact was not that our involvement was just a repeat of many failed attempts to control the land between the Tigris and the Euphrates. Nor was it the fact that the establishment of a government sympathetic to an occupational force would never succeed--the people of Iraq have always preferred to be ruled by the devil they know over the devil they don't. It was the fact that the place we call Iraq had evolved as a process of conflict and cultural exchange with the rest of the world over millennia. Iraq is more than a three dimensional space. All the foreign involvement changed Iraq over time and made it what it is today, from Britain, to the Ottomans, and before them the Persians, and even by the Chinese. For the first time in my life, I realized that I could understand the present if I could know what happened in the past. And now, I want to know more.

The Museum of Vietnamese History

I took a visit to the Museum of Vietnamese History to find some physical clues that would help me understand what is Vietnam. The museum is a short walk from our apartment. Nestled beneath tamarind trees in the park near the Saigon Zoo and Botanical Gardens, which is, incidentally, around 130 years old, the museum is a wooden yellow building with a pagoda and a courtyard. Inside, the exhibitions are laid out in a sort of haphazard chronological pattern. The first room puts you in the prehistoric age, surrounded by display cases of stone axes and dioramas of cavemen on the hunt for mastodons. In the next, suddenly you leap forward to the era of Chinese domination from about 200 BC to 900 CE, followed by the conflicts with the Chinese during the Lý and Trần dynasties. Action-packed models and dynamic paintings depict epic battles between the Việt people and the Song during the 11th century, then Yuan in the 13th century.

Perhaps the Champa lion's style influenced the design of the stone lions that I posted yesterday.

Step in the next room and -whoosh- you're lurched backwards in time again, this time to experience the Champa, a Hindu kingdom which occupied what is now Southern Vietnam until they were displaced by the Việt and Chinese in the 15th century. I read somewhere (great attribution, eh?) that the music and dance of the Champa were so enjoyed and appreciated by the Vietnamese imperial court that the arts were preserved, even as the Viet continued to wage war against the Champa for centuries.

The room beyond the Champa crosses even further back in time. It holds the material remnants of the Óc Eo culture. Artifacts of this civilization were discovered on Vietnam's western shore. The Óc Eo may have existed sometime between the 1st and 7th century.

Then you're teleported forward yet again. Seriously, there's no pattern. The exhibition designers intended you to walk out of this museum with a case of time-warp whiplash. In the next room, the models and dioramas create an image of the late Vietnamese dynasties and their wars with the Siamese prior to French colonization.

Ceramics with a five-clawed dragon could belong only to the Chinese emperor.

But the haphazard time traveling is only half of what the museum has to offer. In one room, a tiny bony mummy in a wooden sarcophagus; in another, various Buddha statues from around the world--an interesting piece is haloed by a hundred arms. There are stone sculptures from Cambodia and ceramics from various Asian countries. There's a collection of 18th and 19th century ceramics, mostly imported from China, but quite a few from Vietnam and a couple from Europe. Finally, there's a collection of minority culture artifacts, in recognition of the 54 minority ethnic groups in Vietnam.

The Museum of Vietnamese History was a good introduction to Vietnam's past, setting the frame for me to understand its present a little more clearly. The first message I took was that Vietnam has a long history of warfare and foreign occupation, including the Chinese and Mongolians, the Champa, the Siamese, the French, the Japanese, and the US. I also got the message that Vietnam has embraced many aspects from its surrounding cultures, including Buddhism from India, music and dance from Champa, Confucian ideals like property ownership and imperial court proceedings from China, as well as Chinese script, which was eventually replaced by the Latin alphabet, one of many contributions from Europe. I would have liked to have seen more descriptive placards. I found an average of one sign per exhibition that explained the cultural significance of the displays at large. I was happy to find that each piece was labeled in Vietnamese, English, and French. The museum lacked some of the multimedia and interactive displays that I've come to expect in a modern museum. But for the ticket price of 75 cents, you can't beat it.


Provender
- breakfast: hủ tiếu gà
- snack: chôm chôm, bòn bon
- supper: mì xào chay with rau muống