Hà Nói is a capital city, and has the allotment of high quality museums you’d expect as a result. From fine art to historical to ethnographic, Hà Nói has it all. So let’s go museuming. Together. You’ll be fine. I’ll hold your hand during the scary parts.

The Ethnology Museum

The Vietnam Museum of Ethnology is unlike any ethnographic museum I’ve seen. Yes, it has a museum with galleries and explanatory placards, just as you’d expect. But the bulk of the grounds are taken up with houses brought in from all different ethnic groups and regions that have been rebuilt on site. Rather than just reading about how the different groups lived, you can go in their houses and feel it for yourself. Being able to enter all these different houses may well have been Hà Nội’s highlight.

What’s not obvious at first glance here is the extent of Vietnam’s ethnic diversity. There are 54 distinct ethnic groups in Vietnam, but the vast majority, 85%, are ethnically Viet. The next largest ethnic group, the Tày, is only 1.92%. Vietnam has a population of about 100 million, which, surprisingly, ranks it 16th largest in the world, but that’s still not a lot of people, divvied up into 53 groups. The smallest 45 ethnic groups account for only 3.7% of the total population.

The Vietnamese government values and supports the diversity these ethnic groups represent, which is the only reason many of them still exist as intact cultures and not just DNA fragments. It’s hard to keep groups that small discrete and unassimilated, so props to the Communists.

Ede House

A long house from the Ede tribe, this house was built for a powerful family in 1969 and relocated to the museum in 2000. The house is 140 feet long and 20 feet wide, and is oriented, as is traditional for the Ede, on a north/south axis, with the main entrance at the north end and the living quarters at the south. The extent and quality of the carvings speaks to the prominence of the family that built it.

Viet House

This Viet house is notable for the splendor and artistry of the wood carving. No mud house this.

Tay Stilt House

This is a multi-generational home built entirely on stilts. There are separate rooms for married children, a dedicated kitchen, and a master bedroom. The space underneath is multi-purpose, for everything from domestic animals to tools and a mill for pounding rice. It’s a playground for children and a place for elders to rest in the shade. The range and quality of weaving techniques is impressive.

Bahnar Communal House

Not housing, but a communal house from the Bahnar people, used for a variety of social and ceremonial activities, as well as serving as a guest house for visitors. As the largest, most impressive structure in the village, it was meant to communicate strength and power.

Every one of the houses at the museum had a video running inside documenting the reconstruction of the structure onsite, but watching this being built, with craftsmen climbing up the partially completed structure like acrobats, may have been the most impressive.

Khmer Junk

This Khmer junk is 84 feet long, and was built for racing during the annual moon worshipping festival. Also, not technically housing, but pretty fucking awesome. In 18 races, this baby came in first 14 times and second the other four.

The museum even has a water puppet theater.

Vietnam Women’s Museum

Well, the gals have their very own museum in Hà Nội, and you have to be just thrilled for the little darlin’s. I’m sure they’re all puffed up. There are exhibits on Women in the Family, Women in History, and Women’s Fashion, but the standout exhibit was on Đạo Mẫu, the worship of mother goddesses that dates back to the 16th century.

Central to Đạo Mẫu is the practice of hầu bóng, literally “serving the reflections,” a ritual involving dressing up and presenting as one of the deities. This is most often performance, but there are priestesses who act as mediums, allowing the goddesses to incarnate through them. Not unlike Santeria’s channeling of Orishas.

Either way, the ritual involves elaborate costumes specific to the individual goddesses, and the museum has an excellent selection. As well as videos of the performances, which may well have been nothing more than ritual performance but certainly had the ecstatic veneer of channeling spirits.

If you can, I strongly suggest zooming in on these pictures. The embroidery is breathtaking.

Đạo Mẫu rituals also involve paper representations of the stories being told, as well as fancy paper decorations. Paper seems to be an important part of many Vietnamese rituals, from altars to the streetside burning of joss paper for ancestors. The museum’s collection of the Đạo Mẫu paper goods was every bit as spectacular as the costumes on display.

Hoàng Thành Thăng Long – The Imperial Citadel

The Imperial Citadel is yet another box checked on our UNESCO World Heritage bingo card. It was Vietnam’s capital city from the 11th to 18th centuries, and was the very last thing we did in Hà Nội, the day before we left for Hội An. It is part monument park, part museum, and part active archeological site.

There were delightful details scattered throughout.

As beautiful as the grounds and buildings were, the standout was the museum, specifically the spectacular terra cotta collection. It’s hard to fathom how so much terra cotta has survived from the 11th century, especially given how much of it was rooftop decoration.

However, the highlight of our visit, for me, took place in one of the galleries. Two young boys, maybe ten years old, were loose from their parents, and one mustered up the courage to say hello to us. I replied Xin Chào, and he screamed like the family chicken had just politely enquired after his father’s health. Sometimes being a dancing bear is just flat-out entertaining.

Vietnam National Fine Arts Museum

Vietnam has been civilized for a long time, having had organized societies for at least 4,000 years. And organized societies have a penchant for creating art. Not that the National Fine Arts Museum has pieces going back 4,000 years, but there’s a rich heritage to mine, and the museum’s collection covers more than a thousand years of that history.

The Hall Of Wiggy Patriarchs

My favorite exhibit, it’s a series of life-size effigies of various patriarchs of the Tây Phương Pagoda near Hà Nói, all created in 1794. More than just life-sized, they are remarkably lifelike, each with its own personality. Unlike many of the Vietnamese figurative sculptures, they all look like very specific individuals, with nothing generic about them. Being in a room full of them, it was hard not to feel their presence.

Sculpture

I love how playful and spirited these pieces are, with an almost cartoony style. These wooden sculptures are all 17th century specimens.

The stone sculptures were just as entertaining.

Bodhisattva Avalokisteshvara

There were two of these in the sculpture hall, and they were both magnificent. This first one is from the 1500s.

The second one is from 1656, and is specifically referenced as the Thousand-armed and Thousand-eyed Avalokisteshvara.

Lacquer Paintings

Relatively modern, lacquer painting in Vietnam dates back only to the 1930s. We didn’t know you could paint with lacquer, so their collection, with pieces from the 30s to the 70s, was a lovely surprise.

Silk Paintings

Silk painting as a technique has a long history in Vietnam, but there obviously aren’t many ancient examples still intact. The museum has a thorough selection of modern pieces, though, which very much capture the range of expression that’s possible. Here’s a few from the 60s to the 80s.