by Jim Goodman
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| Đà Lạt in its Central Highlands setting |
When the French ruled Vietnam
they named the major city streets after their own officials and military
officers. After their departure in
1954 Vietnamese on both sides of the 17th parallel rushed into a
rectification of names program.
The new city authorities replaced the colonialist street names with
those of Vietnamese heroes and revolutionaries. Nha Trang, in south central Vietnam, also carried out the
changes, but left the names of two intact: Pasteur Street and Yersin
Street.
Louis Pasteur discovered how
to make milk safe to drink, giving his name to the process—pasteurization. Alexandre Yersin, his protégé, became
famous for identifying the plague bacillus. But around this part of Vietnam, he is also known for
another discovery—Đà Lạt.
Living in Nha Trang at the time, Yersin used to make excursions
exploring the Central Highlands to the southwest. On one of these trips in 1893 he wandered into a place in
Lâm Đồng
province that he found particularly lovely. It had rolling hills, lots of pine forests and, at 1500
meters altitude, a climate that was refreshingly cooler than that in the
tropical plains.
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| central Đà Lạr |
Afterwards Yersin pressed
Governor-General Paul Doumer to turn this place into a resort. The colonial government approved the
idea and in 1898-99 built the road connecting the site to the national highway
at Phan Rang. The first hotel
opened in 1907 and in 1912 the government officially established the city of Đà
Lạt. The name derives from the area’s
indigenous people, the Lạch, a small branch of the Cơ Ho ethnic minority,
which the new settlers pronounced Lạt.
‘Đà’ in their language means ‘stream,’ so the city’s name meant ‘the
stream of the Lạch.’
Two other explanations for the
name persisted for a while. Some
claimed that educated Vietnamese referred to it by the Sino-Vietnamese term Đa
Lạc—Great Pleasure—which evolved into Đà Lạt. Others claimed it was from a Latin acronym coined by the
French planners—Dat Aliis Laetitiam Aliis
Temperiem, meaning “giving some people pleasure and others freshness.’ But the first French commissioner
himself confirmed the true origin of the city’s name.
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| Đà Lạt Flower Garden |
A city of ‘Great Pleasure’
was, however, exactly what Đà Lạt’s planners had in mind. Villas in the European style began
dotting the hillsides. Boulevards
connected the neighborhoods. The
French created parks, golf courses, hospitals and boarding schools, but no industries. Đà Lạt was to be, purely and simply, a
holiday resort for their colons sweating
in the tropical heat of places like the Mekong Delta. In Đà Lạt the high temperatures
throughout the year range from 21-25 degrees C. and the lows from 11 to 16
degrees, about like Paris in May.
Promoters quickly began touting Đà Lạt as the City of Eternal Spring.
To enhance the beauty and
atmosphere of the city and its environs, French engineers turned springs and
streams into scenic lakes, beginning in 1919 with a modest lake in the center
of Đà Lạt. Four years later they
added another dam below the lake, enlarging it and naming it Grand Lake. In 1932 a typhoon destroyed both dams
and so the French built yet another, bigger dam to re-create the lake that lies
there today, currently called Hồ Xuân Hương—Spring Fragrance Lake. The long flower garden along one side
of it no doubt influenced the choice of the new name.
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| Đà Lạt Cathedral |
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| stained glass window, Đà Lạt Cathedral |
Throughout the 1920s and 30s
the town continued to grow. More
French colons erected houses here and
enrolled their kids in the boarding schools. To cater to their spiritual needs,
construction started on the Đà Lạt Cathedral in 1931, which took more than a
decade to complete. It resembles a
typical church in the French countryside, featuring a narrow steeple 47 meters
high. Above the altar inside are
several stained glass windows, evocative of those created in Notre Dame and
Chartres Cathedral.
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| the Eifel Tower replica in Đà Lát |
As a final fillip to nostalgia
for the homeland, the city installed a replica of the Eifel Tower in Paris. This gave the city a new
nickname—Little Paris. Le Pétit Paris.
That Paris was flat and Đà Lạt hilly didn’t seem to matter. Đà Lạt was a French town, not an
occupied Vietnamese town with French settlers. It was supposed to be a place where the French could pretend
they were in Europe, not in Southeast Asia.
Among the pleasures offered
was big game hunting. Lâm Đồng
province and the Central Highlands were sparsely populated at the time. The
forests were still quite extensive and home to deer and roe, boars and bears,
peacocks and pheasants, panthers and tigers, gaur and elephant. Big game hunting became such a popular
pastime that by the time the French packed up and left Đà Lạt in 1955, all
those animals were extinct in Lâm Đồng.
Hunting wasn’t restricted to
the French colons. High-ranking Vietnamese officials in
the colonial government also built villas in the city and joined in the same
pursuits. The last Nguyễn Emperor,
Bảo Đại, had a summer palace constructed in Đà Lạt in 1933 and a smaller one in
Buôn Ma Thuột. One of the routes
between the two cities was a private one for the emperor’s entourage, so he
could indulge in his favorite ‘sport’—shooting elephants.
During World
War II, with the Japanese occupying northern Vietnam, France made Đà Lạt the
capital of its government of Indochina.
The city then had more French officials than usual, but no major changes
took place. After the war, it
reverted to its role as a resort, but by the 1950s the Việt Minh insurgency had
reached the Central Highlands and roads connecting Đà Lạt to other cities
experienced sporadic guerrilla attacks.
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| Huế specialty in the Đà Lạt market |
After the French departure Đà
Lạt continued to be a holiday resort city, only now it was for officials and
businessmen of the South Vietnam government. The city’s population had always had a Vietnamese
majority. The French proportion
peaked at 20% and was declining just before they all left. The Vietnamese took over the vacated
villas and hotels, added more and in 1966 opened the city’s premier
attraction—the Đà Lạt Flower Garden next to Xuân Hương Lake.
The Việt Cong insurgency was
already underway by then. Đà Lạt
hosted a military academy that trained officers for the Sài Gòn regime. But the only time the city came under
attack was during the 1968 Tết Offensive, when every city in South Vietnam was
targeted. Otherwise, the two sides
seemed to have an unofficial agreement not to let Đà Lạt suffer from the war. The military academy stayed open and
South Vietnamese officers spent their holidays in the city’s villas. The Việt Cong trained their soldiers in
the nearby forests, while their cadres relaxed in their own villas. No planes or artillery bombed the area
either, so today it is free of any unexploded ordnance or leftover mines. North Vietnamese troops took the city 3
April 1975 without firing a shot.
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| a room at Hằng Nga, the 'Crazy House' |
After Vietnam’s re-unification
Đà Lạt, like other cities in the country, fell upon hard times. War damage and international isolation
left Vietnam in dire straits economically. When hardly anyone could afford to take a holiday anywhere,
a place like Đà Lạt, designed to be a resort, could hardly prosper. But by the end of the 20th
century, with a new economic policy in effect and the country’s pariah status
ended, growth, investment and tourism returned to Đà Lạt. Nowadays it’s one of the country’s top
travel destinations, but it has also developed along lines the French neither
intended nor anticipated. In
short, now it is a fully-fledged city, important to other sectors of the
economy besides the tourist industry.
Among the Vietnamese who
migrated to the Đà Lạt area in the early 20th century were those
taking advantage of the newly tamed wilderness of the highlands to make
farms. Cabbages grow well around
here and are in such abundance restaurants sometimes give customers a free
plate of cabbage leaves with the meal.
Artichoke is another, valued as a treatment for liver and gall bladder
problems. Vietnamese tend to
consume it less often as a vegetable and more likely as a medicine in the form
of jelly or pills or as powder turned into tea. And in recent years coffee plantations have spread
throughout the Central Highlands, replacing the forests and sparking an influx
of immigrants from all over the country.
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| Đaranla Falls |
The central market, Chợ Đà Lạt,
has stalls full of cabbages, artichokes and coffee, as well as local flowers,
avocados and strawberries in season, plus area specialties like preserved
fruits, shredded deer meat and Đà Lạt wine. Vietnamese were not wine-drinkers traditionally, so this was
something the French introduced.
First they used strawberries and later grapes from vineyards established
around Phan Rang. Production
continued long after the French left and now Đà Lát wine is available
throughout the country and an all but obligatory beverage for Vietnamese
tourists having dinner in a Đà Lạt restaurant.
One of the surprises in the
market is that one can hear all the language’s dialects in a single
stroll. Vietnamese from north,
central and south Vietnam have all settled here and some operate businesses
catering to regional tastes, like the goat restaurants run by northerners and
the stalls making bánh khoài, the
stuffed pancake from Huế, run by women from that city.
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| Prenn Falls |
Tourism is still the city’s
main business and visitors have a choice among dozens of hotels, ranging from
five-star to backpacker specials.
The most unusual one, though, is clearly Hằng Nga, with weird buildings
shaped out of trees, fanciful sculptures, decorations and room interiors that
seem to have been inspired by an old hippie’s psychedelic fantasy. Locals call it the Crazy House, the
place also bills itself as an art museum and at any given time hosts more
visitors than guests.
Contemporary Đà Lạt’s
attractions are still the same as they were in colonial days—the climate and
the countryside. Temperatures are
always comfortable and several lakes, waterfalls and mountain views can be reached
with easy motorbike excursions. Just
ten km south of the city off Route 20 is the Đatanla Falls. The path to get there winds through a
thick pine forest and descends steeply to the falls, which cascade gently
across the boulders. The area was
a base of Lạch/Cơ Ho people resisting Chăm invasions in past centuries and a Cư
Ho ceremonial pole stands nearby as a reminder.
Another
two km south is Prenn Pass, the former boundary between the Cơ Ho tribes on
this side and the Chăm on the other side.
It was here the Cơ Ho turned back a Chăm invasion by King Pôrômê of
Panduranga in the 17th century. The waterfall at the foot of the mountain drops 13 meters
over a precipice. Even more
spectacular are the Elephant Falls, 24 km sw of Đà Lạt, which drop 30 meters.
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| display in Đà Lạt Flower Farden |
The lakes in the Đà Lạt
vicinity are largely artificial, the result of dams built first by the French,
and later by the Vietnamese, as hydropower and water storage projects. As a bonus, the dams created a string
of new scenic tourist spots: the
Gold and Silver Springs, 24 km northwest of the city, Tuyền Lâm Lake, just 5 km
south, with a Trúc Lâm (Zen) monastery on the hill opposite, Đa Thiện just
north and Hồ Than Thở, the Lake of Laments, named for a tragic tale of two
star-crossed lovers who died here in the late 18th century.
With such sites within easy
access of the city, Đà Lạt has drawn an ever-increasing number of Vietnamese
tourists. Mass domestic tourism
has resulted in a plethora of tailor shops and souvenir stalls selling things
like stuffed forest animals and silk-embroidered pictures of rural scenery and
flowers. And at places like Cám Ly
Falls, in the city suburbs, tourists are offered pony rides by locals dressed
like American cowboys, with some of the ponies painted to look like zebras.
Despite such kitsch
distractions, the main lure of the city for the Vietnamese is its landscape,
its hills and valleys studded with pine forests and myriad flowers. Among the species of flowers,
decorating waterfalls, growing along the rural roads, sold in the markets and laid
out in beautiful patterns in private and public gardens, are the peach blossom,
sunflower, orchid, rose, hydrangea, pansy, mimosa and gladiolus.
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| Đà Lạt flowers |
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| Đà Lạt orchids |
Đà Lạt Flower Garden, sprawling
alongside Xuân Hương Lake and the most beautiful place in town, features these
and dozens more, including vines, ornamental plants and cacti. Đà Lạt is one of the top destinations
for Vietnamese on honeymoon and a leisurely amble through the flower garden is
a must for newlyweds. And if that
isn’t romantic enough, they can take an excursion to the Valley of Love and the
Forest of Kissing and Cuddling north of the city, appropriate anytime of year. Spring is the season for lovers, and in
Đà Lạt, it’s always spring.
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| sunset in Đà Lạt |
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