Getting to Know Bắc Hà

                                                                  by Jim Goodman

Hmông handicrafts stalls in Bắc Hà, 2000

       Around the turn of the century, when Sapa had already established itself for several years as the leading destination in the mountains of northern Vietnam, Bắc Hà was basically a sideshow.  Tour company posters advertised it as a ‘non-touristic destination’.  They basically touted it not as a separate area worth exploration, but as a particular event—the colorful Sunday market.  Buses packed with tourists left Sapa early Sunday morning for the 100-km ride and arrived just as the market was getting into full swing.  They left mid-afternoon for Lào Cai and an overnight train ride back to Hanoi.

Bắc Hà in 2000

       Having spent several days in Sapa on my first trip to Vietnam December 1999, on the next journey a couple months later, entering the country from China at Lào Cai, I made Bắc Hà my first destination. .  Nestled in an 800-meter high valley, with modest mountains on all horizons, it is not as spectacularly sited as Sapa.  Nor does it have near as many guesthouses and restaurants.  No park exists in town, but the hilltop behind the market provides good views of the surrounding scenery. 

       The town then was rather small and quiet.  Most residents were ethnic Vietnamese (Kình), but the Hmông Hoa, who comprise 65% of the district’s population, live in the suburbs and nearby villages.  Villages of the Tày and Phù Lá minorities are within hiking distance, while the Dao live further away.  The ’downtown’ area, such as it was, featured buildings in the Franco-Vietnamese style, with a small Buddhist temple roughly in the center, opposite a colonial-era clock tower.

Hmông girls in Bắc Hà

Hmông girl in the Sunday market, 2000

       I arrived on an early bus from Lào Cai over an hour before the first tourists from Sapa.  Folks were already setting up stalls on the streets and mountain dwellers were arriving from several directions, mostly Hmông, but also some members of the Dao, Tày and Phù Lá ethnic minorities.  Just from their apparel, this was a very different scene than Sapa’s Saturday market.  The Hmông and the Dao also dominate Sapa, but their female counterparts in Bắc Hà belong to different sub-groups and women  dress in completely different outfits. 

a busy Bắc Hà lane on market day, 2000

      The Black Hmông of Sapa are called thus because the dominant color of their clothing components—jacket, cap, shirt, leggings and shorts—is black.  The women of the Flowery Hmông  (as it translates) don bulky, ankle-length, patterned blue skirts, lavishly embroidered and appliquéd, bright jackets, belts, leggings and aprons.  They embellish their outfits with heavy silver neck rings, chunky finger rings and necklaces and big round earrings.

       The Red Dao women around Sapa wear highly embroidered trousers and long-tailed jackets with bright red caps or turbans on the heads.  The Dao of Bắc Hà are also a Red Dao sub-group, but wear outfits dominated by plain black, with no embroidery, with a wide vertical band of silver studs on the front of the jacket, colorful tassels attached at the bottom, and a round, mostly red-striped turban on the head.

young Red Dao woman

Red Dao women in Bắc Hà

       The Tày women dress in long black jackets and trousers, while the Phù Lá women wear a light or dark blue, side-fastened jacket, occasionally with a heavily embroidered bib over the front.  They are relatively few in the crowd, which is dominated by Hmông women as soon as they start to arrive.  Older women lead heavily laden ponies.  Young women carry woven pack baskets of split bamboo.  Some lead dogs on leashes.  Others bear pigs wrapped in a split bamboo harness and carried in the pack basket.  These they sell in the square at the end of the market street, while others set up stalls all along the way. 

group gardening in Bản Phố village

       By the time the tourist groups show up the streets are packed.  In 2000, though, the other notable difference from the Sapa market scene was the interaction between foreigners and locals.  Sapa’s Hmông and Dao women and girls were already the most aggressive souvenir and handicraft sellers one could encounter in Vietnam.  Bắc Hà’s Hmông all but ignored the foreigners.  The handicraft and jewelry stalls they set up were for other Hmông and nobody pestered a foreigner to buy anything at all.  They just smiled for the photographs.

Hoàng A Tưởng Palace

       As for the tourists, they rarely initiated any interaction with the locals, except maybe to ask if it was OK to take a picture.  They stayed in their groups and all departed around 3, just as the market was winding down.  Only two other visitors stayed the night and we hiked together to the nearest hill for a view of the valley and the sunset.  But they left early next morning and for that day I was the only stranger in town.

       The nearest minority settlement is the Hmông village of Phố, 4 km up the mountain behind Bắc Hà. Not all the Hmông of Bác Hà live in big villages.  The path passes by hamlets of a handful of houses and occasionally a lone household off by itself next to newly cleared land.  The houses are sturdy, roomy, wooden structures of usually one story, with roofs of thatch or wood tiles.  Besides rice, corn and vegetables, they also raise ponies for transport and pigs and dogs for the market.

Hmông weaver at Hoàng A Tưỡng Palace 

       In the 90s the Hmômg began cultivating plums and other fruits in hillside orchards.  This brought them prosperity not yet experienced in Sapa, despite the tourist income there.  Bắc Hà plums are now highly prized and locally eaten with salt, black pepper and chili.  The Bắc Hà Hmông then lived in better houses, looked healthier and cleaner and their women had several sets of clothes.  They smiled politely when I passed by, invited me for tea when I stopped to photograph collective gardening and no one offered me anything for sale.

       I pressed on to other destinations next day and as years passed my research took me elsewhere in Vietnam.  But I kept hearing about changes in both Sapa and Bắc Hà from friends in the motorcycle touring business.  The biggest change in Bắc Hà came in 2006 with the opening of the renovated Hoàng A Tưởng Palace.  Now the town had a distinct historical relic of its own.

Tày woman and child

Tày woman, Bản Liền

       The palace sits on a mound one kilometer from the town center and dates its construction to 1914-1921.  The French colonialists appointed a local Tày chieftain, Hoàng Yến Chao, as ruler of the area and conscripted French and Chinese architects to design his palace.  The result was a very baroque combination of French and Oriental styles, occupying 4000 square meters, two stories high, mostly yellow walls, arched entries and a railed balcony, offering a view of the town and surroundings. 

painted rafters of a Tày house in Bản Liền

       The palace compound comprises the former residential palace, occupying 420 square meters, and subsidiary buildings on its wings.  These used to house a military detachment, but now the ground floor rooms are used to display local art works and Hmông handicrafts.  The upper floor rooms, of both the wings and the main house, were for private use and today hold furniture and old photographs.

       The palace was one of three the French commissioned for their allies in the northern hills.  The others were near Đồng Văn, Hà Giang, for the Hmông chieftain, and Mường Lay, Lai Châu, for the Thái chieftain.  So long as they kept the frontiers peaceful, these chieftains could rule without interference.  And in the case of Hoàng Yến Chao and his son and successor Hoàng A Tưởng, this meant unchecked exploitation of the people under their rule, as well as economic monopolies on all essentials of trade.

Tày stilted house in Trung Đô

       When the Việt Minh began seizing control of the northern mountains, Hoàng A Tưởng fled and subsequently disappeared from the history books.  The palace fell into disuse and disrepair until its 2006 restoration.  Now it is the most popular attraction in town after the Sunday market.  And there is no admission charge.

       By 2017, on my return to Bắc Hà, the nature of the Sunday market had come to resemble that in Sapa in the past.  Tourism has grown exponentially this century and nowadays foreigners may even outnumber locals in Bắc Hà on Sundays.  A much larger part of the market consists of souvenir handicrafts stalls, usually run by Vietnamese rather than Hmông, while the latter badger tourists in the lanes to buy whatever they are carrying.  In return, the tourists are more inclined to very intrusive photography, zeroing in for repeated close-ups of every lady with a wrinkled face and lots of silver jewelry.

       But they don’t all leave afterwards.  The district’s additional attractions, its ethnic mix and other market days, have recently inspired more travelers to schedule a longer stay.  The number of hotels is still small, but it’s still a very laid back town, without the plethora of handicraft shops and sellers that characterizes Sapa.  Visitors can take treks of two to four days in the mountains and see and stay in villages of the Hmông, Dao and Tày.  They can also opt for a home-stay visit to a single Hmông, Tày or Dao village.

planting rice in Trung Đô

      One such Tày village is Bản Liền, 23 km southeast of Bắc Hà, lying in a valley backed by forested hills.  The Tày are Vietnam’s largest ethnic minority.  They are not colorful dressers, preferring plain black jackets and trousers, with a bit of blue trim on the jacket lapel and a blue belt for the women.  Yet they are still very traditional.  All Bản Liền families live in stilted wooden houses with angled roofs of thatch or tiles.  The rooms are spacious but sparsely furnished.  The rafters supporting the roof interior often feature painted designs of flowers, birds, butterflies, arabesques and other symbols.  They follow a kind of Buddhism mixed with animist practices, such as making caps for their babies with special protective medallions.

       Another popular Tày village is Trung Đô, about 15 km south of Bắc Hà, entered via a tree-lined road until the rice fields before the village.  A little larger than Bản Liền, with only about half the houses traditional stilted ones, it also features a fine old village temple and the remnants of the former chieftain’s residence.  Trung Đô lies close to the Chày River, where boats take passengers upriver to the market villages of Bảo Nhai and Cốc Ly.

buffalo market in Cốc Ly

       Bảo Nhai holds its weekly affair on Thursdays, in and around the covered market in the center.  Mainly Hmông, Tày and Vietnamese Kình attend, and once in a while a foreigner.  It’s rather small and caters strictly to locals, so free of the tourist-oriented products and stalls that dominate market days in Bắc Hà and, to a lesser extent, Cốc Ly.  It’s also an early riser market, which starts winding down by noon

       Market day at Cốc Ly, on the Chày River 20 km southwest of Bắc Hà, falls on Tuesdays.  The venue has two sections.  The stalls hawking the usual market goods sit on a mound on the east side of the road and the livestock market, mostly buffaloes, is in a shallow on the west side of the road.  The market stalls on the mound are mostly run by Hmông and Hmông are most of the shoppers as well. 

Hmông herbal medicine stall in Cốc Ly

       Because it’s just two days after the Bẵc Hà market day, some foreigners extend their stay to include witnessing this event--but a few dozen at most, not several hundred.  As a result, though, the market includes many stalls selling the kind of tourist souvenir handicrafts seen in Bẵc Hà now and Sapa, yet without the hard sell, pestering manners common to the other two places.  Still, other layouts are of more traditional Hmông products, from vegetables to medicinal herbs to homemade maize liquor.

       The maize liquor sold there could very well be from Bãn Phố, above Bắc Hà, which has a district-wide reputation for it.  One of their production centers is a short walk outside town, where visitors are given a tour of the processing methods and facilities and a sample of the liquor.

       North of Bắc Hà, Cán Cấu, a 20 km-ride through beautiful hills, has market day on Saturdays, drawing mostly Flowery Hmông, some Tày and hardly any foreigners.  Lùng Phìn, just 10 km north of Bắc Hà, holds its market day on Sundays, attracting Hmông and Phù Lá.  Other than the Lùng Phìn area, the easiest place to visit the Phù Lá is Chỉu Cái, a few km south of Bắc Hà.  Most houses have converted to modern style, but the females still wear the side-fastened traditional jacket, in pastel colors for the younger ones and darker shades for the older women.

Phù Lá woman in Bắc Hà, 2000 

Phù Lá woman, Chìu Cái, 2017

       In 2000 Bắc Hà’s reputation rested on the town’s market day.  The authenticity of that has eroded since then, but the result has been to find that authenticity elsewhere in the district, in far-flung market venues and remote ethnic minority villages.  For anyone looking for genuine traditional life styles, the district is worth an extended stay.

Hmông girls on the northern rim of Bắc Hà district

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       Bắc Hà is one of the stops on Delta Tours Vietnam’s journey through the northern mountains.                 See the itinerary at https://www.deltatoursvietnam.com/other-tour-options

      

      

The Enduring Attraction of Sapa

                                                                 by Jim Goodman

Sapa as the morning fog lifts

        By 1918, the French had been in control of northern Vietnam for three decades.  That year a French missionary, wandering around in the mountains along the Chinese border, discovered Sapa.  He believed this was a good place to spread the Word of God and several years later oversaw the construction of a church in the Hmông village there. 

       His compatriots, upon learning about Sapa, had more secular ambitions.  They viewed the mountain town, 1640 meters above sea level, as a great place to escape the heat of the plains in summer and soon developed it as a health resort.  The French promptly expelled the Hmông residents, who subsequently resettled in Sinchai, several km north, built villas, tennis courts and parks, even a small hydroelectric complex next to the Cát Cát waterfall near Sinchai, and by the 1930s Sapa was a popular French tourist site. 

Sapa in 1930

       After 1945 the French ceased coming.  Their unpaid corvée labor demands on the local minorities had turned all these people into Việt Minh sympathizers and Sapa became a guerrilla stronghold throughout the anti-colonialist struggle.  

       Afterwards Party officials took over the abandoned French villas for their occasional vacation use, but the Chinese invasion in 1979 destroyed nearly all of them, as well as the church. The government paid for the church’s reconstruction, but otherwise Sapa didn’t recover until it became touted as a tourist destination in the early 90s.

Sapa Catholic Church

       By then villas had been restored and turned into guesthouses.  Shops and restaurants lined the main street, some offering unusual choices like venison, antelope, apple wine and the far stronger snake wine.  When fog was absent a visitor had a magnificent view of Phansipan from the end of the town.  A picturesque pond at the town entrance, fountain in the square just inside the city, a mini-stone forest on Hàm Rồng Hill behind the church, with an array of small caverns and weirdly shaped boulders jutting up from the ground, and a grove above the town full of birds in the mornings completed the list of Sapa’s physical attractions.

Red Dao in Sapa for market day

       The great majority of Sapa’s residents are ethnic Vietnamese, but they only constitute 15% of the district’s population.  More than half, 52%, are Hmông, 25% are Dao, with a few Giáy and Xa Phô as well.  For travelers this was a very different kind of Vietnam, full of colorful minorities and mountain scenery.  Very few Hmông and Dao lived in Sapa, but they were always around, for their villages are not far away.

Lừ woman visiting Sapa 

       Saturday is market day in Sapa and ethnic minorities swarmed into town.  Not only Hmông and Dao, some Giáy and Xa Phô, and even Lừ from Bình Lư west of Sapa, would turn up as sellers, buyers or both.  It was a great day to mingle with the natives, even if you didn’t have a camera.  The streets were jammed with color, for Sapa’s minorities, male and female, still preferred their ethnic clothing.

       The most numerous in attendance are the Hmông from the nearest villages like Sinchai and Lao Chải, members of the sub-group the Black Hmông, who dominate the district.  The women dress in long-sleeved black jackets of indigo-dyed hemp or cotton, embellished with embroidered collars and cuffs, knee-length black pants, leg-wrappers, a round black cap, big round, filigreed earrings and silver neck rings.  Men wear full-length black trousers and a side-fastened jacket and also like to don neck rings.

Black Hmông women, 1930

       More colorful are the Red Dao  (pronounced Zao and known as Yao in neighboring countries), whose women wear long-tailed jackets and shin-length trousers, both heavily embroidered, and bright red, tasseled turbans.  They keep their heads shaved under those turbans, wear silver earrings and neck rings and have silver buckles on the jacket.  The men dress more sedately, mainly in black, but may have heavily embroidered jacket cuffs.  Dao women run shops in the main market center that sell ethnic Dao clothing and embroidered pieces to other Dao as well as tourists and Vietnamese merchants.

Black Hmông today, same basic clothing

       Throughout the 90s visitors to Sapa could observe one particularly charming custom called the Love Market.  Actually it was just a gathering of Hmông and Dao youths after market day, characterized by music and dance.  Some romances may have developed in this context, but it was not the principal motivation for those involved.  It was more like a public party.  By the end of the decade, tourist groups outnumbered the locals and the custom fell into abeyance. 

       It was in these years that Sapa’s people first began interacting with foreigners.  They were rather shy and reserved in the beginning, but so were the visitors, for the most part.  Then the foreigners started buying things from them for souvenirs and that encouraged a more forward attitude.  But it wasn’t always driven by the prospects of economic gain.  Some of them, especially the youth, were just plain curious about the foreigners.  They even learned foreign languages to be able to converse.

young Red Dao woman

Dao men also favor traditional clothing

       The most delightful encounters then were with Hmông girls aged 10-15.  Usually in small groups, but sometimes solo, they approached foreigners offering to sell them the little brass mouth-harps (đàn mồi) they were playing.  If they didn’t get a sale, and generally they didn’t, it didn’t matter.  They put them away, asked what country the foreigner was from and spouted off a few phrases they’d learned in the foreigner’s language.  If it was a country they hadn’t met anyone from yet they responded with something along the lines of  “How do I say ‘hello, how are you?’ in your country’s language?  How do I say ‘where are you going?’ and ‘do you like’?”

Phansipan, tallest mountain in Vietnam

       Besides encounters in the town, foreigners could also meet the minority people by visiting them in their villages.  A few were within walking distance.  Motorbikes could be rented for settlements further away, while tour companies offered organized treks of 2-5 days where customers stayed overnight in Hmông, Dao and Giáy villages. 

       The companies also took hardy travelers to the top of Phansipan, the towering mountain several km above Sinchai, where they camped overnight.  Rising to 3141 meters, Phansipan is the highest mountain in Vietnam, at the lower end of the range here called Hoàng Liên Sơn.  Flanking the right bank of the Red River, this range begins in the center of Yunnan, where it is known as Ailaoshan and its highest peak, Mt. Ailao, at the upper end of the range, is just 25 meters higher than Phansipan.

       Ailaoshan is famous for the proliferation of irrigated rice terraces climbing up the mountain slopes.  Streams above the terraces feed water into them all year round.  While not in such profusion as north of the border, and not always irrigated by adjacent streams, the terraces in Sapa district are a definite part of the area’s scenery.  Pictures of them appear on posters advertising Sapa in tourist offices throughout the country.  And every trekking route passes by photogenic sets of them.

terraced fields in Sapa district

       The people who farm them live in villages of 30-60 families.  Their houses are simple, one-story buildings of wood or mud-brick, with roofs of thatch, wooden tiles or, more recently, corrugated iron.  Few villagers are by any measure wealthy, but they are self-sufficient, grow their own food, raise chickens and pigs for their meat and make their own clothes.

       The Hmông weave their own hemp cloth, while the Dao and Giáy purchase the materials in the market and cut and stitch them at home.  Turning hemp plant stalks into thread usable for a loom is a laborious process.  It’s more complicated than spinning cotton thread.  Hmông women often carry loops of hemp string with them to the field or markets, splicing, twining and winding it into satisfactory thread while on the move and carrying a full basket on the back.

Hmông woman twining hemp thread

       After bleaching the thread the women weave it on a narrow loom, producing a long strip of cloth 25-30 cm wide.  They dye this with indigo several times until it is a deep blue-black.  Then they cut it up and sew the pieces together to make the components of their clothing. The last step is to embroider extra pieces for the collars and cuffs, another prime free-time activity.

       For finding time for embroidery no one does this more than the Dao.  Unless everyone is out in the fields for planting or harvesting, whenever visitors come to a Dao village in relatively clement weather, they will see pairs, groups or individual Dao women and girls sitting outside busy with their needles.  Frequently changing the thread colors they embroider cross-stitched designs in floral, geometric and other patterns on black cotton cloth for their next coats and trousers.

       Besides creating the most attractive and exotic clothing ensembles in the area, Dao embroidery skills are considered a personal asset for a young woman’s marriage prospects.  To be a good embroiderer requires paying attention to detail, a sense of balance and proportion, long-term planning and a good measure of patience.  These are also qualities desirable in a good housewife.      

       Trekking companies arrange itineraries to include stops in different ethnic minority villages.  Travelers can also rent a motorbike and turn south out of the south end of Sapa along a road above a long valley backed by high mountains.  In a single day’s drive they can visit Hmông, Dao and Giáy villages.  They can also make a stop at a peculiar set of boulders next to the main road above the Giáy village of Tả Vân.  

inscribed stone

       These feature inscribed lines, straight and squiggly, on the surface of the stones, though nothing that resembles any kind of pictograph.  Local publicists tout these as an ancient Hmông alphabet, but none of these inscriptions, if that’s what they are, are in the shape of a text.  If they were meant to be magical, that knowledge is lost.  The world still waits for the researcher who finally deciphers them and solves the mystery.  Meanwhile, people will believe they must mean something.

       Excursions in other directions out of Sapa are also worthwhile.  Several kilometers out on the road back to Lào Cai a left turn on a branch road takes one to Tả Phìn.  It’s a gradual uphill road for 3 km to the ruins of a French monastery built in the 1930s.  The French eventually abandoned it and then bombed it as a Việt Minh base during the Vietnamese war for independence. From here the road descends for another 3 km, passing jagged hills and Hmông villages to the north, and ends at the large Dao village of Tả Phìn in the valley.  

       A final option is the high road heading west to Lai Châu province.  There are picturesque waterfalls along the way, one near the road, another requiring a long walk down the mountain slope to see.  The road zigzags over the mountains and then descends to a plain and the Lừ village of Bình Lư.  The Lừ live in stilted houses and are ethnically and culturally close to the animist Thái of Vietnam.

the ruined Tả Phìn Monastery

       In the 90s such excursions only appealed to the individual Western tourists.  The tourist industry grew in Sapa because of the town’s popularity with foreign tour groups, who often arrived Friday, stayed for the Saturday market and then left Sunday for the market at Bắc Hà, three hours away, before boarding a train back to Hanoi.

       That’s still the case, well into the next century, with foreign visitors.  On the weekends the town is overrun with tourists and other days practically restricted to the backpackers.  The novelty of foreigners has long worn off for the local people and except for home-stays on the trekking routes the encounters are more strictly commercial.  The Hmông girls who used to hang out with foreigners in town grew up and, thanks to their multi-lingual skills, got jobs with the trekking agencies. 

       On the other hand, the city authorities turned over the small, rarely used stadium in front of the church to minority merchants.  With their own selling venue they no longer pester tourists on the street or surround them flashing their goods as soon as the tourist leaves a restaurant, making for a much more relaxed, hassle-free environment.

ethnic minority marketplace

Love Waterfall (Thác Tình Yêu) nw of Sapa

       The other major change in recent years is the increasing numbers of Vietnamese tourists.  They don’t do much trekking, but enjoy the scenery, the waterfalls, the pond and parks and the special culinary dishes.  Antelope is off the menus now, and venison less common.  But nowadays, thanks to new fish farms in the district, diners can opt for American salmon and Russian sturgeon. 

       Far from being ruined by tourism, the Sapa experience may not be as fresh and exciting as the early 90s, but it is still quite enjoyable.  The ethnic minorities are likely to retain their preference for their traditional style at least another generation or two.  The cuisine and drinks will still be special and the mountains will always tower majestically all around.  These features guarantee Sapa’s permanent appeal to travelers, domestic and foreign.

the valley south of Sapa

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for more on Sapa and Ailaoshan see my e-book The Terrace Builders