Culture and war entwined in Vietnam tourism

Culture and war entwined in Vietnam tourism

By Ian C. Glover

Developments in the region, especially Cambodia, affect Vietnam's tourism industry.

SINGAPORE: In the 1990s, tourism has become increasingly specialized and, together with eco- or green tourism, cultural tourism is a distinct leisure activity, identifiable by its focus on museums, historical monuments, exhibitions, music and dance performances.

Until the late 1980s, tourism of any sort to Vietnam was limited to official cultural delegations and a few groups from "friendly", mainly eastern bloc countries. However, following the 1986 Communist Party Congress, a more open policy (doi moi) was inaugurated and since then Vietnam has steadily relaxed internal controls, opened to the capitalist world and invited inward investment.

At first only tolerating visitors, the authorities soon started to encourage and promote organized tourism, in which cultural tourism -- to historic monuments, archaeological sites and "heritage" locations in general -- plays a significant, if not yet major, role.

The past 10 years have seen something like a 16-fold increase in overseas tourist arrivals. From 92,500 international visitors in 1988 the numbers rose to 250,000 in 1990, 420,000 in 1992 and 1.6 million in 1996. The first six months of this year, however, has seen a 7 percent decline.

Vietnam has a long tradition of scholarly concern with its own past, born out of 900 years of resistance to Chinese political domination. As early as the 11th century, the newly independent Li dynasty encouraged the collection of antiquities to help legitimize the new state by strengthening links with the pre-Han past. A well established historiographic tradition emphasized indigenous dynasties and institutions.

Modern archeology began during French colonial rule with the establishment of the Ecole Francaise d'Extreme Orient (EFEO) in 1901. French scholars paid most attention to the monuments of "advanced" civilizations, such as the Indianized Cham civilization (2nd to 15th centuries AD) of central and southern Vietnam. Taking a typically colonialist attitude, they saw the Vietnamese and Annamese as having relapsed from a former higher level of culture, long ago brought from China and India, and now requiring infusions of foreign modernizing ideas and institutions. This, of course, lent intellectual support to their own "mission civiliatrice".

Serious emphasis was given to prehistoric archaeology only after the independence of North Vietnam in 1954, and the establishment of an Institute of Archeology in Hanoi. Priority was placed on nationalist and Marxist perspectives, and students of archaeology sent for training in China, Russia and eastern Europe. Archeology thus secured its place in rebuilding the national identity. The main focus of the new research of the 1950s and 1960s was to identify the ancestral cultures of the Lac Viet peoples in their homeland on the plains of the Red River Valley where the Late Bronze-Iron Age Dong Son Culture was seen as the "glorious product of the Vietnamese people before their subjection to Han Imperial hegemony".

Archeology was thus used to show that the Vietnamese peoples had achieved political maturity and high standards of cultural expression before the Chinese invasions. A recurrent theme in recent Vietnamese historical and archaeological writing has been "building and defending the country in connection with the heroic struggle against Chinese feudal expansionism".

At this time research in the archeology of central and southern Vietnam was neglected. Much of the area was under the control of the French and later the U.S. satellite government in Saigon; and it was also the traditional homeland of the Cham and Khmer peoples, long traditional enemies of the Vietnamese and only subjugated from the 15th century.

With unification in 1975, northern (and some southern) Vietnamese archeologists started to work in the central and southern parts of the country and to identify a series of regional sequences from neolithic to metal age, named from type- sites or regions.

Greatest emphasis was put on the Sa Huynh Culture, thought to be ancestral to the historic Cham civilization and roughly contemporary with the Dong Son.

Since about 1990, Vietnamese archeologists and historians have also started to take a greater interest in the Cham civilization itself. Whereas the French had stressed the intrusive nature of the Cham, their "civilized" and Indian aspects, the Vietnamese, with their nationalistic and Marxist perspectives, looked for continuities from the past prehistoric culture, and see the Cham civilization as the product of local evolutionary forces.

No longer a threat to national unity, the Indianized Cham civilization could now be valued as a glory of a greater Vietnamese tradition, and promoted for tourism.

Cultural tourism

As indicated earlier, Vietnam has only recently become a major tourist destination. Tourist infrastructure is still weak, but private small hotels have proliferated and some of the old French colonial hotels have been renovated at huge expense.

Organized tour groups, especially from France, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Singapore, are now frequent sights. What are the attractions? What do they go to see?

A great attraction, of course, is the pure novelty. Vietnam is a new destination for people who have been everywhere else. There is value in being able to say that you have been there before your friends and neighbors.

Historic monuments have an important place in this cultural one-upmanship. Most attractive, however, are the sites to which the visitors can identify, from the battlefields of Dien Bien Phu (especially for the French) to the sights of the Vietnamese War of Unification.

Here, the Viet Cong tunnels at Cu Chi and Ben Duoc north-west of Saigon, the bunkers and minefields of the former "DMZ" around the 17th parallel, and the Khe Sanh combat base are powerful attractions, not only for middle-aged Americans who fought in Vietnam, but also for a younger generation who know Vietnam only from protest songs of their parents' generation.

A quick trawl through Vietnam URLs on the World Wide Web, and public library holdings in London, suggests strongly that the Vietnam War, its memories and mementos are the foremost attraction to Vietnam-bound tourists from the USA and Europe.

On a cruise which called into Saigon in early 1997 on which I was guest lecturer the only organized land tours offered there by the Vietnamese tour company were to the Cu Chi tunnels, the War Crimes Museum and to the Re-unification Hall, former palace of the President of South Vietnam. A BBC radio program heard in September 1997 similarly emphasized the attraction of war sites.

For middle-aged French tour groups, especially, going to Vietnam is a form of nostalgia for a mythical colonial past, where there was peace (of a sort and for a while), cheap food and servants, and luxurious living for a ruling caste. This sort of nostalgia inspired, and was encouraged by, the 1991 French film Indochine.

For these tourists the grand hotels and public buildings are a major attraction. These are fine examples of Beaux Arts, Art Nouveau and Art Deco styles, built by the French between the 1880s and 1935. They are indeed a splendid architectural heritage, and it is to be hoped that they are not swept away as Vietnam rebuilds.

Other major tourist attractions are the two National Museums in Hanoi and Saigon. These are fine buildings in themselves, and have magnificent, if not always adequately displayed, collections illustrating Vietnamese culture from the Palaeolithic to the independent medieval dynasties. Individual museums are also dedicated to the People's Army, to the Revolution, and to the life of Ho Chi Minh, who also has a Soviet-style mausoleum in Hanoi.

Finally, one comes to the more purely archaeological and built heritage; not insignificant but not yet, I think, high on the tourist's list of priorities. In the north there are numerous temples and pagodas in a modified provincial Chinese style. At Hue, the remains of a citadel, a royal palace and funerary temples of the Nguyen rulers of the 19th century are magnets for tourists both for their intrinsic beauty and charm of location, and from the associations of the 1968 Tet offensive. Old Hue has recently been scheduled by Unesco as a World Heritage site.

From Danang southwards, forty or so Cham temples offer a view of a very different cultural tradition. Smaller, less imposing and far less well-known than the great monuments of the Khmer civilization in Cambodia, they have suffered from neglect and sometimes deliberate destruction by American and South Vietnamese forces. Many Cham towers are, however, still picturesque ruins, graceful in their details and those at Mi Son are now under consideration for scheduling as a World Heritage site.

What is the future of cultural tourism to Vietnam? As indicated earlier the rapid growth of the early 1990s is over and numbers seem to be dropping.

Vietnam Today of March/April 1997 carried an article entitled, "The Hotel and Tourism Industry ... Distress Alert" which blamed the too rapid construction of mediocre hotels with poor standards of service, low occupancy rates, which over-charge for the market, and poor infra-structure, especially for internal travel and communications - a case of "too much, too soon".

Certainly tourist facilities in Vietnam do not at present compete in quality-for-price with those of Thailand, Malaysia and the Philippines, and I suspect that the novelty of going to see Vietnam has worn off.

Those who wanted to get there before their friends have done so and are moving on to yet more exotic locations.

A relatively new development has been the cruise ships which call in at a few locations such as Ha Long Bay, Hai Phong, Da Nang, Nha Trang and Saigon, and give well-off foreign tourists a glimpse of Vietnam without having to experience the discomfort of internal travel. But even here there are problems and one cruise company, Swan Hellenic, is cutting down on stops on account of the excessive port charges levied in Vietnam.

Another uncertainty facing cultural tourism to Vietnam is the political situation in Cambodia; most tours organized by foreign operators, which account for nearly half of the foreign travelers coming into Vietnam, link together visits to two or three countries such as Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia, Vietnam and the Philippines; and in terms of cultural attractions, the temples at Angkor are the star attraction.

The present political disturbance in Phnom Penh can only adversely affect tourist arrivals in Vietnam.

And, finally, it is interesting to see that not everyone in the Vietnamese government unquestioningly accepts the benefits of tourism. An article by Jeremy Grant in the Financial Times of Sept. 26, quoting from the Vietnam News Agency, reported "a bizarre attack on foreign tourists, accusing them of treachery, smuggling, drug trafficking, sex abuse and even assassination ... the opening up to tourists in the 1990s had brought with it a litany of evils such as espionage and sex crimes. "Hostile elements' posing as tourists were trespassing in restricted areas to obtain sensitive information on national security". With paranoia like this in high places, the immediate future of cultural tourism in Vietnam faces more problems than those presented by poor hotel service and bad roads.

Dr. Ian C Glover is Emeritus Reader in Southeast Asian Archaeology, Institute of Archaeology, University College, London.