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.