Bac Son Valley

A stretch of land of more than 600 square kilometers in the mountains of northeastern Vietnam holds at least four layers of history. Most of them lie thousands of years apart.

The deepest layer is geology. Vietnam's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and scientific agencies record that the arc of limestone mountains around the Bắc Sơn valley began in an ancient ocean more than 500 million years ago. These mountains were not made in human time. They were made in the time of the Earth, when layers of coral, trilobites and other ancient sea creatures settled on the ocean floor and were slowly lifted into mountains. That is why, in April 2025, UNESCO officially recognized the whole of Bắc Sơn, together with the limestone region of Lạng Sơn, as a Global Geopark. A UNESCO Global Geopark is an area with landscapes of international geological importance, managed for protection, education and sustainable development. It is the fourth geopark in Vietnam.

The second layer is archaeology. From about 10,000 to 8,000 years before the Common Era, people lived in the caves and rock shelters of this region. They used stone axes with ground edges and made early pottery. Scientists around the world gave this culture the name Bacsonian, the Bắc Sơn culture, after the place itself. So the name Bắc Sơn appears not only on maps of Vietnam but also in international archaeology, as a scientific term.

The third layer is revolutionary history. At dawn on September 27, 1940, about 600 people of Bắc Sơn rose up. They came from the Tày, Nùng, Dao and Kinh peoples. The Tày and the Nùng are two peoples of northern Vietnam with closely related languages and similar cultures. The group took the Mỏ Nhài post and seized the weapons there. It was the first armed uprising led by the Indochinese Communist Party in the years from 1930 to 1945. 16 days later, the Bắc Sơn guerrilla unit was founded, the forerunner of Vietnam's revolutionary armed forces. In 2016, the Prime Minister signed a decision ranking the Bắc Sơn Uprising historic site a Special National Monument, the highest rank in Vietnam's system for classifying monuments.

The fourth layer is the present. In October 2025, at an awards ceremony in China, the United Nations tourism organization named the village of Quỳnh Sơn one of the Best Tourism Villages in the World for 2025. Quỳnh Sơn lies in the Bắc Sơn region. It was not chosen for hotels or modern facilities. It was chosen because more than 400 traditional Tày stilt houses still stand intact. People still weave cloth. They still sing Then, a ritual practice in the spiritual life of the Tày, and they still play the đàn tính. They also hold the Lồng Tồng festival on the 12th and 13th days of the first lunar month, to celebrate going down to the fields. Out of more than 270 applications from 65 countries, Quỳnh Sơn was among those chosen.

From the summit of Nà Lay, after about 1,200 stone steps and at a height of about 600 meters, a visitor sees all of this at once. Below lie the valley, the fields, and villages with stilt-house roofs of yin and yang tiles. All around rises the arc of limestone mountains, 500 million years old. In late July, and again from October to November when the rice ripens, people call this valley by a folk name, the golden valley. It is not an official name, but anyone who sees the color of ripe rice among the green arc of mountains will understand why.

The Bắc Sơn Uprising Museum stands in Long Hưng hamlet, in Long Đống commune. Its design follows a traditional Tày stilt house. It displays 138 objects, 127 of them originals.

Standing in the Bắc Sơn valley, a visitor stands on all four layers at once: the floor of an ancient ocean, the caves of the Bacsonian people, the ground of the 1940 uprising and the stilt-house villages of today.