Bao Dai Palace of Buon Ma Thuot

Over almost 120 years, one piece of land in Buôn Ma Thuột has worn many faces. It was a French restaurant, then the office of a colonial Resident. Later it was the workplace of the last emperor of the Nguyễn dynasty, and after that the seat of a revolutionary advisory council. Today it is a national monument inside the grounds of the Đắk Lắk Museum. This is the Bảo Đại Palace. Its names kept changing, but its nature did not.

The first layer begins before 1905, when the site was a restaurant called Maison Lefevre. In 1914, Resident Sabatier chose the place for the District Chief's Office. Under French rule, a Resident was the French official who oversaw a province. In 1926, Resident Giran remodeled it into the Resident's Office. The local Ê Đê people called it Sang Ae Prong, which means the house of the great man. That name came from how the Indigenous people felt about power. It was never the official name.

In 1925, an event worth remembering took place inside these grounds. A group of educated people from the ethnic minority peoples, led by the teacher Y Jút, surrounded and attacked the Resident's Office. They were protesting against Resident Sabatier. It was one of the early actions against colonial rule by the Indigenous people of the Central Highlands.

The name Bảo Đại Palace belongs to a later period. Bảo Đại came back to Vietnam with the title of Head of State. From November 1947 to about May 1948, he worked at this site for almost eight months. From 1949 to 1954, he often came here to rest and hunt at the start of the rainy season. That is where the name that still follows the place comes from, even though the place has been renamed many times on paper.

After August 24, 1945, the building became the seat of the province's revolutionary advisory council. In October 1945, an exhibition fair was held here, together with an oath of unity among the Ê Đê, Kinh, M'Nông and Gia Rai peoples. On December 1 of that year, a meeting was held to discuss the election of the first National Assembly. After 1975, it was the first headquarters of the Provincial Party Committee of Đắk Lắk. Many senior leaders came here on official visits, among them General Secretary Lê Duẩn in April 1978.

In 1999, the site was ranked a national historic monument. In 2023, the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism officially renamed it the Bảo Đại Palace Historic Site. This replaced its old name, the Historic Site at 4 Nguyễn Du Street. That name had only been a way of calling the place by its former street address.

Step closer and you see a palace with a floor area of 1,514 square meters. It stands on an artificial mound that rises almost two meters above the yard. Its shape joins the Ê Đê longhouse with Western architecture, which is rare in the architectural heritage of the Central Highlands. It was a building of the colonial administration, yet it borrowed the form of a traditional Indigenous home.

The garden covers almost 6.5 hectares. The place to stop is the camphor tree on the right of the entrance gate. It was planted in 1930 and is now nearly 30 meters tall, with a trunk about 2.5 meters across. In 2014, it received the plaque of a Vietnam Heritage Tree. This tree is older than the name Bảo Đại Palace itself.

Here, history can be read in layers, one laid over another. There is colonial history, the history of resistance, the history of the last emperor, and the history of a land still writing its own story. Under the shade of the camphor tree, nearly a hundred years old, the palace is the point where many stories meet, and none of them has ever ended neatly.