Bau Hai Nam Fields

Rows of chili plants and corn grow on farmland at Bàu Hai Năm. There is no gate here, no signpost and no one selling tickets. It is not a tourist site at all.

And because it has none of those things, it tells a different kind of story.

The place lies in Trảng Bàng, in Tây Ninh Province. Its land falls in the area of Gia Lộc and Lộc Hưng. In newspaper reports and planning documents from the early 2000s, the name appears mostly when they discuss land and industrial planning.

In 2009, a plan for the Bàu Hai Năm Industrial Park was approved, covering about 151 hectares. But the project moved slowly. Most of the land stayed farmland, where local people grew chili peppers, corn, rice, other crops and cassava. Because the fields lie near the N20 canal, they could be farmed two to three times a year. In 2013, the province decided to ask that the industrial park be taken out of the plan.

That may sound dry, a matter of documents and zoning. But for the households living on that land, it was not dry at all. They waited in uncertainty, not knowing whether the ground they farmed would be taken back. It is a story about making a living, and about ordinary people caught in the middle of large decisions about land.

Where the name Bàu Hai Năm comes from, no reliable source on place names or local history explains for now. It is one of the things left open.

What the sources do show is that the name also appears in historical memory. One source is the Tây Ninh newspaper. It records that Bàu Hai Năm was one of the posts in Trảng Bàng that were surrounded and forced to surrender on April 28, 1975. But no source confirms that the fields today hold a specific historic site, with a marker or a memorial. Without official records, it cannot be called a historic site.

Gia Lộc is also known for the Kỳ Yên festival at its communal house, a traditional festival listed as national intangible cultural heritage since 2012. Kỳ Yên is a village festival that welcomes the spirits and prays for peace and good fortune. It is the wider cultural setting of the land around Bàu Hai Năm.

What stands here today is a farming landscape at the edge of a city. It is not grand and not mysterious. But a closer look shows land in transition, between growing crops and urbanization, between the memory of war and modern life. The rows of chili and the green stalks of corn and rice lie on ground that was once drawn onto a planning map and then handed back to the people who farm it. It is a quiet but true story of the South.