Ben Luc Bridge

Below the Bến Lức Bridge flows the Vàm Cỏ Đông River. No sign points visitors to a monument here, and there is no museum or anything else to stop a stranger. Still, for anyone who knows how to look, this spot holds one of the best transport stories in southern Vietnam.

In local records, the stretch of river at Bến Lức was once called Lật Giang. A landing on its bank gave the whole area its name. Bến Lức comes from a river landing where many plants called lứt, or lức, grew wild along the bank.

The water here runs past a marker of transport history that goes back to the late 19th century.

In 1885, the railway from Saigon to Mỹ Tho opened. It was the first railway in Indochina. To run it, the line had to cross the Vàm Cỏ Đông River right here at Bến Lức.

A technical study by the transport department of Ho Chi Minh City describes the railway bridge as a chain of spans joined end to end. The long spans were 60 meters, and the others were shorter. The whole bridge was 342 meters long. It was a metal bridge raised on soft, muddy ground, under the technical pressures of the late 19th century.

And the building did not go smoothly.

The researcher Tim Doling records that the line opened on July 20, 1885. But because of technical problems at the bridge, passengers still had to cross the river by steam ferry for about ten more months. Only on May 29, 1886 did trains run the whole way. So the railway opened first, and nearly a year passed before the crossing worked in full.

That detail says a great deal about the difficulties the French met when building in the river country of the south. The ground was soft, the mud deep, the current strong. It was nothing like Europe or the north of Vietnam.

The Saigon to Mỹ Tho railway ran for more than 70 years before it closed in 1958. The railway bridge no longer exists. But the name Bến Lức remains, and so does the crossing over the Vàm Cỏ Đông. Today, instead of train carriages, trucks and cars run without pause over the new and old Bến Lức bridges.

Work on the new bridge began on December 22, 2001. It is 555.6 meters long and 11.5 meters wide. It is rated for loads of 30 tons. It was built alongside the old bridge to carry the growing traffic on National Highway 1.

One bridge and one river, and beneath them layers of stories from a century and a half.