Bien Hoa Citadel

People in Biên Hòa have a folk name for this old citadel: Thành Kèn, the Bugle Citadel. It is not an official name, but it is still spoken today.

People of old Biên Hòa chose the name because of the French. After they took the citadel and stationed troops inside, French soldiers sounded a bugle at dawn to wake the camp, and the sound carried across the whole area. To the people of old Biên Hòa it was an unfamiliar, foreign sound. It became a memory tied to one era of history.

The citadel stands in Quang Vinh ward, in the city of Biên Hòa. In 1816, the 15th year of Emperor Gia Long, the Nguyễn dynasty had it built of earth. The dynasty was Vietnam's last royal dynasty, and it reigned from 1802 to 1945. In those years the dynasty had only just united the country and was strengthening the defenses of the frontier lands.

In 1837, 21 years later and under Emperor Minh Mạng, the citadel was rebuilt in laterite stone and renamed the Biên Hòa Citadel. It had four gates and a flag tower, and each gate had a stone bridge across the moat. It was an orderly fortress, and it showed how the Nguyễn court organized government and the military in the southern lands.

Then war came. In December 1861, the citadel fell to French colonial forces, and from then on it began to change its shape. The French cut its perimeter to about one eighth of what it had been and built French-style military buildings inside. That is why, beside the laterite wall of the Nguyễn period, two old French-style villas stand today, with red tile roofs, wide arched windows and long corridors.

The two layers of architecture sit side by side in the same grounds. They tell two very different stories about one piece of land.

After 1975, the logistics office of the Đồng Nai provincial police managed and used the site. It added some buildings as offices and storehouses. In 2001, when a road was opened through the town center, some parts were torn down, including the bunkers and the ring of the wall. What remains today is not the citadel as it was. It is a trace of it, reduced, changed and restored over many periods. That truth does not lessen the value of the site. If anything, it makes clearer the story of everything that has happened on this land.

In 2013, the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism ranked the Biên Hòa Citadel a national historic site. In 2025, the Đồng Nai Department of Culture, Sports and Tourism was assigned to lead a plan to renovate the grounds and create a Citadel Square. It would be an open space for community life, while the original relics are preserved.

The old wall of laterite is rough and earth-brown. Beyond it, the two red-roofed villas stand quiet in the shade of old trees. No textbook says as much as these real materials and real layers of time, still here to be seen and touched. History is not dry pages of text. And perhaps, in the quiet early morning in Quang Vinh ward, the bugle of long ago can still be heard.