Bung Xang Lake

The street signs in Cần Thơ say Bún Xáng. They have it wrong, and so do most newspaper articles. Before the story begins, the spelling needs fixing.

The correct name is Búng Xáng. The first word ends in the letter G, so it is Búng, not Bún. Researchers who study place names in the Mekong Delta, and the Cần Thơ Newspaper, have corrected the mistake many times. But the habit has sunk deep, and the wrong name keeps passing from one generation to the next.

The meaning is in the two words.

In the speech of the South, the word búng means low ground that floods deep. It is a relative of the trấp and the bưng, but it floods deeper than either. The Mekong Delta has many place names of this kind. Búng Bình Thiên is in An Giang. Lung Ngọc Hoàng is in the old Hậu Giang province, now part of Cần Thơ. Here and there, a bưng called Sấu turns up.

Now the second word. Xáng means a dredger. It is the French word chaland, said shah-LAHN, made Vietnamese. Under French rule, canals were dug to open new land in the delta, and dredgers worked everywhere. So many canals carry xáng in their names. There is the Xáng Xà No canal and the Xáng Phụng Hiệp canal. There is the Xáng Cái Sắn canal too.

Búng Xáng, then, means a low-lying hollow that a dredger dug deeper.

And that is exactly what happened here.

Before 1967, this place was only a small búng, joined to a creek called Rạch Ngỗng. Then Cần Thơ University began to build its Campus II, right behind the lake. The ground there was low and swampy. The university had to use dredgers to dig earth out of this búng, and pumped the sand up to raise the foundation. Without meaning to, it made the búng wider and deeper. Nearby residents saw it and called it Búng Xáng, and the name passed into history.

Cần Thơ University was founded in 1966. It is the largest regional university in the Mekong Delta. The story of this lake is tied to the growth of that school.

Around 2017 to 2018, a project to rebuild the lake began, paid for with World Bank development funding of about 222 billion dong. Its main aim was not to beautify the scenery. It was to hold back the flooding that comes with high tides. Central Cần Thơ floods ever more heavily, because of climate change and the sinking of the delta. The lake covers more than 12 hectares, the largest in the city proper, and it is seen as a lung of water that stores rain and tidal floodwater.

The project built an embankment 2,500 meters long around the lake, and a path of 2,800 meters circling it.

But the people of Cần Thơ did not wait for the official handover to come here. A street of food grew up along the shore on its own. Today it is the second night-time economy zone of the Ninh Kiều area, after Xáng Thổi Lake. More than 100 eateries, cafés and places for fun stay open late into the night.

The tables offer bún cá Châu Đốc, which is noodles with fish, and bánh tráng nướng, grilled rice paper. There is lẩu mắm, a hot pot, and snails of every kind. There is cá lóc nướng trui, fish from the grill. It is the youthful air of a university city.

On a fine evening, people stroll along the embankment. Cafés look out over a lake that gives back the lights of the night, and live music drifts in from somewhere far off. It is easy to see why the people of Cần Thơ love this place. Sixty years ago, this was a small búng beside a village. Now it is one of the liveliest places for fun in the city.