Can Tho Museum

Before the Kinh people settled in the southwest, before the Chinese came to make a living, and before the Khmer built their old pagodas, another kingdom stood here. It is called Phù Nam in Vietnamese and Funan in English.

It had cities, an international port, money and writing. It traded with Rome, India and China. The Cần Thơ Museum is where its story begins.

The museum stands on Hòa Bình Boulevard, close to Ninh Kiều Wharf. It is the largest general museum in the Mekong Delta. It was founded in 1976 and took the name Cần Thơ Museum in 1992. New building work began in 1998. Today its exhibition space covers about 3,000 square meters and holds more than 1,000 objects.

The first gallery tells the story of the Óc Eo culture, the culture of the kingdom of Funan from the 1st century to the 7th century of the Common Era. Funan was the first kingdom in Southeast Asia to have writing and money. Its port of Óc Eo, in the old An Giang region, was a major stopping place for goods moving between East and West. In the glass cases lie pieces of Funan pottery, jewelry and gold rings. Most striking of all are the Roman and Indian coins. Small as they are, these pieces are physical evidence of an international trading network. That network belonged to a civilization that disappeared more than fourteen centuries ago.

The next gallery turns to three peoples who have lived side by side in the Mekong Delta, and still do. They are the Kinh, the Chinese and the Khmer. Few other places in Vietnam can say the same.

The Kinh are the majority ethnic group of Vietnam, and they came to clear the land from the 17th century. The Chinese came later, between the 18th and 19th centuries, and formed busy trading communities. The Khmer are the oldest native community here, descendants of Funan and of Chân Lạp. Chân Lạp is the old Vietnamese name for the Khmer kingdom of Cambodia. Today the Khmer are an important ethnic minority community in this region.

The museum shows the clothing, instruments and everyday objects of all three. For the Kinh there is the áo bà ba outfit and the conical hat called nón lá. For the Chinese there is a set of objects for worship. For the Khmer there are the festival costumes Sampot and Sbai, the instrument Chapey and the Sa-dam drum.

The gallery of recent history follows the southwest through the two wars. It covers the Nam Kỳ Uprising of 1940 and the Đồng Khởi campaign from 1959 to 1960. It covers the Tet Offensive of 1968 and the general offensive of 1975. Cần Thơ, also called Tây Đô, was the center of the revolutionary movement for the whole region. The room holds guerrilla weapons, archive photographs and a model of a secret shelter.

Another part of the museum is given to the ecology of the delta. It shows the plants and animals of đước and tràm forests, rice fields and canals.

The final section marks what Cần Thơ has achieved since 1975. The most prominent is the Cần Thơ Bridge. It opened on April 24, 2010, and it is 2,750 meters long. It crosses the Hậu River and joins Vĩnh Long with Cần Thơ. The Hậu River is one of the two branches of the Mekong that flow through Vietnam. When it opened, it was the longest cable-stayed bridge in Southeast Asia. It was built with Japanese development aid.

So the galleries run from the Roman coins that speak of a vanished kingdom to a cable-stayed bridge over the Hậu River today. That is Tây Đô, a place where every layer of history still breathes in the middle of the city.