Cho Lon

When Quách Đàm first came from Guangdong to Saigon to make a living, he carried a shoulder pole through the streets, buying scrap and old bottles. To save money, he slept on the river landings. He was a Teochew man, born in a poor stretch of countryside. Many years later, that same scrap collector built Bình Tây Market, which people in old Saigon still called by another name: Chợ Lớn.

Chợ Lớn is also the name of a whole quarter of the city, where Vietnamese people of Chinese descent have lived for hundreds of years. A day here begins at the market, passes through assembly halls hazy with incense, and ends under the glow of lanterns.

At first light, the rows of yin and yang tiles on the roof of Bình Tây Market slowly come into view. This is a wholesale market. Traders from small markets all over the city come here to buy in bulk and take the goods back to sell. To build such a market, the old scrap collector had come a long way. He went into the rice trade and grew so rich that people called him the rice king.

When the land in Chợ Lớn grew crowded and more people arrived every day, he offered to give the land and pay for a truly large market. He asked for only two things. He wanted to build rows of houses around the market to rent out, and he wanted a statue of himself to stand inside it. Work on the market began in 1928 and was finished in 1930. But he did not live to see it. He died in 1927, at the age of 64.

On top of the market roof, a dragon pays homage to the moon. The bronze statue of Quách Đàm from those days now stands in the grounds of the city's Museum of Fine Arts. Inside the market, the traders pooled their money to put up a smaller portrait statue, and to this day someone still lights incense for him.

But the story of this place begins much earlier. When the Ming dynasty in China fell, many people would not accept the Qing, the new dynasty ruling China. They crossed the sea to find a new life. In 1679, Lord Nguyễn Phúc Tần allowed Ming soldiers to settle in the lands of the south. There were 3,000 of them. The lord was one of the Nguyễn lords, a noble family who ruled southern Vietnam from the 16th to the 18th century. The soldiers' descendants married Vietnamese men and women and took up the local language and customs. They came to be called the Minh Hương.

One group of them founded a busy trading town on the river island of Cù lao Phố, in Biên Hòa. In 1776, the fighting of the Tây Sơn years laid it waste. The Tây Sơn were three brothers who led an uprising from 1771 and for a time ruled Vietnam. Many Chinese families fled together to Đề Ngạn, the old name of Chợ Lớn. Their market streets were far larger than the other markets around, and that is probably how the name came about. Chợ means market, and lớn means big.

On June 6, 1865, Chợ Lớn became a city of its own, separate from Saigon. Only in 1931 were the two cities joined into one. Today, in the middle of Ho Chi Minh City, there is still a ward called Chợ Lớn.

The people of Chinese descent here do not all speak the same tongue. They formed five main groups: Cantonese, Hokkien, Teochew, Hainanese and Hakka. The Cantonese were the largest of them. Today, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese people of Chinese descent live in the city. Each group has its own assembly hall. It is a place of worship, and also a shared home where people from the same homeland can lean on one another.

Toward noon, incense smoke drifts slowly through Bà Thiên Hậu Temple, also called the Tuệ Thành Assembly Hall. Tuệ Thành is an old name for the city of Guangzhou. It was the home of the people who built the temple around 1760.

The old story goes that the Lady Thiên Hậu was really named Lâm Mặc Nương. She was a girl on the island of Mi Châu who could see what was to come, and many times she saved seafarers from storms. The migrants carried her spirit tablet with them across the sea. A restoration stele in the temple still records words from long ago: the migrants had only small boats to cut through the waves on the way south. So each time they raised a sail, they prayed to the Lady for calm winds and quiet seas.

The temple has been restored many times, and in 1993 it was recognized as a national monument of architecture and art. At the gate stands a pair of large guardian lions. Their bodies are long and slender, gentler in line than the fierce lions usually seen. Each year, the temple celebrates the Lady's feast day on the 23rd day of the third lunar month. The day before, people hold the mộc dục ceremony. They bathe her statue and dress her in a new set of robes.

Nearby, each group tells the story of its homeland through an assembly hall. The Nghĩa An Assembly Hall of the Teochew people has carved panels worked on both faces. They show old tales and scenes of everyday life. Then there is Nhị Phủ Shrine, which people usually call Ông Bổn Temple. Its curved roof is shaped like a dragon boat. On it, dragons and carp are pieced together from fragments of porcelain.

In the afternoon, the story stops by the kitchens. In Chợ Lớn, Chinese families have kept their dishes through many generations. There are noodles with braised duck, roast duck with crackling skin, and roast pork. There is chè đậu đỏ, a sweet soup of red beans. Along Hà Tôn Quyền Street, one shop after another sells dumplings.

When the afternoon sun fades, Chợ Lớn lights its lamps. Lương Nhữ Học Street has been bound to the craft of lantern making for more than 50 years. Every Mid-Autumn Festival, the streets around it are hung thick with star lanterns, carp lanterns, spinning lanterns with turning figures, and flying dragon lanterns.

Then night falls. In Bà Thiên Hậu Temple, the last incense of the day burns slowly. And on the roof of the market built by the old scrap collector, the dragon still turns quietly toward the moon.