Co Vien Lau

More than twenty old wooden houses stand on one stretch of ground beside the famous boat landing at Tam Cốc, and none of them began their lives there. Some places are visited for the scenery. Others matter more for the story behind them. Cố Viên Lầu is the second kind.

The place lies in the Tam Cốc and Bích Động area, inside the wide Tràng An Landscape Complex. UNESCO recognized that complex as a mixed site, valued for both its culture and its nature. Cố Viên Lầu itself lies in the buffer zone, and the World Heritage title belongs to the complex, not to this place. What it holds is a collection of old houses. They were gathered from across Ninh Binh and the delta provinces of the north, carried here and raised again on grounds of about 22,000 square meters. Together they make a small picture of a village of the old north.

The houses date from the 18th century to the 20th. Not every house was raised by one carpenter, and not every house comes from the same land. Yet side by side they tell one story. It is about how the people of the north ate and lived, how they worshiped, and how they passed the ways of the household down through the generations.

When it was fully open, the grounds had a banyan tree, a landing at the water and the courtyard of a communal house. The communal house had seven bays. Its owner said it was brought from Thanh Liêm in Hà Nam and was more than a century and a half old. Inside the houses stood a sập gụ and a tràng kỷ, furniture of the old way of life. A tủ chè stood there too. The Ninh Binh newspaper reported a collection of antiques made of stone, bronze, ceramics and wood. A display area was once opened to receive visitors and researchers.

But the story of Cố Viên Lầu does not stop at those rooflines.

In 2018, the place fell into a dispute between its business owner and a bank, and all activity was halted. VnExpress and VietnamNet both ran articles on the old houses, which had badly deteriorated. Weeds grew thick, many parts were damaged, and only a small part of the grounds could still be reached. The same articles recall that film crews had once chosen the place as a setting. The Ninh Binh newspaper had reported it among seven impressive tourist spots of 2023. Then it slid back into abandonment while a legal solution was awaited.

This raises a question that few tourist sites raise. Saving old houses is one task. Managing them well over the years is another.

Someone built these grounds to keep more than 20 old houses, to show hundreds of antiques, and to recreate a northern village in the middle of the Tràng An heritage region. That was an effort worth honoring. But without a way to manage it, without legal support and without the means to keep it going, a few years of neglect are enough. The wood rots, the tiles break and the weeds creep in. The lesson is not only for Cố Viên Lầu.

Even in its present decay, the rooflines, rows of columns and window openings still tell what no textbook can tell about the old north. This is how earlier generations lived, built their houses and arranged the space of their homes.

Cố Viên Lầu is not dead. But it is waiting.