Da Lat Market

On a gently sloping hill in the middle of Da Lat stands a cinema called the Ba Tháng Tư. All day long, people walk up and down the slope in front of it, baskets in hand, jackets closed up to the neck. The people of Da Lat call this hill the Hòa Bình area.

Before it was a cinema, this spot was a market. It stood right here, on this very hill.

The market was built of forest timber and freshly sawn planks. Its posts still showed the grain of the wood, and overhead was a thin roof of corrugated iron. The timber and the planks all came from the forests around the town. Under the iron roof, sellers sat beside their goods, and buyers walked between the rows of wooden posts. When highland rain drummed on the roof, the whole market heard it at once. A hand would reach up to pull a tarp over the goods to keep them dry.

That was in 1929, when the whole highland town had just over 2,000 people. Mornings on the hill were cold, and the cold went straight through the plank walls into the market. Before then, Da Lat had only a small market that gathered on its own, at a place later called Ánh Sáng hamlet. As more people came, the French Resident had it moved up the hill. Under French rule, a Resident was the French official who oversaw a province.

People did not give the market a fancy name. They simply named it after what it was made of. Chợ Cây, the Timber Market.

Wooden posts, an iron roof, and a hill holding it all up. In those days, that was all the market Da Lat had.

In 1931, a great fire swept through the market. Chợ Cây burned. The rows of plank houses around it burned with it.

A few years later, a new market rose on the very same ground. This time it was not forest timber and sawn planks but brick and stone, put up by a construction company under contract.

Then the city grew faster than its market. Less than a lifetime after Chợ Cây went up, Da Lat had more than 53,000 people. The brick market on the hill could no longer cope. The mayor of the city at the time, Trần Văn Phước, had to find a place for another market.

And the spot he picked looked nothing like a site for a market. At the foot of the hill lay a marsh of stagnant water, thick with mud. Its surface was covered by a water vegetable called xà lách son. The marsh had been abandoned for a long time, and it spoiled a whole corner of the town. That was where he decided the new market would stand.

In 1958, work began right on top of the marsh. By 1960, a market with an upper floor stood on the old mud. The design came from the architect Nguyễn Duy Đức. The man who turned the drawings into a building in the middle of the marsh was the contractor Nguyễn Linh Chiểu. One drew and one built, and together the two men set the whole city's market down on what had been nothing but an abandoned mudhole.

At Chợ Cây, everything was laid out under one iron roof. At the new market, seeing it all meant climbing. It was one of the first multistory markets in Vietnam. Stairs led up, and goods were set out on the floor above.

As for the brick market on the hill, it was not torn down. The space where goods had once been laid out was converted into a cinema, with rows of seats and a big screen. The market became the Hòa Bình cinema, now called the Ba Tháng Tư. So the cinema on the hill is that same brick market, standing on the ground of the wooden market that burned.

Few people passing through the Hòa Bình area know they are walking on the ground of two old markets.

The market had moved all the way down the slope, leaving a whole familiar neighborhood behind. If nothing changed, anyone in the Hòa Bình area who wanted to reach the market would have to walk down the entire slope and circle around to the front.

The task of linking the new market to the old one went to a young architect just back from France, Ngô Viết Thụ. A few years later, he became the first Asian to be named an Honorary Fellow of the American Institute of Architects. He rearranged the rows of shops and the streets around the market. Then he added one more thing, something the people of Da Lat still use every day.

What he built was not a road. It was a staircase. He ran it straight from the Hòa Bình area into the upper floor of the new market.

Anyone who takes that staircase from end to end passes from one era of the market into the next, in a single flight of steps.

At the foot of the hill, the market is still a market. From the entrance, row runs into row, with no end in sight. One row for clothes, one row for food, one row for local specialties. Shoppers here have to climb, because some stalls only come into view after a whole flight of stairs.

Then come the fresh flowers. No sign is needed here, because their scent and color arrive first. The smell is cool and a little sharp, the smell of stems cut that very morning. It mixes with the cold damp rising from where the flowers stand. They are set in bunches packed close together, one row of color giving way to another. The highland chill clings to every petal. A flower seller bends down, turns each bunch to set it straight, then sprinkles a little more water over the top. That whole row of flowers stands on ground that was once nothing but mud and still water.

By day, the staircase is just a shortcut. Shoppers go up and down it, baskets in hand, thinking about lunch, and no one notices they are walking on the link between two markets.

But night is different. In the 1970s, the way down to the market still had no street lights. That was when food sellers began setting out their stalls along the steps from the Hòa Bình area down to the market, and on toward Xuân Hương Lake. The only light came from a few oil lamps. The highland fog settled thick, and each lamp lit only a small circle around itself. So people felt their way down the steps, from one circle of light to the next.

In the fog, the people coming and going were only blurred shapes, still holding their bowls, still calling to one another from step to step. The people of Da Lat looked at the scene and gave it a name that sounded strange but was meant fondly: chợ Âm Phủ, the market of the netherworld. The name spoke of the fog and the oil lamps. The place itself was where people sat and ate together, to warm themselves on a cold night.

That name has stuck. The Da Lat night market now lights up Nguyễn Thị Minh Khai Street, right in front of the market. As evening falls, the food stalls are set out. A bowl of hot súp cua, crab soup, is carried out into the cold air, its steam rising straight up and then hanging still for a moment. Only the oil lamps have turned into electric lights.

The staircase is still there. The sounds of the market below keep climbing the steps: people calling to each other, the clink of bowls and chopsticks, laughter.

Halfway up the steps, the hill rises overhead, where a market of forest timber under an iron roof once stood. Below shine the lights of a market with an upper floor, risen from an abandoned marsh of water vegetables.

A child climbs back up the hill, one hand in their mother's. The other holds a piece of hot bánh tráng nướng, grilled rice paper, and the child keeps blowing on it. The fog drifts slowly across the steps, just as it did in the days of the oil lamps.