Hanoi Opera House

Beneath the Hanoi Opera House lies a whole forest that no one in the audience has ever seen. At the end of the 19th century, the spot where the theater stands today was still a marsh. It belonged to two villages, Thạch Tần and Tây Luông. The ground there was soft and soaked with water.

Today, on that soft ground, a French-style building lifts the peak of its roof 34 meters above the street. It looks out over a wide square. The building has stood firm for more than 100 years, while its stage curtain has gone up and come down more times than anyone could count.

The story begins in 1899. That year, the Hanoi city council proposed building a theater as a place of entertainment for French officials. The design was drawn up by two French architects, Broyer and Harlay. Later, the architect François Lagisquet added further drawings. Two contracting firms, Travary and Savelon, took on the construction.

Their model was the famous Opera Garnier in Paris, made smaller and built with materials suited to the local climate. Work began on June 7, 1901.

The first challenge was to keep the building from sinking into the soft ground. Workers drove 35,000 bamboo piles into the earth. On top of them, they poured a layer of concrete 90 centimeters thick. That is the forest beneath the theater: a whole forest of bamboo driven into the mud, packed close together, carrying an entire building on its back.

The frame, the beams and the ceiling were made entirely of metal, with no wood at all. By the time the work was nearly done, the cost was estimated at about 2 million francs.

Ten years after work began, in 1911, the theater was finished. On the evening of December 9 that year, its stage lit up for the first time with a comedy, The Journey of Monsieur Perrichon. The guests gave money generously on that opening night, and the theater troupe set it aside to help children living on the streets. The theater's first night opened with laughter, and with an act of kindness.

The front of the theater is like a page from a book of architecture, opened in the middle of the street. A row of Ionic columns stands in perfect symmetry. The balconies, the arched openings and the carved reliefs are decorated in the Baroque manner. High above, a steep Mansard roof is covered in black tiles.

Up the front steps lies the main lobby. There, a T-shaped staircase faced with stone rises ahead, and the floor is paved with marble. Gilded chandeliers hang overhead, beside old-style bronze wall lamps. On the second floor is the Mirror Room, where mirrors alternate with the windows. It once hosted grand official receptions.

The main auditorium lies behind, almost perfectly square. Three tiers of seats curve around the stage in a horseshoe, and the top tier is made up of private boxes. The ceiling carries paintings by French artists. People have compared this auditorium to a music box. In the early days, it held 870 seats.

For a time, the stage curtain was made of coarse cloth and bore a picture of the Turtle Tower, Tháp Rùa, in the middle of Hoan Kiem Lake. Later, it was replaced with a curtain of satin.

On October 22, 1921, on this very stage, the play Chén thuốc độc by the writer Vũ Đình Long had its premiere. The title means "The Cup of Poison". It was the first spoken drama written by a Vietnamese author. From that night on, Vietnamese spoken drama had a birthday of its own.

Then came August 1945, and the square in front of the theater became the meeting place of the whole city. On the afternoon of August 17, a rally of the General Association of Civil Servants was underway there. In the middle of it, Việt Minh activists went up onto the speakers' platform. The Việt Minh was the organization that led the struggle for Vietnamese independence from French rule. Then a huge red flag with a yellow star was unfurled from the theater.

Two days later, from first light on August 19, crowds streamed toward the city center from every direction, and the streets were thick with flags and banners. Among them walked a 22-year-old composer, Đỗ Xuân Oanh. He composed as he went, singing so that the people beside him could sing along. By the time he reached the Opera House, his song Mười chín tháng Tám was complete. Its title means "The Nineteenth of August".

At 11 o'clock that morning, by a common estimate, about 200,000 people filled the square. The rally opened with a flag salute and with Tiến quân ca, a song by the composer Văn Cao. That song later became the national anthem of Vietnam. Then the crowd split into many columns and spread out across the city. They headed for the palace of the imperial viceroy of the north, for the city hall and for the barracks of the civil guard.

On March 2, 1946, the first National Assembly of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam held its opening session inside the theater. Late that year, in the same building, the Assembly adopted the first constitution of Vietnam.

In 1994, the broad square in front of the theater was officially named August Revolution Square. From 1995 to 1997, the theater went through a major restoration that brought back as much of its original look as possible. The work was finished just in time for the summit of French-speaking countries, held in Hanoi in November 1997. After the restoration, the auditorium had nearly 600 seats covered in velvet.

In 2011, at exactly 100 years old, the Opera House was listed as a national heritage site. Ten years after that, Chén thuốc độc was staged again on this same stage, 100 years after its first night.

By day, couples stand on the front steps to have their wedding photos taken. In the evening, when floodlights fall on the front of the building, it seems to put on a different coat.

At that hour, the Ionic columns glow, and the black-tiled roof stands out against the night sky. Few people standing in the square think of the old marshland of Thạch Tần and Tây Luông. Few think of the bamboo forest driven deep beneath the concrete. Yet it is that unseen forest that has carried the whole building on its back, so that the stage curtain could rise again and again.