Ho Chi Minh City History Museum

In October 1994, in the Xóm Cải area of Ward 8, District 5, Ho Chi Minh City, workers were excavating and moving old graves to free the land for building. In one large tomb of hard-set mortar, they uncovered a coffin set inside a thick wooden outer casing. Inside lay the body of a woman, dressed in many layers of cloth, silk and brocade, and soaked in an embalming liquid.

The body had lain in the ground for more than a hundred years, from the time of the Nguyễn dynasty, Vietnam's last royal dynasty. Today the woman rests in Room 15 of the Ho Chi Minh City History Museum.

But first, the story of the building that holds it all.

The Ho Chi Minh City History Museum was the first museum in Saigon and in all of southern Vietnam. Blanchard de la Brosse, the French governor of the southern region, signed the decree founding it on November 28, 1927. The French architect Auguste Delaval built it from 1926 to 1928, and the museum opened on January 1, 1929. Delaval was born in 1875 and died in 1962. The architect is long gone, but the building he left Saigon still stands today.

One look at the building shows a style quite different from Notre-Dame Cathedral or the Central Post Office. This is the Indochinese style, called Indochinois in French. It combines a modern French structure with curved roofs, upturned roof corners and East Asian motifs. It was the signature style of French public buildings in Indochina in the late 1920s.

When the museum opened in 1929, its first collection held only 2,893 objects. Most of them came from the collection of Victor Holbé, a French doctor and a collector of antiquities. Today the museum holds more than 30,000 objects. Among them are 12 National Treasures.

The biggest highlight of the museum is Room 6, which is devoted to Champa. It was an ancient kingdom on the central and southern coast of what is now Vietnam. Its culture spans the 2nd century to the 17th. Together with the cultures of Phù Nam and Óc Eo, Champa is one of the two main focuses of the museum.

In this room stands a bronze statue, the Đồng Dương Buddha, from the 8th to the 9th century. It is a National Treasure, and it is considered one of the oldest and most beautiful Buddha statues in Southeast Asia.

The statue came a long way to reach Saigon. It was found in the early 20th century at the village of Đồng Dương. The village lies in the Thăng Bình area, in the old Quảng Nam province, now part of Da Nang. In those same years, French archaeologists from the French School of the Far East, a French institute that studies the classical civilizations of Asia, carried out large excavations there. Among them was Henri Parmentier, a Champa specialist. He also studied many other important Champa sites, such as Mỹ Sơn and the Po Nagar towers.

Most Champa art honors Hindu gods such as Shiva, Vishnu and Brahma. But the Đồng Dương culture of the 8th to 9th centuries followed Mahayana Buddhism. In the late 9th century the kingdom of Champa had its capital at Đồng Dương, and the place was once a great Buddhist center of Southeast Asia.

Among the museum's 12 National Treasures is another Champa bronze. It is a statue of the bodhisattva Avalokitesvara, whom Vietnamese people know as Quán Thế Âm. It stands only 52 centimeters tall. It has four arms, and a small Buddha sits in meditation on its topknot. The statue dates from the 10th century and was found in 1923 at Đại Hữu, in the Quảng Bình area. Bronze is rare in Champa sculpture, which makes this small statue all the more precious.

Next comes Room 7, which shows the Óc Eo culture. This is the story of Phù Nam, an ancient kingdom in the Mekong Delta that flourished from the 1st to the 7th century. It traded with India and China, and even with Rome. At the Óc Eo site in An Giang, a gold piece has been found that dates from the reign of a Roman emperor.

The Óc Eo objects here help bring to life a busy trading port in the delta nearly two thousand years ago.

And finally, Room 15. The Xóm Cải mummy. This is the body of a real person who once lived, so it is a room to enter quietly, with deep respect.

She was a noblewoman of the Nguyễn dynasty who lived in the 19th century. Her exact identity has not been established. But the way she was preserved is clear. The coffin and its wooden outer casing were sealed with traditional Vietnamese lacquer, and the coffin was filled with an embalming liquid. Her body was dressed in many layers of cloth, silk and brocade. Thanks to these methods, the body is still fairly intact after all those years underground. It was a traditional Vietnamese burial of the time, with the coffin inside an outer casing, set in a tomb of hard-set mortar.

The museum sits within the grounds of the Saigon Zoo and Botanical Gardens, among rows of old trees that give deep shade. Through the gate with its curved roof and upturned corners, the way leads from the thousand-year-old kingdom of Phù Nam, past the silent Champa statues, to the woman who has lain still for more than a hundred years. All of it is still there, quietly waiting to tell the story of the southern land.