Hoa Binh Reservoir

On November 6, 1979, people began to build a dam across the Đà River, in the Hòa Bình region. It was no small dam. At the time it was the largest construction project in Southeast Asia. More than 40,000 Vietnamese workers and officials took part, together with more than 2,500 visits by experts from the Soviet Union.

The Hòa Bình Hydropower Plant was inaugurated 15 years later, on December 20, 1994. By then a vast lake had spread across the Đà River. That is the Hòa Bình reservoir.

A few figures show its size. The normal water level of the reservoir is 117 meters. The lake covers 208 square kilometers. In all, it can hold 9.45 billion cubic meters of water. The plant has eight generating units of 240 megawatts each, 1,920 megawatts in total, and 12 discharge gates. The Hòa Bình Hydropower Company published these numbers officially.

The figures are not the whole story. The plant has four main jobs. It holds back floods, to keep the lands downstream safe. It makes electricity for the national power grid. It supplies water to farms in dry seasons. And it keeps the river open for boats. Because of these four jobs, the project matters to all of northern Vietnam, and not only to Hòa Bình.

When the dam was finished and the water rose, the valleys and low ground along the Đà River went under. Thousands of households had to move away. The story of the lake cannot leave this out. The beauty of the reservoir today is tied to the years of resettlement.

The rising water also made something new. Hills that once stood in the middle of valleys became small islands. The area of Thung Nai is a good example. After the plant was finished, the river flooded the valleys halfway up the mountains and left a lake with countless little islands. Some people compare it to Ha Long Bay in the mountains. That is a tourist's comparison, not an official name.

Out on the lake stands the Chúa Thác Bờ Temple. Local people keep the worship of the Mother Goddesses of Tam phủ there. Tam phủ refers to the Mother Goddesses of three realms: heaven, water, and mountains and forests. UNESCO has inscribed the practice of this Mother Goddess worship among the Vietnamese people on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. That list is for living traditions, passed on from one generation to the next. The belief is alive today, and it is still part of daily life for the people around the lake.

Mường villages lie along the shore. One is Xóm Ké, in Hiền Lương Bay. Another is Xóm Mỗ, with its stilt houses and terraced fields. The Mường are an ethnic group of northern Vietnam whose language is closely related to Vietnamese. The people here make their living from the water and the forested hills around them. Smoke from cooking fires rises from the stilt houses in the middle of the lake. The life here has a rhythm of its own, slow and deep.

On Ông Tượng Hill, within the grounds of the plant, stands a monument to President Hồ Chí Minh. It is 18 meters tall and looks down over the lake. It was inaugurated on January 20, 1997. At its foot the lake spreads out wide, and it is easy to see how much work one generation of Vietnamese and their Soviet experts put into the project over 15 years.

Behind the engineering lies a story of communities who gave up their valleys so the water could rise, and of hands that raised a dam among the mountains. Today a deep blue lake still lights the lamps of millions of families across northern Vietnam.