Hoang A Tuong Mansion

Among the plum-covered hills of the white plateau of Bắc Hà, small villages lie under tiled roofs. One building here stands apart from all of them.

It has French-style arched doorways, concrete balustrades, a spiral staircase and corridors paved with brick. Yet thick walls surround it, with loopholes pointing out in all four directions like those of a fortress. Its plan follows a traditional East Asian layout: a screen wall at the front, an open courtyard, and the main house set deep behind.

This is the Hoàng A Tưởng Mansion. It has been a national monument of architecture and art since 1999.

According to the Vietnam National Authority of Tourism, the mansion was begun in 1914 and finished in 1921. The man who laid its foundations was Hoàng Yến Chao, a Tày. The Tày are one of the peoples of northern Vietnam. The mansion takes its name from his son, Hoàng A Tưởng. The same authority also presents the building under another name, the Hoàng Yến Chao Castle.

Many local tourism sources call it the mansion of the "Mèo king." That name needs care. Hoàng Yến Chao and his son were Tày, not Hmong. The Lào Cai Department of Culture, Sports and Tourism explains that they ruled an area with many Hmong residents, so people called them "king" in the sense of a regional chief. It was a popular name, never an official title. As for Mèo, it is an old and mistaken name for the Hmong, used in French and in many older documents. It is disrespectful, and people now avoid it.

Both men belonged to the thổ ty, the powerful local ruling class of Bắc Hà in the colonial era. The thổ ty held economic and political power in the region, and the French authorities supported them. Within the grounds of the mansion, a visitor is in a space of power from a period when the ties between the colonial rulers and the thổ ty were tangled together in the northwestern mountains. The story is not simple. Knowing the setting gives the building more depth.

Now to the architecture.

Past the gate, the enclosing wall is high, and along it run small openings cut at a slant. The Lào Cai Department describes them as loopholes, which served the same purpose as in fortresses. So the mansion was a place of defense as well as a home. That points to an owner whose position was not always secure, in a highland where power had its rivals.

Inside the gate is a wide open courtyard. A screen wall stands at its front, and the main house lies deep inside, with a row of side houses on each side. The layout is traditional, but the decoration follows the French style: round arched doorways, upright columns, cast balustrades and a spiral staircase at the center.

According to the Lào Cai Department, the whole mansion has 36 rooms, in the main house, the two rows of side houses and the outbuildings. The Tiền Phong newspaper puts the area of the whole site at about 10,000 square meters. Different sources may give different areas, because one may measure only the buildings and another the whole plot of land.

The mansion has been restored, and what can be seen today carries both the original layer and the hand of the restorers.

Inside, the rooms are used to display pictures and documents about the history of the building and of the land of Bắc Hà.

For more than a hundred years the mansion has stood on the Bắc Hà plateau, through colonial rule, the wars, reunification and the reform era. Its story is one chapter in the history of a complicated land.