Hoang Su Phi Rice Terraces

To make a single terrace step, people first have to find a source of water high on the slope. They dig a channel to bring it down, level the hillside, and raise a bank to hold the water. Then they wait through the first rainy season to see whether the bank breaks. If it breaks, they build it again. That work was repeated over hundreds of hectares of hillside, across many generations, in a land of earthen mountains in the west of Tuyên Quang province.

That is how the Hoàng Su Phì terraces came to be.

Hoàng Su Phì lies in the western part of what used to be Hà Giang province. It now belongs to Tuyên Quang, after the two provinces merged on July 1, 2025. The Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism ranked the terraces as a national scenic landscape, in a decision issued on November 1, 2011. Under a supplementary decision in 2016, the scenic area covers 11 communes.

This is not a UNESCO title. Hoàng Su Phì is a scenic landscape and national monument recognized by Vietnam's Ministry of Culture. That still means something of its own. The state has formally recognized the worth of a whole system of terraces tied to the lives of many ethnic communities.

The Hà Giang and Tuyên Quang newspapers say the system is hundreds of years old. It is tied to six communities: the La Chí, Dao, Nùng, Tày, Hmong and Phù Lá. No official research names the community that first built terraces here. The terraces are the work of many communities, who made them together and have kept them going through many generations.

The land around Hoàng Su Phì is steep and deeply cut. It has high mountains, low and middle hills, and narrow valleys, with an average height of about 900 meters above sea level. Water decides everything. Where there is a source high up, there can be terraces. People have to work out the course of the water from the mountain streams down to each step, enough for wet rice, but not so much that it brings the banks down.

The scene changes with the season. In the water-filling season, around May and June, water from the mountain gullies pours down and fills the steps. The flooded fields reflect the sky like mirrors set one after another along the hillside. In late September and early October, at places such as Nậm Hồng and Thông Nguyên, ripe rice turns the slopes a deep gold against the green of forest and villages. Many photographers and landscape lovers choose that moment to come to Hoàng Su Phì.

Bản Phùng is the place many people mention when they speak of the La Chí community and the typical terraced landscape. Around Nậm Hồng and Thông Nguyên, clusters of terraces lie among villages of the Red Dao. Here the terraces sit beside the Shan tuyết tea of Phìn Hồ. They also sit beside the Giàng Hạ waterfall and the hot mineral spring at Thông Nguyên.

Another special feature of Hoàng Su Phì is the raising of carp in the rice fields. In communes such as Hồ Thầu and Bản Luốc, people keep carp at the foot of the rice plants. It is a livelihood, and it is also tied to farming festivals, to the rice harvest, and to the catching of the fish.

Seen from far off, a single terrace in Hoàng Su Phì shows the result of many generations who solved the problem of growing wet rice on a steep mountainside. It is farming technique, an understanding of land and water, and a culture handed down.

What we call a beautiful view is a living system. Each terrace step is a promise to the next season, and the farmers of Nậm Hồng and Bản Phùng are still keeping that promise, every year, on hillsides in a region that averages about 900 meters above sea level.