Huoi Pha Lake

Huổi Phạ Lake lies in the middle of the city of Điện Biên Phủ, a quiet stretch of water that few people come to see.

Huổi Phạ is an irrigation reservoir, built in the 1960s. The newspaper Nhân Dân once recorded that it has an earthen dam raised by hand and holds more than 2 million cubic meters of water. It is no ordinary reservoir. It belongs to the Nậm Rốm irrigation system, which waters the fields of Điện Biên, among the largest rice fields in the Northwest.

The famous Mường Thanh field, where the historic battlefield of 1954 once lay, stays green season after season largely thanks to water from this system. For decades the Điện Biên Irrigation Management Company has run the Huổi Phạ dam. Its work is to keep the water flowing in the right season and to the right field.

It is rare to find open water like this right inside a city. The surface is smooth, ringed by protection forest and rolling hills. There is no sound of traffic and no crowded streets. There is only water, sky, and trees.

The province has drawn up a plan to turn the Huổi Phạ area into a complex of urban living, tourism, sport, and entertainment, while protecting the lake's ecosystem and the protection forest around it. The provincial People's Committee has approved a subdivision plan for the area, with the lake as the center of an urban ecological space.

So this is a place where the story is still being written. Today the water is still. Beneath it lies the history of a whole region. There are the workers who raised the dam by hand in the 1960s, the golden rice seasons on the Mường Thanh field, and a future now taking shape on a planning map.

From the edge of the lake you look out over the flat water and the green forest around it, and you see Điện Biên from an angle very few visitors have seen.