Huynh Thuy Le Ancient House

In the middle of Sa Đéc, on busy Nguyễn Huệ Street, stands a house that makes everyone who sees it stop. Its front is symmetrical, with solid brick walls and tall arched doors. At a glance it looks like a French villa from the early 20th century. But step inside and the space is entirely different: East Asian, quiet and still, scented with incense and old wood. This is the Huỳnh Thủy Lê Ancient House, a national monument of architecture and art in Đồng Tháp province.

The house has two names. The first is the Ancient House of Huỳnh Cẩm Thuận, after the father who had it built in 1895. The gilded board above the main door still bears his name in three Chinese characters. Travelers, though, know it as the Huỳnh Thủy Lê Ancient House, after the son who inherited it and became a famous figure in world literature. Two names and two stories, and both belong to this house.

Huỳnh Cẩm Thuận was an ethnic Chinese merchant in Sa Đéc, with family roots in Fujian. He traded in rice at a time when the Mekong Delta was doing brisk business with the West. With a solid fortune behind him, he built the house in 1895 and had it renovated in 1917. That work left the blend of three cultures still visible today. A local guide tells visitors that the bricks were imported from France and the fine timber from Cambodia. No effort or expense was spared to make a house that was both grand and true to the family's identity.

Outside, it is a French villa: a symmetrical front, masonry walls, arched doors, and molded lines running in an even rhythm. Inside, it is wholly Chinese. There is a traditional hall of three bays, with an altar to Quan Công in the central bay. Quan Công was a general of ancient China, later worshipped as a god of war. There are finely carved wooden screens and doors. A pair of phoenixes decorates the main frame, with birds, flowers and leaves on either side. The carvings also show apricot blossom, orchid, chrysanthemum and bamboo, finished in red lacquer and gold leaf. And the roof is purely Vietnamese, laid with yin and yang tiles, its gable ends curved gently like boats.

One detail often puzzles visitors: the middle of the floor dips slightly. A local guide explains that it is a feng shui choice of the Chinese owners. Water flows to low ground, and in Chinese thinking, water is linked with wealth. For a merchant family, the house itself was a statement of prosperity. The altar to Quan Công in the main bay is the clearest sign of the family's faith. Huỳnh Cẩm Thuận hired painters from Fujian, in China, to paint the picture of Quan Công. It shows how closely the family stayed tied to its homeland.

The whole estate once covered more than 2,000 square meters. It held the main house, a garage, a kitchen and a garden, with frontages on two streets. As the town grew, everything was lost except the main house, which covers 258 square meters. That is why the space today feels much smaller than one might picture for a wealthy merchant family of the past.

The house became famous around the world through the story of Huỳnh Thủy Lê and the French writer Marguerite Duras. Their love story began around Sa Đéc in the late 1920s. Decades later, Marguerite Duras drew on those memories to write the novel L'Amant, The Lover. The book won the Goncourt Prize, one of the most prestigious literary awards in France. It has been translated into more than 40 languages. The film of the same name came out in 1992, and some of its scenes were shot in Vietnam. But one thing needs to be set straight: the film was not shot in this house. The crew used the Bình Thủy ancient house in Cần Thơ as its setting. So the place a visitor stands in today is not a film set. It is the real home of a real man, the man who lived on in Marguerite Duras's memory for decades, until the day she wrote him into a book.

Huỳnh Thủy Lê died in 1972. His family went abroad, and the house stood empty. In 1975 it was used as a government office. In 2007 it opened to visitors, and in 2009 it was recognized as a national heritage site.

Standing in a space of only 258 square meters, beneath the father's name in three Chinese characters above the main door, a visitor can feel the weight of all those layers of time. The house has no need to be grand. Memory has settled into every carved line and every piece of fine wood. It lingers, too, in the faint scent of incense drifting through the quiet rooms in the heart of Sa Đéc.