Khmer Culture Museum in Tra Vinh

Many people who come to the old Trà Vinh region for the first time wonder how the Khmer people here live. They wonder what the Khmer believe in and what work they do, how they learn to read and write, and what they have given to history. The Khmer Ethnic Culture Museum is the place to look for the answers.

The museum stands within the Ao Bà Om grounds, next to Âng Pagoda. Its address today is Nguyệt Hóa ward in Vĩnh Long province. The land once belonged to the city of Trà Vinh. The whole country has only two museums of Khmer ethnic culture. One is in the old Sóc Trăng region, and the other is this one, in the old Trà Vinh region.

Building began in the early 1990s, and the museum started welcoming visitors in the second half of that decade. As of 2025, the grounds cover about 1 hectare, and inside there are six themed exhibition rooms in all.

Those six rooms tell six different stories about the Khmer people. It is worth walking slowly, as if passing through the rooms of one large house, each with a story waiting to be told.

The first room is about belief and religion. The Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism counts 143 Khmer Theravada Buddhist pagodas in the former Trà Vinh province. Besides religious practice, these pagodas keep alive the music, the festivals, the Ngũ âm orchestra and the life of the community. In this room there is a model of the main hall of a Khmer pagoda and a model of a phum sóc, a Khmer village. There are also examples of Khmer script and palm leaves inscribed with Buddhist scriptures. These palm-leaf texts are called Satra Slất Rịt. They record Buddhist scriptures, songs of moral teaching and folk tales. This is how the Khmer community stored its knowledge for many centuries. Look closely at the tiny script on each leaf, and a whole library made of leaves comes into view.

In the second room, the story leaves the pagoda for the kitchen and the rice field, for the culture of everyday life. A Khmer house, an ancestral altar, a kitchen and working tools show how closely the Khmer of the south live with their rice fields and canals. Farm tools such as plows, rollers, water scoops and sickles reflect the rhythm of wet-rice farming. So does the fishing gear: traps called nôm and lọp, and a net called xà neng. There is the wedding ritual of tying thread around the wrist. There are small details about meals and the way a family is organized. Together they show a life that took shape and grew over many centuries on this land.

The third room is for traditional crafts and for skilled hands. Here the skill of Khmer artisans shows in weaving cloth and mats, pounding young rice into flat cốm dẹp, carving wood, plaiting baskets and making musical instruments. One craft stands out: the making of crowns and masks by the Khmer of Trà Vinh. In June 2025, this craft joined the National List of Intangible Cultural Heritage. That means the state has formally recognized the craft as heritage to be protected at the national level.

The fourth room covers the arts, and it is the liveliest of all. Dù kê and Rô-băm are stage arts that carry the community's stories. So do the drum dance called Chhay-dăm and the singing called Chầm riêng. So does the Ngũ âm orchestra. Through all of them, the community keeps its sense of beauty and its faith. The crowns, masks, costumes and instruments on display make it easy to picture a Khmer festival, where people gather and hand their heritage on to the next generation.

The fifth room holds photographs, documents and objects on the part the Khmer people played in the wars with France and with the United States.

The sixth room is for special exhibitions tied to events, such as the Ok Om Bok festival or Vietnam Cultural Heritage Day. On every return visit, a new story may be told in that room.

The visit can end at the memorial tower of Maha Sơn Thông on the museum grounds. Here the museum turns from folk culture to the story of real people. The tower was built in 2012. It honors the memory of the elder Maha Sơn Thông. He was an outstanding son of the Khmer people of the south, and he contributed to the cause of unity among all the peoples of the nation.

Outside the museum, the sound of the Ngũ âm orchestra seems to linger in the ear. The red and gold of the crowns still glitter before the eyes. Under the rows of old sao trees beside Ao Bà Om, it becomes clear that heritage does not sit still behind glass. It lives on, in every dance, every palm leaf, every story passed down beneath the roof of a Khmer pagoda.