Mu Cang Chai Nature Reserve

Some places were never built for visitors. They were here before anyone spoke of tourism, and they will still be here long after we have gone.

The Mù Cang Chải Species and Habitat Conservation Area is one of them.

The reserve covers more than 20,108 hectares. Of that, more than 18,390 hectares are natural forest. A strictly protected zone takes up more than 15,000 hectares. An ecological recovery zone makes up nearly 5,000 hectares. This is not a park with open paths for strolling. It is a special-use forest, divided into clear zones, with its own management board and forest rangers on the ground.

Special-use forest is the class of forest that Vietnam keeps mainly for conservation and scientific research.

The People's Committee of the old Yên Bái province set up the reserve in 2006. At that time it lay in five communes of the old Mù Cang Chải area. Two of them were Chế Tạo and Púng Luông. Two more were Nậm Khắt and Dế Xu Phình. The fifth was Lao Chải. After the administrative reorganization of 2025, the reserve is placed in three communes of the new Lào Cai province. Two are Chế Tạo and Púng Luông, and the third is Lao Chải.

The reserve's greatest value is its biodiversity. A professional survey recorded 764 species of higher vascular plants and 221 species of land vertebrates. Among them are 53 species of mammals and 130 species of birds. There are also 26 species of reptiles and 12 species of amphibians.

The emblem of the place is a gibbon called vượn đen tuyền, known to science as Nomascus concolor. It is a globally endangered primate, and this reserve is one of the last important habitats for the species. These gibbons live in groups in old forest. They seldom come down low, and they are very sensitive to the presence of people. Their calls ring out at dawn, threading through the thick layers of canopy. This forest is still alive.

The next story worth telling is that of the ancient trees. They grow in the Tà Cay Đằng area. It lies in Nả Háng village, in Chế Tạo commune. There, more than 4,000 ancient trees of two kinds, thiết sam Đông Bắc and pơ mu, carry plaques naming them Vietnam Heritage Trees. More than 1,000 of them are thiết sam, between 400 and 800 years old. More than 3,000 are pơ mu, growing wild.

This is a heritage forest in the truest sense of the words. It is not a figure of speech, and not a name made up for tourism. These are real trees, and they were already standing here before the country had its present name.

But perhaps the least told story, and the most important, is that of the people who keep the forest. The management board has signed 20 contracts with communities in 35 villages, under which the villagers protect the forest. Those villages lie in the three communes named above. There are 19 community forest protection teams, with 160 people who patrol and help prevent and fight forest fires. The forest that provides environmental services covers more than 18,000 hectares. Payments for those services have reached more than 16,900,000,000 dong.

This forest is kept not only because rangers patrol it. It is also kept by the Hmong people of the area, who have chosen to live alongside the forest rather than off it. That is why the forest is still here.

And among all of this, in Nả Háng village, there are thiết sam trees that have stood for 400 to 800 years. They are still standing there today, mossy and quiet, like witnesses of time itself.