Museum of Vietnamese Ethnic Cultures

In Phan Đình Phùng ward of Thái Nguyên stands a museum building that has been in the same place since 1960. Back then it was called the Việt Bắc Museum, and it belonged to the Việt Bắc Autonomous Zone. When the zone was dissolved in 1976, the museum passed to the Ministry of Culture. Its purpose has stayed the same: to study, preserve and tell the cultural stories of the peoples of Vietnam.

Telling the stories of 54 ethnic groups is no small task.

The Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism says the grounds cover nearly 40,000 square meters. They hold five indoor galleries, an outdoor display area, and storerooms with tens of thousands of original documents and objects. In 1996 the museum building received the Hồ Chí Minh Prize, in the first round of the prize for Vietnamese architecture. It was a high honor.

The indoor route is arranged by cultural and language groups. It opens with an overview of what marks the cultures of Vietnam's peoples. Then comes the Việt Mường group, which includes the Việt and the Mường. After that is the Tày Thái group, which includes the Tày and the Thái. The Hmong and the Dao have their place in the next group, together with many other peoples.

The Môn Khmer group comes next, with more than twenty peoples. They range from the Khơ Mú in the northern mountains to the Ba Na in the Central Highlands. The Khmer of the south are here too. The last gallery brings together the Hán Hoa group with the Tibeto-Burman and Malayo-Polynesian groups. Its peoples include the Hoa and the Sán Dìu. The Gia Rai and the Cham are among them as well.

There are 54 peoples, and each has its own language, clothing, architecture, rituals, music, food and view of the world.

Behind the main building lies the outdoor display. It is divided into six cultural regions. Each has a landscape of its own and one particular house as its centerpiece. There is the stilt house of the Northwest and the long house of the Central Highlands. There is the ground-level house of the lowlands, and the architecture of the people of central Vietnam. Here visitors can look at the buildings, touch them, and picture how people live in houses so different from one another.

The grounds hold another layer of history too. The Ministry of Culture records two buildings there, the French Resident's residence and the barracks of the khố xanh soldiers.

Under French rule, a Resident was the French official who oversaw a province.

Both buildings are tied to the uprising of the Thái Nguyên soldiers in 1917, led by Đội Cấn. The road that leads to the museum is called Đội Cấn Street, after the leader of that uprising. So the grounds are not only a place to display culture. They are also a historic site.

The museum does not stop at glass cases and captions. Since 2018 it has offered a virtual visit, with five exhibition rooms in three dimensions. Since the end of 2023 there has also been an audio guide app, with 99 stories for 99 display groups. With only a phone, a visitor can hear each object tell its own story.

Under one roof, 54 peoples live together. They weave cloth, raise houses and sing songs of their own. Each object in a glass case is part of a story that a community trusted the museum to keep. Out among the stilt houses and long houses, in the Thái Nguyên sun, a visitor passes through a whole stretch of the country. From the high ridges of the Northwest to the great forests of the Central Highlands, all in a single afternoon.