National Museum of Vietnamese History

A roof curves out at eight corners, and the tips of its eaves sweep back up toward the sky. Yet beneath that roof stand colonnaded galleries and French-style door frames.

Many people walk past this building at number one Phạm Ngũ Lão Street without knowing what it holds. It is both Western and East Asian, and belongs to neither side alone. This is the first site of the National Museum of Vietnamese History. And the building, as it happens, had a story of its own before it ever became a museum.

In 1925, a French architect named Ernest Hébrard designed the building with his colleague Charles Batteur. Construction began a year later. The commission came from the French School of the Far East, known as EFEO. It was the French institute for the study of the history and culture of Indochina, with its headquarters in Hanoi. Hébrard did not put up a purely European building. He set an East Asian roof with eight curved corners onto a symmetrical French floor plan, then added curved sun canopies and stylized ornament. This style is known as Indochinese architecture, and the building is one of its defining examples. The building was finished in 1932. It was then called the Louis Finot Museum, after the school's first director.

In 1958, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam turned the building into the Museum of Vietnamese History. In 2011, that museum merged with the Museum of the Vietnamese Revolution, nearby on Tông Đản Street. Together they became the National Museum of Vietnamese History. The new museum officially came into being on September 26, 2011. Between its two sites, it holds more than 200,000 objects.

Of all those objects, one is worth the longest stop.

It waits in the gallery of the Đông Sơn culture.

The Ngọc Lũ bronze drum. That is its name.

In 1893 and 1894, villagers in Như Trác commune were digging earth to build up a dike. The commune lay in Nam Xang district, in Hà Nam province. That area later became part of Lý Nhân district. In the soil they came upon a large bronze drum. It dates from about 2,500 to 2,000 years ago. It belongs to the Đông Sơn culture, the culture of the ancient Việt people in the Bronze Age. In 2012, the Prime Minister recognized the Ngọc Lũ drum as a National Treasure, in the very first round of such awards.

The face of the drum rewards a long look. At its center is a sun with fourteen rays. Sixteen rings of decoration spread out around it, filled with people pounding rice, people beating drums and people dancing. There are houses on stilts, cranes in flight, and deer. Figure follows figure, bird follows bird, all circling the sun at the center, one ring wrapped around the next. None of this is mere decoration. It is a kind of photograph of a farming community that grew rice in flooded fields before the Common Era. Everything the Đông Sơn people lived by, worked at and celebrated is there on the face of this drum.

The bulging band just below the face carries other designs: boats, people and birds. The boats do not appear on the face at all. They show up only on the sides of the drum.

Of the many bronze drums that have been found, the Ngọc Lũ drum is still judged the most harmonious in shape and size, with the most beautiful and varied decoration. That is why it is seen as a defining treasure of the Đông Sơn culture.

Further on comes the gallery of the Nguyễn dynasty, Vietnam's last royal dynasty, which reigned from 1802 to 1945. Here is the golden seal called "Sắc mệnh chi bảo". It was cast in the eighth year of the reign of Emperor Minh Mệnh, that is, in 1827. It was used to stamp the royal decrees that appointed officials and honored deities. It is a small but tangible trace of the court's Confucian power.

The second site stands close by, at number 25 Tông Đản Street. It covers history from the middle of the 19th century to the present day. This part matters a great deal to older Vietnamese visitors, especially groups of veterans. Here are archival photographs of the ceremony for Vietnam's Declaration of Independence on September 2, 1945. Next comes the war against the French, with weapons, uniforms and more archival photographs. It includes the campaign of Điện Biên Phủ, the 1954 battle in which Việt Minh forces defeated the French.

Back at number one Phạm Ngũ Lão Street, where this story began, the building with eight curved corners has stood since 1932. The tips of its eaves still sweep up toward the sky. Inside, at the center of the Ngọc Lũ drum, the sun with fourteen rays still shines out. Around it, the rings of people and birds still circle without end.

History does not live only in objects. It also lives in the very building that keeps them.