Quynh Son Village

On October 17, 2025, in the city of Huzhou, in China's Zhejiang Province, the United Nations tourism organization announced its list of the Best Tourism Villages of 2025. More than 270 applications had come in from 65 countries. One of the villages named was a small one in the Bắc Sơn valley, in Lạng Sơn Province. It is called Quỳnh Sơn.

Quỳnh Sơn did not become famous overnight. Its story began in 2010, when the first community tourism model in Lạng Sơn Province took shape here. In the more than 15 years since, the villagers have slowly built a different way of doing tourism. They do not sell tickets to a show. They invite guests to live with them, in the stilt houses of the Tày of Bắc Sơn. The Tày are one of the peoples of northern Vietnam.

Here stand more than 400 stilt houses. They are not hundreds of identical homes lined up for a good photograph. People really live in these homes. A Tày stilt house of Bắc Sơn has a roof of yin and yang tiles and a frame of posts and beams joined with mortise and tenon. It usually has three or five bays. The posts rest on stone plinths, the floor is wood, and the space is open and airy. Seen as a whole, each house seems to sit down against the mountain, facing the fields and the stream.

The people here are Tày. Many families in the village share the surname Dương, which points to a community bound to this land for a long time. Their traditional work is growing wet rice and Bắc Sơn golden mandarins. There is also one special craft that few places can still practice: making yin and yang tiles by hand. The process runs from choosing the clay and curing it to pressing it into molds, drying and firing. These same tiles now roof the houses of the village.

The village has a communal house that honors Quý Minh Đại Vương. It is one of the notable historical and cultural sites of the commune. Nearby is Rá Riềng Bridge, tied to an ambush by soldiers and villagers of Bắc Sơn against the French. The ambush contributed to the Bắc Sơn Uprising of September 27, 1940. Quỳnh Sơn lies within the special national monument area of that uprising.

Quỳnh Sơn also lies within the Lạng Sơn UNESCO Global Geopark, recognized in 2025, with a ceremony on June 28. A UNESCO Global Geopark is an area with landscapes of international geological importance, managed for protection, education and sustainable development. This small village stands where three layers of value meet: the heritage of the uprising, the culture of the Tày of Bắc Sơn, and the karst geology of the geopark.

Life here is not like a packaged tourist stop. Each year the Lồng Tồng festival opens on the 12th and 13th days of the first lunar month. Other cultural events come with it, such as the singing of Ví and Then. Then is a ritual practice in the spiritual life of the Tày. There is also the Tán Đàn dance. When night falls, nine homestays in the village light their lamps. There are campfires, traditional cakes to make, music and song to share, and farming to try. On such nights the sound of Then singing blends with the firelight, and strangers share the same meal with their hosts as if they were family.

The food is distinctive too: bánh chưng đen, xôi cẩm, lạp xường, bánh ngải, xôi ngũ sắc, khâu nhục, vịt quay and Bắc Sơn golden mandarins. Each dish is a layer of Tày memory tied to this land.

The best thing about Quỳnh Sơn is that it is not an open-air museum. In those stilt houses, real people are living, lighting their kitchen fires and welcoming guests as they would welcome relatives home to the village. The title of Best Tourism Village does not hang on any signboard. It lives in every yin and yang roof tile, every line of Then singing, every shared meal on the wooden floor.

On an afternoon in the Bắc Sơn valley, more than 400 stilt-house roofs lean against the foot of the mountain, facing the rice fields and the stream. Thin kitchen smoke rises over the old tile roofs. Somewhere, a line of Then singing drifts back. This is Quỳnh Sơn, a small Tày village that has gone out to meet the world and still remains entirely itself.