Sa Pa Love Market

On Saturday night in the Sa Pa highlands, most shops along the mountain streets have pulled their shutters down. From the park of ethnic cultures comes the sound of a khèn, a wind instrument. The note is not high and not hurried. It carries the rhythm of mountain breathing. The instrument is made from six bamboo pipes set into a small wooden gourd.

That sound belongs to a community story older than the name most people know.

The Lào Cai newspaper reports that visitors gave the place its name, chợ tình, the love market, at the end of the 20th century. Before that, this was simply the Sa Pa market, held once a week on Sunday. Villagers came down from Tả Van and Hầu Thào. Others came from Tả Phìn and from villages farther off still. They could not get home in a day, so they usually arrived on Saturday afternoon and stayed the night. In time, that crowded Saturday night grew into a gathering space of its own.

The newspaper describes its original purpose as "a place for young men and women of the region's ethnic minorities to pass on knowledge and to meet." The Hmong, the Red Dao and the Tày were the main communities taking part. The Tày are one of the peoples of northern Vietnam. All three groups met to trade experience in farming, to sing in answer to one another, and to listen to each other play the khèn and the flute. It was a meeting of communities, not a tourist rendezvous.

The newspaper says the Sa Pa night market is known for the khèn and for the singing called hát giao duyên. The Hmong khèn is more than an instrument. It is a language the whole community speaks, and the Hmong play it at festivals, at weddings and at funerals. The singing that goes with it is a language too. It is made of verses that answer one another in rhyme, about the farming seasons and the memory of the community. Its subject is far wider than the love between two people that visitors often picture.

At the end of 2020, the Lào Cai Tourism Information and Promotion Center began a trial to recreate that space. The event took the name Điểm hẹn, Chợ tình Sa Pa, which means the meeting point, the Sa Pa love market. Its programs were performances built on the folk material of the peoples of the region. The khèn and the singing sound again, this time so that young people and visitors from far away can hear what the highland communities have kept for centuries.

The people who step into that space are members of ethnic minority communities coming to their own culture. They are not actors. The sound of the khèn and the voices singing say it all.

Chợ tình Sa Pa is known by a name that is not quite accurate. Still, it holds a part of the voice of the Hmong, Dao and Tày communities of highland Lào Cai. Its worth does not lie in the name. It lies in the sound of the khèn carrying down into the valley on a Saturday night.