Saigon Central Post Office

On a long wooden table in the hall of the Saigon Central Post Office, there once lay a half-written letter, beside a magnifying glass and two dictionaries. One was English and Vietnamese, the other French and Vietnamese. The man holding the pen sat on an old wooden chair at the worn tabletop, choosing each word with care.

That letter was about to set out on a long trip. But before it left, it would pass through a whole building that has worked as a post office for more than 130 years. And the man who wrote it had a story just as long.

He was Dương Văn Ngộ, born in 1930. As a boy, he studied French at the Petrus Ký school. At the age of 18, he passed the entrance exam and went to work at the Saigon Post Office. During his years there, he also studied English at Hội Việt Mỹ, the Vietnamese American Association.

In 1990, he retired. But he did not leave the building. He was invited to stay on, writing letters in the hall for customers who paid him. A few other people did the same work back then, and he was the youngest of them all.

The letters on that table could carry almost anything. Some were love letters sent across borders. Some helped a son or daughter find the way back to their roots. Some passed between a mother and her child, each living far from the other. And many were work documents, where every single word had to be translated exactly.

He translated letters from Vietnamese into English and French, and back the other way. He wrote exactly what people asked, adding nothing and leaving nothing out, and he kept each person's private life to himself. Sometimes he only helped write a foreign address on an envelope. He said every country has its own way of writing an address, and that the way it is written shows the culture of that country.

Now the letter is finished. It leaves the wooden table, and the eye turns upward.

Overhead rises a high vaulted roof, held up by rows of iron columns. Sunlight falls into the hall through the glass panes in the ceiling, while ceiling fans turn between the columns. The space is tall, wide and airy all at once, and it brings to mind the old railway stations of Europe.

The French began building it in 1886 and opened it in 1891. From that day to this, it has never stopped being a post office. Among the buildings the French left behind in Vietnam, few have kept doing their original work for so long.

The letter travels down the hall, past two old hand-drawn maps high on either wall. The first is titled Saigon and Its Surroundings, 1892. That was Saigon when the building had been open for just a year.

The second is titled Telegraph Lines of Southern Vietnam and Cambodia, 1936. Its lines trace the paths of telegrams, spreading out from Saigon across the whole south and on into Cambodia. The two maps have been there for a very long time, like two old friends quietly watching the crowds pass below.

The hall also has wooden telephone booths, where people once stepped inside to make long-distance calls. Above the main counter hangs a large portrait of President Hồ Chí Minh. And around the counters, there is always the sound of talk, laughter and questions.

Many people still say this building was designed by Gustave Eiffel, the man who built the Eiffel Tower in Paris. But Eiffel did not design the Saigon Post Office.

The two names tied to the plans belong to the architects Auguste Henri Vildieu and Marie Alfred Foulhoux. Some accounts say Vildieu was the designer, with Foulhoux as his assistant. Others hold that Foulhoux was the main designer. Some guess that Eiffel had a hand in the iron frame inside, but no document has yet been found to prove it.

Then the letter reaches the door. Seen from outside, the building is dressed in yellow, the traditional color of the French postal service. Its architecture has a European shape, with a few touches of Eastern decoration. Across the front run rectangular panels bearing the names of inventors in telegraphy and in electricity. Between them are reliefs of men and women wearing laurel wreaths.

And on the highest arch, right in the center, sits a large clock. Next to the building stands Notre-Dame Cathedral of Saigon, Nhà thờ Đức Bà. The two buildings the French put up stand side by side in the heart of the city.

The old letter writer once said that technology runs even faster than the clock on the front of the post office. Email arrived, and fewer people came to ask for letters. Long love letters, running for pages, grew rare. On many days, customers only asked him to write a few fond lines on a postcard.

And yet people still found their way to that wooden table. Every day he rode his bicycle to the post office. Travelers from many countries stopped to talk with him and asked for a photo together. Sometimes he even led them on a walk around the building, telling them about Vietnamese culture. Newspapers in Canada and in Germany came to write about him too.

In 2009, he was recognized as the longest-serving hired letter writer in Vietnam. The director of the city post office once put it very simply. "Uncle Ngộ is part of the post office," she said. He died in 2023.

As for the letter, it is already on its way. It passes through the door under the great clock, leaves the yellow building, and heads for a faraway place where someone is waiting. The city has changed its name, and the letter writer of those years has passed on, but the building is still there.

In the hall, sunlight still falls through the glass in the ceiling. The two maps are still there, high on the walls. And every morning, the door under the clock opens again, so that new letters can begin their own long trips.