The Bac Lieu Prince's House

A house stands on the bank of the Bạc Liêu River, at number 13 Điện Biên Phủ Street. Its ward is Bạc Liêu, in Cà Mau Province. People of the Mekong Delta have long called it by a name heavy with tales, the House of the Bạc Liêu Prince.

The house was built from 1917 to 1919 and designed by a French architect, who joined Eastern and Western styles. All the materials came from France: cast steel, marble for the floors, bricks and decorative iron frames. Vietnam's tourism database says a letter P is set into many details, such as screws and iron frames. It explains the letter as a mark of origin, for Paris.

The man tied to the house is Trần Trinh Huy. Tourism writing often calls him the Bạc Liêu Prince. Other names for him are Ba Huy and Hội đồng Ba. He came from a large landowning family and returned from studying in France. He was famous for one of the most extravagant lifestyles in Nam Kỳ in the early 20th century. Nam Kỳ was the name then used for southern Vietnam.

Stories about him have passed down through many generations. The tales say he burned money to cook eggs. They say he held a beauty contest. They say he owned an airplane. These are folk tales, and they are the part that gives the place its pull. They are not a fully verified historical record.

The house itself tells another story, one of architecture.

The tourism database records that the house was also called the nhà Lớn, the Big House. Once finished, it was considered the most imposing house in the six provinces of Nam Kỳ at the time. The ground floor has two bedrooms, two wide halls and a staircase up to the next floor. The upper floor has three bedrooms and two halls. One bedroom belonged to Trần Trinh Huy, with a double bed, a telephone, an air conditioner, a wardrobe and a writing desk.

The front of the house is pale yellow, with blue doors, a domed roof, moldings, columns and curved balustrades. Seen from outside, the symmetrical layout and the decoration show a family that had more than money, and that also wanted to display its standing in the Western style of the age.

Today the house lies in the old Bạc Liêu area, which belongs to Cà Mau Province after the change of administrative boundaries. It speaks of more than one wealthy family. It tells of the meeting of Eastern and Western cultures in Nam Kỳ in the early 20th century, of the landowning class, of the river town of Bạc Liêu, and of the memory of an age.

Before the pale yellow front and the blue doors, with the sound of the Bạc Liêu River drifting in from far off, a visitor feels what no book fully describes. This was once a place where an age put itself fully on show, brilliant, proud and as fragile as the tales still passed down today.