Tra Co Beach

Three dương trees stand at the very tip of Sa Vĩ headland. They have stood in the sand for many years, straight as three focal points in a photograph. They are the emblem of the place, and they are tied to two lines by the poet Tố Hữu. The poem reads: "From Trà Cổ, with its forest of dương trees, down to Cà Mau, with its forest of đước trees." In that verse, Trà Cổ is where the country's coast begins, in the far northeast, and Cà Mau is where it ends, in the far south.

The name Sa Vĩ is made of two Vietnamese words. A guide document from the Móng Cái city government reads the name as sand (sa) and tail (vĩ): a tail of sand. The headland has a second name, mũi Gót.

From Sa Vĩ, Trà Cổ beach stretches all the way to Ngọc headland at the other end. According to the city's tourism document, it is 17 kilometers long and lies about 8 kilometers from the center of Móng Cái. Along the shore lie white sand, blue sea and long rows of casuarina trees.

Those rows did not grow by chance. President Hồ Chí Minh visited Trà Cổ on May 8, 1961. Bác Hồ, or Uncle Hồ, is the name by which Hồ Chí Minh is widely known. He stopped on this very beach to talk with the people of Trà Cổ and with the Ba Thu fishing cooperative. According to a local guide document, he advised them to plant trees that would break the wind and keep the sand in place, so that Trà Cổ could become a green, clean and beautiful resort by the sea. The casuarinas along the shore today are said to be the result of that advice, and they are the image that most defines Trà Cổ.

Trà Cổ is more than a place to swim. It has a deep culture of its own.

Hidden behind the shore, in the Nam Thọ area, stands the Trà Cổ communal house. The communal house dates from 1461, in the Later Lê period. The villagers built it to honor the guardian spirit of the village and to keep the memory of how the land of Trà Cổ came to be settled. It was ranked a national monument of architecture and art in 1974, and raised to a special national monument in 2023.

Every year the communal house holds a festival that runs from the 29th day of the fifth lunar month to the 3rd day of the sixth. Two rites stand out: the carrying of the deity out onto the sea in procession, and the Ông Voi contest, a popular name for a traditional kind of competition. The festival was recognized as national intangible cultural heritage in 2019.

Beside the communal house stands the Trà Cổ church, also called Tràng Lộ church, built in 1880. Standing so close together, the communal house and the Catholic church tell of the varied history of the people who have lived in this northeastern border land.

As geography, Trà Cổ may be only a strip of sand on the edge of the Gulf of Tonkin. In the memory of the Vietnamese, though, it is the place where a poem begins, and the place where Bác Hồ left his advice. It is also the place where fishermen, across the centuries, have kept putting out to sea and bringing home full nets.

Seventeen kilometers of white sand run from one headland to the other, and the casuarinas murmur in the sea wind.