Vietnam Museum of Ethnology

Vietnam has 54 ethnic groups. The Việt, also called the Kinh, are the majority, at about 85 percent of the population. The other 53 are ethnic minority groups. Most of them live in the mountains, spread across the country from north to south.

There is a place where the cultures of all 54 can be explored in a single afternoon, without traveling thousands of kilometers. It is right in Hanoi.

The Vietnam Museum of Ethnology was founded by a decision of the Prime Minister on October 24, 1995. It was officially inaugurated on November 12, 1997, during the summit of French-speaking countries that Hanoi was hosting. French President Jacques Chirac came in person to cut the ribbon, together with Vice President Nguyễn Thị Bình. The day marked a special cultural moment in the ties between Vietnam and France.

The museum stands on Nguyễn Văn Huyên Street in the Cầu Giấy area, about 8 kilometers west of central Hanoi. The street is named for Professor Nguyễn Văn Huyên, Vietnam's first ethnologist trained in France. He defended his doctoral thesis at the Sorbonne in 1934. He went on to become the longest-serving Minister of Education of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, from 1946 to 1975. It is no coincidence that the museum stands on the street that bears his name.

The museum has three exhibition areas. The Bronze Drum building holds the indoor exhibition on Vietnam's 54 ethnic groups. Its first floor is for the peoples of the northern mountains, the Tày and the Thái among them. The Mường, the Dao and the Hmong are presented on this floor too. The second floor is for the peoples of the Trường Sơn mountains, the Central Highlands and the lowlands. The Kite building was inaugurated in 2013, and it presents the cultures of the peoples of Southeast Asia. And then there is the part that nearly every visitor calls the most remarkable of all, the outdoor Architecture Garden.

The Architecture Garden holds ten or eleven traditional houses of different ethnic groups, all built at a scale of one to one. That means real houses, neither shrunk nor enlarged. But here is what makes them truly special. The houses were not rebuilt by the Kinh. They were raised by artisans of each group, who came to Hanoi from their home regions and built them right on the site. They used wood, bamboo, leaves and wooden posts from their own homelands.

The house hardest to forget in the garden is the Bahnar communal house. It rises 19 meters in the middle of the garden. In a Bahnar village in the northern Central Highlands, this is the house that belongs to the whole community. Festivals are held there, honored guests are received there, and the village gongs are kept there. Its roof climbs high to a sharp point. It is the tallest house in the village, and it shows the strength and standing of the entire community.

The Ê Đê longhouse is more than 40 meters long. Among the Ê Đê, descent follows the mother's line, and the right to inherit belongs to the women. Each time a daughter marries, the family adds one more section to the house, so the new couple can come and live with them. That is why the length of a longhouse shows how large the mother's family has grown. A house like this can stretch to 50 meters, or even 100.

And there is the Jarai tomb house, with wooden statues of people standing all around it. It is one of the least known parts of the Architecture Garden, and also one of the most striking. The tomb house is the funeral architecture of the Jarai. After someone dies and is buried, the children and grandchildren build a tomb house over the grave and set wooden figures of people around it. One figure is weeping. Another claps its hands in farewell. A mother holds her child. A man and a woman embrace. Every figure is full of feeling, seeing off the one who has died. This is one of the most original forms of folk sculpture in Vietnam and in Southeast Asia.

On weekends and festival days, the museum comes alive with craft demonstrations. In one corner there is water puppetry, in another the shaping of tò he figurines. There is brocade weaving, pottery making, and the printing of Đông Hồ folk paintings. The liveliest times are the Mid-Autumn Festival and the Lunar New Year, when the whole grounds fill with drumbeats, laughter and color.

Walk all three areas at an easy pace, and you will feel you have traveled around the whole country. The walk leads from the soaring roof of the Central Highlands communal house to the Ê Đê longhouse, which joins generation to generation. It ends at the wooden figures of the Jarai tomb house, quietly seeing off the dead. All 54 ethnic groups come together under a single patch of Hanoi sky.