Vietnam TravelTravel Special FeaturesHai Phong - Portrait of a Port Town

Hai Phong - Portrait of a Port Town

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Evenings in Hai Phong are lit with fountains and bubble over with couples and families. The streets stay open late so that boutiques welcome passersby while fresh fruit stands dot the sidewalk with blenders and tall glasses of cool fruit shakes. Hai Phong is a port town that lies on the northern coast of Vietnam, approximately 100 KM north of Hanoi. It preserves the quaint colonial charm of its past while making a name for itself in modern architecture.

"Hai Phong" in Chinese means sea defense, and in fact this sea-side metropolis has served as a port city for several centuries, being the primary seaport of Vietnam's northern region. In the mid-nineteenth century, when the French invaded Vietnam, they claimed Hai Phong as their main navel base in Indochina; it is currently the nation's third most populous city.

Despite having been a frequent wartime target, Hai Phong has retained much of its bygone colonial charm, while continuing to press forward at a remarkable pace. "Hai Phong leads as one of the foremost industrialized and modern regions in the country," reads a recent government decree, "with promise to become a fully industrialized, civilized and modern metropolis before the year 2020". And the kinds of changes that the city has witnessed over the past decade have been proof to such potential.

Traces of Hai Phong's colonial past nestle in the city's wide, breezy lanes and along major streets where buildings like the courthouse and the city opera loom with tall windows and boxy balconies. Many of the city's former colonial homes have been modified over the past two decades, but the ground floors still stand inside elaborate iron gates, and columns dominate within the structure of the buildings. Entire lanes branching from the main road that once housed massive private homes have since been split into smaller houses for rent.

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