Chinese Invaders, French Colonialists, Japanese Fascists, and American Imperialists

Hanoi is a bustling city and there’s much to do. I spent the day seeing the city on bike—no easy task with Vietnam’s traffic—including the old Citadel, the Temple of Literature, Ho Chi Minh’s Maosoleum, and the Military History Museum.

Although Hanoi is currently in the middle of the fourteenth Communist Party Convention or something like that (central police in their Latin American dictator-style suits and Politburo tourists are everywhere), the museum was empty save for a few Western tourists. It’s a sad place. The center of the museum was a 30 foot high pile of plane wreckage collected from various French and US planes, which is shown above. Much is made of the numbers of enemy killed; nothing is said about the Vietnamese who died, save for the sporadic tributes to martyrs. And the displays are morbid, proudly displaying swords “used to kill two French soldiers” and weapons captured from the enemy.

The section on how the people of the world supported North Vietnam is the weirdest part of the exhibit. Here you learn that every Polish citizen gave 250ml of blood to the Vietnamese people (no mention on whether it was voluntary or not), Romania gave a transistor radio alarm clock, and the Bectorang Rutsen International Court in Stockholmprosecuted Americans for war crimes in 1967 (some things never change).

Last note: the place was in real need of a clean—I took this shot of the plane wreckage through the window of the second display building.

Our next stop is Sapa, and then we head across the Chinese border. The next two nights will be spent on trains and buses, so the next post will probably be from Kunming.