Rough Guide to Vietnam - Jan Dodd [67]
The ethnic Chinese, or Hoa, first began to settle here around 1900; many came from existing enclaves in My Tho and Bien Hoa. The area soon became the largest Hoa community in the country, a title it still holds, with a population of over half a million. Residents gravitated towards others from their region of China, with each congregation commissioning its own places of worship and clawing out its own commercial niche – thus the Cantonese handled retailing and groceries, the Teochew dealt in tea and fish, the Fukien were in charge of rice, and so on.
The great wealth that Cho Lon generated had to be spent somewhere. By the early twentieth century, sassy restaurants, casinos and brothels existed to facilitate this. Also prevalent were fumeries, where nuggets of opium were quietly smoked from the cool comfort of a wooden opium bed. Among the expats and wealthy Asians who frequented them was Graham Greene, and he recorded his experiences in Ways of Escape. By the 1950s, Cho Lon was a potentially dangerous place to be, its vice industries controlled by the Binh Xuyen gang. First the French and then the Americans trod carefully here, while Viet Minh and Viet Cong activists hid out in its cramped backstreets – as Frank Palmos found to his cost, when the jeep he and four other correspondents were riding in was ambushed in 1968.
Post-reunification, Cho Lon saw hard times. As Hanoi aligned itself increasingly with the Soviet Union, Sino-Vietnamese tensions became strained. Economic persecution of the Hoa made matters worse, and, when Vietnam invaded Chinese-backed Cambodia, Beijing launched a punitive border war. Hundreds of thousands of ethnic Chinese, many of them from Cho Lon, fled the country in unseaworthy vessels, fearing recriminations. Today, the business acumen of the Chinese is valued by the local authorities, and the distemper that gripped Cho Lon for over a decade is a memory.
Ho Chi Minh City and around | The City | Cho Lon |
Binh Tay Market and around
First impressions of Binh Tay Market, with its multi-tiered, mustard-coloured roofs stalked by serpentine dragons, are of a huge temple complex. Once inside, however, it quickly becomes obvious that only mammon is deified here. If any one place epitomizes Cho Lon’s vibrant commercialism, it’s Binh Tay, its well-regimented corridors abuzz with stalls offering products of all kinds, from dried fish, pickled vegetables and chilli paste to pottery piled up to the rafters, and the colourful bonnets that Vietnamese women so favour. Beyond Binh Tay’s south side, stalls provide cheap snacks for shoppers and traders.
A few steps north of the market lies Tran Chanh Chieu, a street clogged by a poultry market full of chickens, geese and ducks tied together in bundles. Cereals and pulses are the speciality at the street’s east end, with weighty sacks of rice, lentils and beans forming a sort of obstacle course for the cyclo that try to negotiate the narrow strip of roadway still visible.
The slender spire of Cha Tam Church peers down from above the eastern end of cramped Tran Chanh Chieu, but you’ll have to walk round to Tran Hung Dao to find the entrance. It was in this unprepossessing little church, with its Oriental outer gate and cheery yellow walls, that President Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu holed up on November 1, 1963, during the coup that saw them chased out of the Gia Long Palace (see "The Ho Chi Minh City Museum"). Early the next morning, Diem phoned the leaders of the coup and surrendered. An M-113 armoured car duly picked them up, but they were shot dead by ARVN soldiers before the vehicle reached central Saigon.
With clearance from the janitor (who’s usually somewhere around hoping for a tip) you can clamber up into the belfry and under the