When I arrived in Saigon for the first time, I couldn't notice every early colonial building since I didn't know what to look at. Now I know how to recognize them. Look at this image taken in the 1920s (by photographer Leon Ropion, from Saigoneer.Com):
The key is the pitched roof, not flat one - almost every house has it in the image.
Knowing this, you can be sure what is in front of you in my image from 2024, 100 years later:
Covered with red tiles, with wide windows, sometimes even with old wooden shutters. These buildings looked like giants 100 years ago. Now they look rather cozy and graceful.
There are many of them scattered in District 1, often surrounded by newer buildings. It's because some of "the dinosaurs" disappeared. Another reason is that they built some houses as stand-alone houses which got younger neighbors later in the time of multi-story construction.
Another type of early colonial building is easier to recognize since they are too posh to not notice them.
Saigon Opera, for example (in the image above), the City Hall, Notre Dame Cathedral, Hotel Continental, and many others.
All these buildings form the historic heritage of Saigon and constitute its top tourist attractions. There are no earlier buildings. Before the French acquired the place by force of arms (1859), the city wasn't anything ancient but an outpost of the Vietnamese colonization in the former Cambodian lands (before 1700).
Let's take a look what's inside another beautiful example of colonial architecture, Saigon Central Post Office:
It continues to work in its initial field.
But it also has become a tourist attraction. It is probably the most touristy place in the whole city. Many foreigners photograph each other for social media and buy souvenirs there. But not only that.
Travelers, many of whom were born in the era of the Web and never experienced all those dated things, come to send a postcard or two to the homeland.
I spent a time there observing these people. One of them:
It looked, this person was having a serious and delightful talk, considering his pose and expression, so I couldn't help but sneak a pic. At that moment a phrase came to my mind "Hello, Mom, I am in Vietnam", and I was silently giggling at it. 😁
But let's continue our tour in District 1.
Saigon has a row of skyscrapers. The tallest is 461-meter-tall Landmark 81 but it is located outside the historic core. Other tallest buildings of Saigon are in District 1.
They don't form an ultra-modern-looking area but rather decorate older streets and form a peculiar bouquet with colonial buildings.
The towers of Saigon Centre, 193 meter-tall, in the image above, don't look striking. However, they do beautify the city (and offer a nice shopping mall environment as well).
Another giant, Bitexco Financial Tower (on the right), has a more creative shape and is probably loved by many for that. The foreground, by the way, is taken by another famous building of the colonial times - Ben Thanh Market.
Fun to see the Times Square building in socialist Vietnam. But that's reality. 165 meter-tall (in the middle in the image above).
The towers of Vincom Center remind the main cathedral of the city, Notre Dame Cathedral of Saigon which also twin towers. (Can't show the latter since it's fully covered with scaffolding nowadays.)
There are interesting buildings of the late twentieth century in District 1 too. One of them is the Cafe Apartment. This is a residential building that has been turned into a hub for cafes, bars, and restaurants (with regular residents living next to those enterprises):
Worth visiting even you don't want to sit at a care or bar, just to see interiors and have a look at the city from above.
Climbing the staircase reveals exterior and interior elements of different cafes like this pin-up mural (with original tiles on the floor).
The balconies of the Cafe Apartment look at Nguyen Hue Boulevard and open up panorama with many modern and colonial buildings. Worth spending a time there to get a bird's eye view of downtown Saigon.
More stories from Southeast Asia are ahead! Check out my previous posts on my personal Travelfeed or Worldmappin map.
I took these images with a Nikkor 50mm on a full-frame DSLR Nikon D750 in June, 2024, in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.