Buon Ma Thuot

The plateau around the city was Ê Đê country, farmed and hunted from longhouse villages, and the name Buôn Ma Thuột means the village of Ama Thuột — the father of Thuột, a local headman. The French reached the highlands late, establishing an administrative post here in the first years of the 20th century and making it the centre of Darlac province. They laid out a small colonial town, opened roads down to the coast, planted rubber and then coffee on the red basalt soil, and built a prison in the 1930s for political prisoners from central Vietnam, among them future leaders of the communist party.

Under the Republic of Vietnam the city was a garrison town and the base for programmes aimed at the highland peoples, whose movement for autonomy, known by its French acronym FULRO, pressed for land and political rights. On 10 March 1975 North Vietnamese forces attacked and took the city within two days. The loss led the southern command to abandon the highlands altogether, and the retreat turned into a rout that ended with the fall of Saigon seven weeks later; the battle is commemorated by the tank and monument at the main roundabout.

After the war the government resettled large numbers of lowland Vietnamese on the plateau and pushed coffee planting hard. Output grew enormously through the 1990s, and Buôn Ma Thuột became the centre of the trade, with warehouses, processing plants and a provincial capital's institutions. The expansion also brought lasting disputes over land and forest with the original highland communities, and unrest in the early 2000s. In June 2025 Phú Yên province on the coast was merged into Đắk Lắk, which kept its name.

The city is a meeting point rather than a single culture. Ê Đê people, whose society is matrilineal and whose longhouses are entered by a carved wooden stair, live in villages now inside and around the built-up area; M'Nông, Jarai and other highland groups live further out, and the majority of residents are Kinh Vietnamese whose families moved up from the coast and the delta. Vietnamese is the common language, and Protestant and Catholic churches are prominent alongside Buddhist pagodas.

Gong music is the strongest thread of highland identity. The Space of Gong Culture of the Central Highlands is recognised by UNESCO as intangible cultural heritage, and sets of tuned gongs are played at harvest ceremonies, house blessings and funerals, with rice wine drunk from tall jars through long bamboo straws. Weaving in dark indigo with red and white patterning, wood carving and epic chanting belong to the same tradition, and are performed at the museum, at village cultural houses and during festivals.

Coffee shapes everyday manners as much as any of this. Meetings, courtship and business all happen over small glasses of dark robusta, iced or with condensed milk, in gardens full of tables. The city's calendar turns on the crop: white blossom in the early months of the year, picking from around November, and drying floors spread across yards and roadsides afterwards.

About 434,000 people lived in the city in 2023. It is the largest in the Central Highlands and the seat of provincial government. Coffee dominates the economy — growing, buying, drying, roasting and shipping — alongside pepper, rubber, cashew, durian and avocado, timber and the trade and services a regional capital supports. Small factories process farm produce, and the university and teacher training college bring students from across the highlands.

The built-up wards are modern and low-rise, with shophouses along the main roads and newer suburbs of villas behind them; longhouse villages survive as quarters within the city. Days start very early, with markets busy before dawn and cafés full by seven, and slow through the hottest hours. The afternoon rain in the wet season empties the streets for an hour at a time.

Prices for coffee and pepper set the mood of the whole province, and swings in them are felt immediately in the shops. Water is a recurring worry, since irrigation for coffee draws heavily on wells and streams through the dry season, and deforestation on the plateau has reduced the flow of the rivers. Land rights and the position of the highland minorities remain sensitive subjects.

Coffee comes first. Đắk Lắk grows mostly robusta, which is roasted dark, often with butter, and brewed in a small metal phin filter that drips into a glass of condensed milk. Cà phê sữa đá, iced with milk, is the standard; cà phê đen is black with sugar; and cà phê trứng, whipped with egg yolk, is drunk here too. Arabica from the higher slopes around Chư Yang Sin is sold as a speciality, and whole beans, green or roasted, fill a corner of every market.

The dish most associated with the city is bún đỏ, red noodles: thick rice noodles in a broth reddened with annatto and crab or shrimp paste, served with pork crackling, quail eggs and greens, and sold mainly in the evening. Highland cooking otherwise favours grilling and smoke — chicken flattened and grilled over charcoal, cơm lam, rice steamed inside a bamboo tube, and pork dried over a hearth — eaten with salt pounded with chilli and wild herbs. Bò nướng, grilled beef, is common, as is canh chua, sour soup, brought up from the lowlands.

Fruit is abundant and cheap: avocado, blended with condensed milk into a thick iced drink, durian, rambutan and jackfruit from the surrounding farms. Rượu cần, rice wine fermented in a jar and drunk communally through straws, is the ceremonial drink of the highland villages, and honey and wild pepper are sold beside the coffee in the market.