Cao Bang

Cao Bang's valley has been a frontier for as long as there has been a Vietnamese state, a corridor of limestone and river gaps between the Red River Delta and what is now Guangxi. Tày and Nùng communities farmed it, and local records place an early Tày polity in this country before Chinese and Vietnamese administration reached it. In the 16th and 17th centuries the Mạc dynasty, driven from Thăng Long, held out here for decades, ruling from fortifications above the confluence of the Bằng and the Hiến; the remains on the citadel hill above the town date from that long rearguard.

The French took the region in the 1880s and built a road up from Lạng Sơn and a garrison town of colonial offices and barracks on the river. Its remoteness made it useful to the Vietnamese independence movement: Hồ Chí Minh crossed from China into the province in 1941 and based himself at Pác Bó, where the Việt Minh was founded; the first units of what became the Vietnamese army were formed in December 1944. In 1950 a border campaign drove French forces out of the town, an early turning point in the war.

Peace was brief. In February 1979 Chinese troops crossed the border in force and the town was among those largely destroyed before the withdrawal, leaving little of its older built fabric. Cao Bang was rebuilt through the 1980s and 1990s in plain concrete, and the town became a city in 2012. The reopening of border trade, the UNESCO geopark designation and improving roads from Hanoi have since turned a remote administrative town into the base for the province's tourism.

This is a minority province rather than a Kinh one, and the town reflects it. Tày and Nùng people form the great majority in the surrounding districts, with Hmong, Dao, Lô Lô and Sán Chay communities in the higher valleys, and it is normal to hear Tày spoken in the market alongside Vietnamese. Stilt houses with earth walls and yin-yang tiled roofs stand in the villages just outside the built-up area, and village halls and spirit shrines still order the farming year.

Music and ritual survive strongly here. Then singing, accompanied by the gourd lute and practised by Tày, Nùng and Thái communities across the northern border provinces, was inscribed by UNESCO as intangible cultural heritage in 2019, and is performed at ceremonies and festivals rather than as a show. After Tết, villages hold the lồng tồng going-to-the-field festival, with offerings, folk songs and the game of còn, in which a cloth ball is thrown through a ring on a high pole. Craft villages in the surrounding districts keep up blacksmithing, paper-making and other handwork.

The memory of war shapes public life more than in most Vietnamese towns. Pác Bó and the town's war memorials are visited by school groups and by veterans, and the events of 1979 are part of family history for most older residents. People are used to the border: goods, relatives and language cross it, and pragmatism about China coexists with a long historical wariness.

The town counted about 74,000 people at the 2019 census, in a province of roughly half a million, and Cao Bang is small enough that much of it knows itself. Administration is the biggest employer — provincial offices, schools, the hospital, the army and border guard — alongside trade, transport and services for the surrounding districts. Farming continues right up to the edge of the built-up area, with rice and maize in the valley floors and chestnut, star anise and forestry on the slopes.

Money comes into the province from cross-border trade at the district crossings, from remittances sent by young people working in Hanoi, Bắc Ninh or abroad, and increasingly from visitors to the waterfall and the geopark. It remains one of the poorer provinces of Vietnam, and rural roads, water supply and schools show it, though better roads towards Hanoi are slowly shortening the journey down to the delta.

The day is early: the market is at its fullest between six and eight in the morning, offices open before eight, and lunch is followed by a real pause in the heat. Evenings belong to the riverbank, where families walk, teenagers gather on motorbikes and cafés and beer tables spill onto the pavement. Weekly and periodic markets in the surrounding district towns draw people down from the hills and are as much social occasions as trade.

The north-east's best-known noodle dish is phở chua, sour phở: rice noodles served cool and dressed rather than in broth, topped with roast pork belly, fried liver, sweet potato crisps, peanuts, herbs and a sweet-and-sour sauce. It is eaten as a light meal at any time of day and is associated above all with neighbouring Lạng Sơn, though it is sold here too; duck phở, phở vịt, is a speciality of Cao Bằng and Lạng Sơn alike. The local version of bánh cuốn is the other distinctive dish — steamed rice rolls filled with pork and mushroom, served in a bowl of hot bone broth with a rib in it, and eaten with a spoon at breakfast.

Upland ingredients run through everything else. Dried and smoked buffalo meat comes down from the hills, khâu nhục — a braised pork belly dish the Tày and Nùng adopted from China — is served at feasts, and xôi trám is sticky rice cooked with the dark, oily trám fruit, a speciality of the province. Chestnuts from Trùng Khánh, small, sweet and roasted at roadside braziers in autumn, are the thing people take home, along with bánh khảo, a dry pressed cake of rice flour and sugar made for Tết. Freshwater fish from the Quây Sơn and the Bằng are grilled or soured into soups.

To drink there is corn spirit distilled in the villages, poured freely at homestays and celebrations, along with weak draught beer and coffee taken very sweet. Thạch đen, a black grass jelly served cold with sugar syrup, is the standard hot-weather refreshment.