Da Lat

The plateau was the country of the K'Ho, Chil and Lạch peoples, who farmed and hunted its forests long before the French arrived; the name Đà Lạt derives from a phrase meaning the stream of the Lạch. In the 1890s the Swiss-French doctor Alexandre Yersin, better known for identifying the plague bacillus, explored the Lâm Viên plateau and recommended its climate to the colonial authorities as a place where Europeans could recover from the heat of the delta. Governor-General Paul Doumer took up the idea, and from the early 1900s a hill station was laid out around a dammed stream.

Villas, a lycée, a golf course, sanatoria and hotels followed, along with a cog railway climbing from the coastal plain, completed in the 1930s, and an Art Deco station to receive it. The town became the summer capital in all but name: Emperor Bảo Đại built palaces here, colonial officials came for the season, and the plateau's flower and vegetable farms were established to supply European tastes.

Da Lat came through the war years with little damage, and after 1975 it kept its role as a resort, this time for Vietnamese visitors, alongside a fast-growing agriculture of greenhouses and cut flowers. The railway to the coast was closed and dismantled, leaving only the short stretch to Trại Mát. Since the 1990s tourism and intensive farming have expanded together, filling the valleys with plastic-covered houses and the ridges with hotels, and the town has spread well beyond its colonial outline.

Da Lat is the Vietnamese idea of a romantic town: cool air, pine trees, mist, and a long association with honeymoons, poetry and love songs. Much of its domestic tourism runs on that reputation, from lakeside cafés to the photographs taken in flower gardens and among the farms. It is also a student town, with a university founded in 1957, and has a small community of artists and musicians.

The architectural legacy is unusual in Vietnam: hundreds of French-era villas with chimneys, dormer windows and gardens, a cathedral, convents and the railway station, many of them now hotels, cafés or government offices. Preserving them against redevelopment is a running local argument. Christianity is strong here, Catholic and Protestant alike, and church spires are as prominent as pagodas.

The K'Ho and other highland communities of the surrounding districts keep gong music, back-strap weaving and their own languages, and their villages sit close to the town on the road to Lang Biang. Visitors encounter these traditions mostly through organised performances and craft cooperatives, and the respectful approach is to treat village visits as a visit to people's homes rather than a display. Everyday manners are Vietnamese and unhurried, with the cold evenings pushing social life indoors around hot drinks.

Around 200,000 people live in the town, and it is the largest settlement of the Lâm Viên plateau. Agriculture and tourism carry the economy between them: the plateau grows most of Vietnam's temperate vegetables and cut flowers under greenhouses, along with strawberries, avocados, artichokes, tea and arabica coffee, and these are trucked to Ho Chi Minh City daily. Hotels, homestays, cafés and tour operators employ much of the rest, and the university brings students from across the south.

Mornings begin early and cold, with markets busy at dawn and farmers already at work under the plastic. The middle of the day is mild, and evenings are spent indoors or around braziers at the night market, which is the town's main gathering place. Weekends bring a large influx from Ho Chi Minh City, filling the roads into town on Friday evening.

The pressures are visible. Greenhouses have replaced much of the pine forest in the valleys, water for irrigation is under strain, and construction on the slopes has led to landslides in heavy rain. Housing costs have risen with tourism, and the balance between farming, building and the scenery that draws visitors is the town's central question.

Da Lat cooks for the cold, which makes it unlike the rest of southern Vietnam. Bánh tráng nướng — rice paper grilled over charcoal with egg, dried shrimp, spring onion and chilli, sometimes called Vietnamese pizza — is the local snack, sold from small braziers in the evening. Sữa đậu nành, hot sweetened soy milk, is drunk from glasses at night stalls, and lẩu, the shared hotpot, is the standard group meal, often made here with beef and wild mushrooms or with fish.

The farms supply everything else. Artichokes are grown on the plateau and sold fresh, dried and as a tea drunk for its supposed cooling properties; strawberries appear as fruit, jam and sweets; avocados are blended with condensed milk into thick iced drinks; and mứt, candied fruit and vegetables — sweet potato, ginger, tomato, lotus seed — fills the market stalls in boxes. Dried and fresh mushrooms, persimmons and dried rose apples are sold in the same aisles.

Drinks are a point of pride. Arabica coffee grown on the surrounding slopes, some of it from around Cầu Đất, is roasted in the town and drunk hot as often as iced, and Lâm Đồng's tea estates around Bảo Lộc supply green and oolong. Vang Đà Lạt, a wine made in the town, is served in most restaurants, and rượu cần, the communal jar wine of the highland villages, is drunk at K'Ho ceremonies.