Ha Giang

The valley of the Lô was on the edge of Vietnamese authority for most of its history. Its peoples — Hmong, Dao, Tày, Nùng, Giáy, Lô Lô and others — arrived in successive migrations from the north over several centuries, and the high karst country was governed in practice by local lords rather than by the court. The French, who occupied the region in 1886, built a garrison on the east bank of the Lô and ruled the plateau indirectly, recognising the Hmong lord Vương Chính Đức as king of the Hmong in 1900 and leaving his family in authority over Đồng Văn and Mèo Vạc. Their walled mansion, built at Sà Phìn in 1902 and 1903, still stands.

After 1945 the new state extended direct administration into the uplands, and between 1959 and 1965 youth volunteers and local labourers cut the road now called the Happiness Road along the cliffs of Mã Pí Lèng, largely by hand, connecting Đồng Văn and Mèo Vạc to the rest of the country for the first time. It remains the defining engineering work of the region.

In February 1979 Chinese forces crossed the border some twenty-five kilometres north, and the town was heavily damaged before being rebuilt; fighting along this frontier went on at intervals until 1989, longest and most severely at Vị Xuyên south of the town, where a war cemetery records the dead. The border was normalised in the 1990s. Tourism arrived only in the 2010s, after restrictions on travel in the frontier zone eased and the plateau was recognised as a UNESCO Global Geopark, and the loop has since become one of the best-known journeys in Vietnam. In June 2025 Hà Giang province was incorporated into Tuyên Quang province, though the name stays on the uplands and on the circuit.

The uplands around Ha Giang are among the most ethnically varied parts of Vietnam, and the town is where those communities meet. Hmong groups are the most numerous on the plateau, recognisable by embroidered and pleated dress that differs from valley to valley; Dao women wear red headcloths and silver; Lô Lô villages near Lũng Cú keep bronze drums used at funerals; Tày and Nùng farm the lower valleys from stilt houses.

The weekly market is the central institution. Families walk or ride for hours to Đồng Văn or Mèo Vạc on a Sunday to trade buffalo, pigs, cloth and herbs, meet relatives, eat thắng cố from the cauldron and drink corn wine; the trading is only part of the reason for going. The Khâu Vai gathering each spring, once a night when former lovers married to others were permitted to meet, has become the best-known of these occasions.

Music and craft are household matters here rather than staged ones: the Hmong reed pipe played at funerals, flax grown, woven and dyed in indigo, beeswax batik, silver worked in village forges. Visitors are welcomed with drink and directness, and the etiquette that matters most is around the house altar, the main door and the acceptance of hospitality. Tourism has brought income and, with it, a familiar argument about how much of this should be performed.

About 55,000 people live in the city, a small, low-built place strung along both banks of the Lô. It functions as the service centre for a far larger rural population: offices, hospitals, boarding schools for children from distant communes, a bus station and the market where upland produce is sold on.

Beyond the town, life is farming on very difficult ground. Maize rather than rice is the staple crop of the plateau, planted in pockets of soil between the rocks and carried out in baskets; rice terraces are worked in the lower valleys, alongside cardamom, tea, cattle and the mint-flower honey the plateau is known for. Water is the constant problem on the karst, where villages depend on rainfall collected in tanks through a long dry winter.

Incomes are among the lowest in Vietnam, and many working-age adults migrate to factories in the delta or across the Chinese border for part of the year. Tourism has changed the town itself considerably since the late 2010s, adding hostels, rental garages, tour offices and cafés along the riverfront, and it has brought homestay income to villages along the loop. Road maintenance, landslides, schooling and the loss of young people to the lowlands are the recurring local concerns.

Ha Giang eats what the mountains produce. Mèn mén, maize ground and steamed into a dry crumb, is the traditional staple of Hmong households, served with soup, greens and pork. Thịt trâu gác bếp — buffalo rubbed with mắc khén pepper and hung above the hearth until it is dark and hard — is the region's best-known product, and thắng cố, the long-simmered stew of horse or buffalo meat and offal, belongs to market day and to the company that goes with it.

The town has two specialities of its own. Cháo ấu tẩu is a dark, bitter porridge made with a mountain tuber that is poisonous unless cooked for many hours, eaten at night as a remedy for cold and aching limbs. Thắng dền, small glutinous rice balls in hot ginger syrup with coconut and crushed peanut, is the sweet eaten at the same hour. Bánh cuốn from Đồng Văn is served unusually with a bowl of bone broth rather than dipping sauce, often with an egg steamed into the roll.

Drinks and preserves round it out: rượu ngô, the corn spirit distilled in the villages, Shan tuyết tea picked from old trees on the high slopes, and bạc hà honey gathered from buckwheat and mint flowers in autumn. Most of these appear in the town market in jars and plastic cans rather than in shops.