Sapa

The valleys around Sapa were settled by Hmong, Dao, Giáy and Tày communities who moved south from China over the past few hundred years, cutting the terraces that now define the landscape. The Vietnamese state had little presence here until the French arrived: an expedition of the Indochina Geographical Service identified the area in 1903, and Sapa, then written Chapa, was developed as a hill station where officials and soldiers could escape the delta's summer heat. A sanatorium was built in 1909 and a military garrison in 1912, a tourist office opened in 1917, and French residents put up villas from 1918.

Nearly all of the colonial buildings were destroyed during the First Indochina War of 1946 to 1954, and most of the population fled. For the next three decades Sapa was a remote district town, and in the 1979 border war with China, fought a short distance north, its Kinh residents were displaced for a time before returning later the same year; the border crossing at Lào Cai stayed shut until 1993.

Vietnam reopened the north to foreign travellers at the start of the 1990s, and Sapa's transformation has been rapid ever since. Guesthouses, then hotels, then large concrete blocks filled the ridge; the road was rebuilt, the expressway from Hanoi shortened the journey, and a cable car towards the summit of Fansipan opened in 2016. The town today looks little like the quiet place described by travellers thirty years ago, and the pace of building remains contentious.

Sapa is a meeting point rather than a single culture. The Black Hmong are the largest group in the surrounding valleys, recognised by indigo-dyed hemp clothing and heavy silver jewellery; Red Dao women shave the hairline and wear tall red headscarves; Giáy and Tày communities live lower down in wooden and stilt houses, and Kinh Vietnamese from the delta run much of the town's business. Each keeps its own language, and Vietnamese is the common tongue between them.

Weekly markets are the social institution of the uplands — a place to trade buffalo and cloth, settle matters between families, drink corn wine and meet people from other valleys. Sapa's own market has become largely a tourist one, which is why visitors and villagers alike travel to Bắc Hà or Cán Cấu on market days. Textile work is the visible craft: hemp grown, retted, woven, batiked with beeswax and dyed in indigo vats, the stained hands of the dyers a common sight.

Tourism has reshaped these customs. Many Hmong women speak fluent English learned entirely from visitors, guide walks and run homestays, which has shifted income and authority within families. It has also brought selling that many travellers find persistent, and an ongoing argument in the region about how much of village life should be staged for an audience.

About seventy thousand people live in the Sa Pa area — the former district-sized town, not the centre alone — most of them in villages rather than the town itself, and roughly eighty-five per cent belong to ethnic minority communities, Hmong and Dao above all. Farming is still the base of life: wet rice on the terraces, maize and cassava on the slopes, cardamom grown under the forest canopy, pigs and buffalo, and increasingly vegetables, plums and medicinal herbs grown for sale down in the lowlands.

Tourism is the other economy and now the larger one in the town. It supports hotels, restaurants, drivers, guides, porters and the craft trade, and pulls young people out of the fields. Work is seasonal and weather-dependent, and the quiet weeks of a wet summer are felt sharply.

The rhythm of the day follows the light and the cold. Households are up before dawn to feed animals and walk to fields or school, often a long way; the market trade is a morning business; and by early evening the mist closes in and the streets empty quickly. Incomes remain well below the national average, and the running issues are familiar across the uplands: schooling and language, land pressure, landslides on rebuilt roads, waste and water supply in a town that has grown far beyond what its services were built for, and how the money from visitors is shared.

Mountain cooking here is built on smoke, fire and preserved meat rather than the fresh herbs of the delta. Thịt trâu gác bếp — buffalo meat rubbed with mắc khén, a local pepper, and hung over the kitchen hearth until dark and dry — is the regional signature, torn into strips and eaten with rice wine. Cơm lam, sticky rice roasted inside bamboo tubes, and thắng cố, the Hmong cauldron stew of horse or buffalo meat and offal, belong to market day.

Vegetables come off the slopes: rau cải mèo, a bitter mustard green, chayote shoots sold in great bundles, wild bamboo shoots and forest mushrooms. Lợn cắp nách, a small free-ranging mountain pig, is roasted whole or grilled in pieces. Hotpot is the standard evening meal in the cold, and grilled skewers cooked over braziers near the square are what most people eat late.

Two more recent arrivals have become local specialities. Cold-water salmon and sturgeon, farmed in streams below the Ô Quy Hồ pass, appear raw with herbs or in a sour hotpot. And the orchards planted around the town supply plums, peaches and táo mèo, a sour mountain fruit steeped into a pale wine sold in every market. Corn spirit, rượu ngô, distilled in the villages, is what a visit to a house is likely to involve.