Saigon – Gia Dinh Special Forces Museum

A private museum in a 1963 house that was once a secret base in the heart of Saigon

From the outside, the house at 145 Tran Quang Khai does not look like a museum. It is a three-storey building with a roof terrace, built in 1963, whose ground-floor front once housed the Ngoc Que Guild – one of the largest cyclo building and repair workshops in Saigon at the time. That very ordinary appearance is why this place survived. Mr. Tran Van Lai – Hero of the People's Armed Forces, known as Mr. Nam Lai – teamed up with the owner to set up a workshop here making curtains and furniture for the Independence Palace. That cover let the house regularly host leaders and commanders of the Saigon – Gia Dinh Military Region and the Special Forces for meetings, document exchanges and medicine collection without drawing attention. After the Tet Offensive of 1968, Mr. Nam Lai's cover was blown and he had to abandon many bases he had painstakingly built, including this house. After 1975, the building was walled off into three units and sold to different owners. Mr. Nam Lai's family bought back part of the ground floor and the second and third floors and restored them as a museum – a very long journey of searching for, collecting and reconstructing his comrades' memorabilia. The museum was founded in 2019 and officially opened in 2023. The space of over 100 m² displays more than 100 artefacts in 7 collections: secret bunkers for hiding weapons and troops, the vehicles fighters used to get around, weapons and everyday objects tied to their operations. The furniture is still arranged much as it was. You can ride the French-colonial-era lift – the only one kept – watch a short documentary, try the turntable and virtual-reality headsets, hear the story of Mr. Tran Van Lai's Solex moped, and take photos with scenes of 1960s–1970s Saigon. The museum operates as a cafe-cum-museum and is the main stop of the "In the Footsteps of the Saigon Special Forces" tour. If you have time, other bases in the same network are scattered across the city: the secret letterbox on Dang Dung Street, the car garage on Cach Mang Thang Tam, the house on Nguyen Thi Huynh, and the bunker on Nguyen Dinh Chieu, which is ranked a national historical and cultural relic.

English text: machine translation from the Localis platform — proper names kept in Vietnamese.