Bach Dinh (the White Palace)

A mark of French architecture and a story of history in the heart of Vung Tau

Bach Dinh (Villa Blanche) is a French-Greek style mansion built in 1898 on the slope of Nui Lon (Big Mountain). It was once the place where Emperor Thanh Thai was held under French colonial house arrest for nearly nine years before being sent into exile in 1916. The building stands out with its white walls, red tiled roof, arched windows and ceramic bas-reliefs decorating the facade. It later opened as a museum, keeping many artefacts linked to the history of Vung Tau and the Nguyen Dynasty, among them a poem by Emperor Thanh Thai carved on a stone stele in the grounds. The museum's highlight is a collection of several hundred ceramic pieces salvaged from a shipwreck off the coast of Vung Tau, dating from the Kangxi period and regarded as one of the largest collections of Kangxi ceramics on public display in Vietnam. Visitors can walk through the exhibition rooms, discover royal objects that once belonged to the imperial family, then continue up to the viewing terrace to look out over Vung Tau Bay. A visit to Bach Dinh is a chance to explore the history of Vung Tau through its architecture, the story of Emperor Thanh Thai and its centuries-old artefacts.

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