Turtle Lake (Hồ Con Rùa)

You are at Hồ Con Rùa, Turtle Lake, although its official name is International Square and there is no turtle in sight.

1From water tower to monument

A gate of the Vietnamese citadel that the French razed in 1859 once stood here. In 1878 they built a water tower; in 1921 they pulled it down and put up a monument with three bronze French soldiers, which the South Vietnamese government removed in 1956. The present ensemble, by the architect Nguyễn Kỳ, was built in the late 1960s: a pool, spiral ramps, a 34-metre pillar and, in the middle, a metal turtle carrying a stele. Sources disagree on the exact date. After 1975 the inscriptions on the stele were erased, and the turtle vanished in an explosion that most sources place in 1976.

2The dragon's tail

The legend, recorded by the journalist Huỳnh Bá Thành in a book of 1982, tells that President Nguyễn Văn Thiệu consulted a geomancer. He was told that a dragon slept beneath the city with its head at the presidential palace and its tail here, and that the thrashing tail threatened his power; a turtle and a pillar driven in like a sword would keep it still. The same book attributes the 1976 explosion to a group that wanted to “free” the dragon.

The turtle is gone, but the name stayed.

3What to look for

• The central pillar and its flower-shaped crown.
• The spiral ramps over the water.
• The direction of the palace, just a few hundred metres away.