Công Viên Bách Thảo
Ten-hectare remnant of a French colonial garden and menagerie, now hiding a hilltop temple and a pigeon-nested lake island.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Công Viên Bách Thảo in Hanoi starts with what the rose garden no longer shows: French colonists carved this ground from the city's outskirts in 1890 and built not a quiet retreat but a showcase of empire, threaded with caged animals Hanoians called the Zoo Garden. It follows what happened when Vietnamese forces marched into a liberated Hanoi in October 1954, and where the birds and larger animals were shipped off to. The rose garden marks roughly where those cages once stood.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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