Dragon House Harbor - Ho Chi Minh Museum
Riverside French colonial wharf building with dragon-topped roof, from which a young clerk left for a thirty-year odyssey.
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About this audio guide
This guide to Dragon House Harbor in Ho Chi Minh City begins on June 5th, 1911, when a young galley hand climbed the gangplank of a French steamer at this exact wharf, carrying little more than a spare shirt and a few coins. It traces the dragon-topped Messageries Maritimes building itself, raised around 1862 as one of the colony's first stone landmarks, and the twenty-one-year-old's restlessness under French rule as he signed on for a voyage bound for Marseille. Boats still work this same stretch of the Saigon River, its curve barely changed from photographs taken a century and a half ago.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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