Nhà thờ Huyện Sỹ

This guide to Nha tho Huyen Sy in Ho Chi Minh City opens with an 1880 French land survey, where a Vietnamese official raised by priests in Penang held the power to approve or reject every plot and used it to build one of the largest private fortunes in nineteenth-century Cochinchina. You'll hear how that official, known by the title Huyen Sy, poured a share of the fortune into the Gothic church in front of you, dying in 1900 before its roof was finished and being buried inside beside his wife. Listen for how his granddaughter grew up on that same fortune a generation later.