Theater
Saigon Opera House
07 Công trường Lam Sơn, Sài Gòn, Hồ Chí Minh 700000
Flamboyant colonial opera house whose carved facade statues were stripped, then restored decades on.
This guide to the Saigon Opera House opens in 1943, when city officials climbed scaffolding to strip the carved statues off their own facade, judging the building too ornate. It traces the theater back to 1900, built in a flamboyant style modeled on Paris's Petit Palais and seating eighteen hundred, then follows it through Allied bombing and two decades from 1955 as home to South Vietnam's Assembly House and Senate instead of performers. Listen for the sound the building lost during those years, and what replaced it.
Audio guides are written and narrated by AI.