Saigon Zoo & Botanical Gardens

This guide to the Saigon Zoo and Botanical Gardens follows the French botanist Jean Baptiste Louis Pierre, who spent thirteen years turning swampy ground by the Saigon River into a living laboratory for tropical plants before the animals arrived almost as an afterthought. It traces the grounds through two world wars and decades of conflict fought in the country's own streets, asking what let this place keep standing while empires and regimes changed around its fence line. Some of the trees shading you now were planted by hands that never saw the Vietnam of today.