One day at the Saigon zoo

Originally published by the Shanghai Literary Review, this updated essay takes readers on a walk through history at the Saigon Zoo & Botanical Gardens – a precious piece of land in more ways than one.

IN 1950, DAYS BEFORE TET (Lunar New Year), the English travel writer Norman Lewis arrived in the capital of Cochinchine, where he was less than impressed by the city’s ‘westernised welcome.’

‘Saigon is a French town in a hot country,’ he observed coolly. ‘There has been no audacity of architecture, no great harmonious conception of planning. [It is a] pleasant, colourless and characterless French provincial town squeezed onto a strip of delta land in the South China Sea.’

The French had transformed what had been a muddy backwater, composed of ramshackle wooden and thatched-roof settlements in the mid-19th century into a modern, colonial metropolis – they laid down a Haussmann-style urban plan with tree-lined boulevards, sidewalks, drainage systems and gas streetlights. They designed an opera house, a grand Neo-Renaissance post office – located right opposite a neo-Gothic cathedral called Notre Dame – and all around the city’s most central arrondissement, they also built elegant villas, apartments, offices, arcades, parks, and more. But none of the above convinced Lewis that this colonial outpost was worthy of the moniker: ‘Paris of the East’.

‘Might as well call Kingston, Jamaica the Oxford of the West Indies,’ he sniffed before plunging headlong into the side streets, where Vietnamese and Chinese communities lived in much less planned living quarters, and where he came across all manner of activities being conducted in public – fortune tellers plying their trade on the pavements, dentists and masseuses, too. Locals ate, dozed or performed their morning ablutions outdoors. Vendors hawked various foodstuffs – diaphanous octopuses, cured pig snouts, splayed chickens and ducks, webbed feet of some indeterminate wading bird. Later in a local cafe, Lewis sipped on a beer as the staff and customers listened ‘respectfully’ to ‘When Irish Eyes Are Smiling’ (of all the songs) on the radio while the penetrating soprano of a Chinese crooner could also be heard from a gramophone shop across the way. Adding to this cacophonous scene, a funeral soon passed by with a flautist and a drummer leading the hearse and mourners through the narrow street outside where giddy children also played outside the store of a herbalist selling various elixirs, one of which – judging by the illustrations on display – cured mediocrity as, apparently, one slug turned a loafer into a confident public speaker.

It’s very clear when reading Lewis’ A Dragon Apparent – the masterful travel book (published in 1951) that apparently inspired Graham Greene to first visit Vietnam – the author relished his brief exploration of the ‘other Saigon’, away from the tamarind-shaded avenues and boulevards that the fearful emigres dared not leave. But before embarking to the Central Highlands, where the ‘real journey would begin’, the intrepid Englishman would pay his respects to one of the city’s grandest colonial institutions – Les Jardins Botaniques (the Saigon Zoo and Botanical Gardens¹, as it is known today in English).

It was a Sunday when Lewis visited and along the way to the gardens, he saw ‘clusters of Vietnamese beauties on bicycles’ all bound in the same direction, ‘floating, it seemed, rather than pedalling, as the trains of their silk gowns trailed in the air behind them.’ With their ‘immaculate appearance’ and ‘swan-like movements’, Lewis describes the scene as one of ‘unearthly elegance’. The park was also full of these ‘ethereal creatures, gliding in decorous groups through the shady paths, sometimes accompanied by gallants, who, in their cotton shirts, shorts and trilby hats, provided a sadly anticlimactic spectacle [....]. Domestic servants, or boyesses, as they are pleasantly known by the French, were dressed [...] charmingly, but more simply, in pajamas only.’

Walking round the gardens, Lewis concluded that ‘photography is a popular excuse for these decorous fétes-champétres’ to which we (who live the age of TikTok and Instagram) can only say plus ça change, old chap. He noted that there were several accepted backgrounds for ‘portraiture’ – outside the archaeological museum, a group of maidens loitered constantly, awaiting their turns to be photographed as they caressed the snout of a decorative dragon. Others posed beside a mostly waterless lake with some lotus flowers: ‘There was a punt, a standard photographic property, which could be set adrift only with great difficulty, in which the lady to be photographed balanced herself, looking mysterious and rather forlorn [...] The moment the exposure had been made, the punt was hauled in, another lady floated into photogenic position, while her predecessor drifted away at the side of her escort…’

After getting a closer look at the natural history of the Jardins Botaniques (deemed ‘charming rather than exciting’), Lewis declared that the ‘deportment’ of the Vietnamese in such places was beyond reproach: ‘There is a gently repressive Sunday-school atmosphere.’ Docilely, visitors admired the caged deer, threw dice for ice cream, and viewed films shown on a 9.5mm hand-cranked cinema contraption rigged up on a bicycle; they patronised fortune tellers, who counted customers’ pulses and examined their eyeballs with a magnifying glass before disclosing the edicts of the fates. Reflecting on his brief diversion, Lewis later concluded: ‘It was all very delightful and civilised.’

Even as Saigon slid into war and acquired the more cynical epithet of a ‘tarnished pearl’, the zoo and gardens provided a sense of refuge for locals and visitors alike.

“Whenever Saigon got depressing I went to the zoo,” wrote the British journalist Richard West in Sketches of Vietnam(1968), a book that covered both the folly of the war and its corrosive effects on daily life in the city.

The zoo, West observed, was improbably serene: well-watered lawns, tall botanical trees, freshly painted museums and a pagoda flanking the gate. It was popular with Saigonese – so popular that even on weekdays visitors queued for tickets, and on Mondays the animals scarcely needed feeding due to the amount of peanuts and bamboo shoots visitors left on the weekend. A group of girls would ask West to take their photograph; a boy might ask for help fetching a kite from a tree; and the children who circled around West were not trying to pick his pocket (as might happen on Tu Do Street). Lovers walked slowly, or rowed a punt across the pond while troops of boy scouts practised their knots or camp-fire cooking. It was, in other words, quite lovely.

West added that the zoo, like the city itself, carried its own ‘darker residue of history’. During the Japanese occupation (1945) it had housed an ammunition dump; under Ngô Đình Diệm (assassinated in 1963), part of it served as a prison. Former detainees later claimed they were held beneath the tiger cages, although West believes they were actually stuffed under the director’s offices. In those days, the animals themselves at the zoo were freighted with symbolism: tigers inspired fear and superstition; lions partly attracted crowds due to a ribald myth; gorillas were jokingly compared to Americans for their long arms and hairy bodies. The snake house proved particularly popular during feeding-time when the keepers put live ducks in the cage. The ducks sat in a corner, awaiting their fate while the pythons dozed – impatient boys in the crowd threw small stones at the cage to try and wake up the snakes or panic the ducks into waking them.

The zoo’s director, Vũ Ngọc Tân, told West that most animals came from South Vietnam, though prized imports included a zebra and a chimpanzee from Africa and a monkey-eating eagle from the Philippines. War, he explained, had made wildlife scarce and expensive: elephants had retreated to the highlands, and tigers once sourced from Tây Ninh were now being sold to American soldiers – why, West must have wondered, did the soldiers not simply visit the zoo.

Not that he wanted them to come. The zoo and gardens remained, in his telling, a largely Vietnamese social space – cordial, intimate, and insulated from the foreign presence that increasingly defined (and defiled) the city.

And when Americans visited the zoo, it did not always go so well.

‘One day in 1963,’ writes Michael Herr in his seminal work Dispatches (1977), ‘[the US ambassador] Henry Cabot Lodge was walking around the Saigon zoo with some reporters, and a tiger pissed on him through the bars of its cage.’ Lodge gamely attempted humour – ‘he who wears the pee of a tiger is assured of success in the coming year’.

‘Maybe nothing’s so unfunny as an omen [being] read wrong,’ Herr wrote of the incident years later.

Some pictures of the zoo and gardens past and present. Picture no.4 by Yuka Nakagawa.

SEVENTY-FIVE YEARS after Norman Lewis’s visit, and nearly fifty after West’s regular visits, I made my way to the Saigon Zoo and Botanical Gardens, which opened on Bastille Day in 1864, making it one of the oldest zoos in the world.

I had visited a few times when I first moved to Ho Chi Minh City in 2012. In those days my son was a toddler and I can remember pushing his buggy through the soupy humidity at the hottest point of the day, each of our backs drenched with sweat. Most of the highly-prized animals (lions, snow leopards, white bengal tigers) were unseen, presumably snoozing in the shade. Disappointed perhaps by the lack of noteworthy wildlife on display, a number of Vietnamese day-trippers approached this long-limbed, hairy-armed Irish man (label: homo hibernicus) to ask if they could pose in a picture beside me – an exotic creature of sorts, and a consolation prize, one they could show to friends and family back in the ‘quê hương’ (countryside homeland). I was game for the first photo but when a small queue started to form, I made my apologies and pressed on.

Perhaps those experiences had put me off returning. Since then I had passed the gardens hundreds of times, often stuck in the back of a taxi – a captive of sorts – crawling through the ever-present congestion that clogs the city’s main streets, without ever venturing further than the Ho Chi Minh City Museum of History (located right beside the entrance to the zoo) or the Temple of Hung Kings (formerly a monument to Indochinese soldiers who died for France during the First World War – lest we forget, about 44,000 Vietnamese soldiers served in combat battalions, fighting in Verdun, the Vosges, and the Balkans). Every so often, I spotted news stories and social media posts, many of which didn’t entice me back into the zoo and gardens. Some lamented the state of the place. I also recall spotting one report refuting ludicrous claims that the zookeepers fed the park’s cats (the domestic kind, of which there are many living in the zoo) to the crocodiles. Some years ago, there were also reports of boorish visitors taunting animals in captivity, the thought of which always brought to mind lines from the famous Thế Lữ poem ‘Longing for the Jungle’ (Nhớ Rừng), written in 1934, in which a tiger spits out: ‘Iron. I lie here, watching the days slowly pass, Scorning those arrogant, foolish men, who gawk with their tiny eyes in mockery, at a king of the deep jungle, now fallen, disgraced, imprisoned, reduced to a mere spectacle, a plaything.’

When I made my return visit in early 2025, I arrived by bicycle at about 4.45pm and coughed up (digitally) a paltry VND 60,000 ($2.40) for a ticket. Even before I got to the motorbike park, I could tell that the place was heaving with families and child-free young couples. Like Lewis, I was visiting on a Sunday. But not a typical Sunday. It was the fifth day of Tet (so still a national holiday) a giddy atmosphere prevailed. Kids zoomed around a ‘car track’ in electric toy cars with flashing lights (mimicking the traffic that most of us had come to escape). Candy floss vendors and ice cream vendors flogged their goods. Scores of punters were pouring in and out of the gates, blithely strolling past a bust of Jean-Baptiste Louis Pierre (1833 - 1905), a key figure in the development of the gardens (and other green spaces in colonial Saigon). The petrified Pierre looked just as unimpressed as I felt to hear, in the distance, Boney M playing over the speakers and an MC doing his best to rev up a small audience of children and their parents. It was from the same corner of the zoo and gardens where an international rock concert (the first of its kind in Saigon) was hosted on May 29, 1971. Glorious footage of the crowds who flocked to the zoo that day can be found on YouTube. The headline act was CBC Band (Con Ba Cu, or Mother’s Children), a rock band formed by a brood of talented siblings and a couple of pals. A New York Times’ article, which generously describes them as ‘the Beatles of Vietnam’, relates how their Hanoi dad (a cook for French officials) wanted his kids to be doctors or engineers. When he found a guitar his wife had purchased for the kids, he smashed it (accidentally foreshadowing rock and roll rage, I suppose). But the band played on and became one of the town’s most popular wartime performers, cashing in on the homesickness of GIs and locals’ growing interest in American rock. They started out in 1964 at a firebase at Can Tho in the Mekong Delta, blowing the minds of American servicemen with a nimble-fingered cover of ‘Wipe Out’ by the Surfaris. They then moved with the musical times, learning tunes from records and cassettes lent to them by G.Is – the Beatles, the Stones, a whole lotta Motown. By the time they played the zoo, they had added psychedelic rock to the repertoire. They played tunes like ‘Purple Haze’ – the title of which inspired a nickname for the U.S Army’s M18 smoke grenade – and the lead guitarist Tung Linh could even do a rendition of Hendrix’ deconstructed ‘Star Spangled Banner’. “Its’ anti-war sound collage of bursting bombs and glaring rockets all the more powerful when played from within the eye of the Vietnamese storm,” the music historian Jack Hopkin wrote, years later, of CBC’s version of America’s anthem.

A few photos of the zoo; two of the rock festival with CBC on stage (credit unknown) and two black and white pictures by Carl Nielsen.

UNFORTUNATELY THE SAIGON INTERNATIONAL ROCK FESTIVAL was “riddled with idiosyncrasy and paradox”, according to Hopkin. For a start, “proceedings were organised, sponsored and promoted by some of the most pro-war echelons of South Vietnamese society.” In other words the festival would help fuel the war that the CBC Band – fervent in their desire for peace in a divided Vietnam – wanted to end. Of the 7,000 who crowded into Saigon Zoo that day in May 1971, some 500 were GIs (the only ones allowed to dance), many of whom came wearing headbands and anti-war or Black Power jewellery, according to the journalist Gloria Emerson. But there were also ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) officers scattered throughout the audience, monitoring proceedings, their red berets, camouflage uniforms and dark sunglasses a stark contrast to the small number of aspiring flower children with flares, ‘far-out sunglasses’ and sideburns in the crowd (most Vietnamese were dressed in plain clothes, judging by the video). Killing the peace and love vibes, in between two acts, ARVN soldiers were invited onstage to receive decorations for combat valour.

Did some US soldiers or American civilians visit the zoo and gardens on other occasions? Surely there were many other humdrum diversions on the grounds, perhaps even the odd cross-cultural date. I can easily picture an American G.I. One who didn’t care for the regrettable scenes seen along Tu Do Street (Dong Khoi today) where he would have seen and heard – and here I borrow the words of the poet and journalist James Fenton – “the lithe whispering whores in Mimi’s Bar, the women with the enamelled faces whose eyes said nothing. They too were casualties of the war, stunned out of feeling, and their sisters could be found all over the country, wherever young Americans were stationed in large numbers. They lived in the half-dark of the bars, where the music of Aretha Franklin and the Doors and the Stones pounded from the jukeboxes, where phrases were dropped, money was exchanged, and men were led upstairs, or into ambushes. The young Vietnamese men, eyes glittery with hatred, watched the Americans parade their purchased ladies along the avenues, where tamarind trees were dying from the exhaust fumes, and sometimes they reached out and slashed an American belly before vanishing into the crowds. Packs of small children roamed too, forcing collisions, slicing at pockets for wallets, flipping watches off the wrists of drunks. In Saigon, the Americans were far from the war, but living in its very heart.”

But we are free to picture a man taking a walk in the zoo in our own fashion. So why not make it a Sunday and imagine a guy who has had enough of the stupid bars, the ‘Saigon tea’, the hustlers, the massages, the hey-you numbah-wan-he-numbah-ten and the same tired old banter, all of which he hears over and over. So he takes his girl to the zoo where – without much interest in seeing the animals in captivity – they wander under the foliage of the tropical trees to find a cooling spot by the pond. And there, at last, he feels a sense of peace and the weird and horrid war, the one he keeps on hearing about, but not seeing with his own eyes, feels distant and even more pointless. And who passes by and perhaps eyes him warily?

In Continental Saigon (1977), a memoir by Philippe Franchini (the half-Vietnamese son of Mathieu Franchini, the Corsican owner of Hotel Continental) there is a hint that most foreigners weren’t interested in the zoo or the gardens back in the ‘60s: “Every Sunday, Hung took his family to the zoo, formerly the botanical garden. It was a place rarely visited by foreigners. On those days, his wife and children wore their finest clothes, and his sons donned neatly pressed suits and polished shoes. They always took a family photo in front of the museum, adding it to their living room display [...] If they happened to encounter lost American soldiers, Hung would puff out his chest with pride. This was his way of proving that Vietnam was more than just a land of bars, corruption, and opium…”

When researching this essay, I also found a memoir by an American author called Saigon Zoo: Vietnam’s Other War: Sex, Drugs, Rock ‘n Roll (2013) that tells the story of a young US military clerk that ended up working as a lifeguard at Long Binh (a vast military base, comparable in size to Cleveland, Ohio) where he spent his free time getting high and/or shitfaced drunk with bored and malcontented GIs. His experiences are a reminder that the vast majority (somewhere between 75% and 85%) of marines and servicemen coming to Vietnam didn’t see combat. There were far more REMFs (rear echelon motherfuckers) than grunts. Although when stuck on base, everyone suffered from extreme boredom and disillusionment, as revealed by Ken Pepiton’s poem: “I Saw The Tiger At The Saigon Zoo.” In the verse, it’s 1968 and the poet is hanging out with a buddy who he calls a liar for stripping a combat aviation badge that a dead man had earned. They’re AWOL (not that anyone has noticed) so they go to the zoo, thinking it’s the last place someone would find them only to meet a reporter from Stars and Stripes (a military rag).

“Strange day away from a war, in a bubble [...]

We are awol, but nobody knows, then a doughy white guy with a camera, Asks the liar why we are in Saigon, at the zoo, in the middle of a war…

A Stars and Stripes reporter, gathering the opinion of warriors (right, in Saigon) re Jackie Kennedy marrying the Greek².

He takes our picture, asks for our names. We are awol, but what the hell, how many losers ever see their picture in the Stars and Stripes?”

They weren’t the only ones to be hiding in plain sight right in the middle of the zoo. Nowadays there is a replica of a restaurant, called Nhan Huong, that was used as a meeting place for cadres and special forces from the PAVN (People’s Army of Vietnam). Opened in 1963, the location was in such a crowded place, and just a short distance from the US embassy, they figured no one would ever imagine they would meet, and even sleep, in such a conspicuous place. And they were right.

I saw the replica of the restaurant when I visited in early 2025, as I wandered down a path, walking through what the Japanese call komorebi (the sunlight that filters through foliage), and noting that all around the gardens, some of what Lewis observed back in 1950 was still apparent – folk posing for photographs, outdoor picnics (families today bring ground sheets and fold-up chairs). Unlike my first visits, now 12 or 13 years ago, many of the animals were on their feet and visible, and with the exception of one ancient, forlorn tiger and a rather fed up Orangutan (literal meaning: person of the forest) called Téo (literal meaning: Tiny) they looked active and fairly healthy.

Last few pix of the zoo. B&W pic is by Carl Nielsen.

VISITORS COMING TO THE ZOO AND GARDENS TODAY will find that a few chunks of heritage, such as the Art Deco greenhouse and a colonial-period office, remain where they always were. However, the sight of bumper cars, a ferris wheel, cheap snack bars, a fish massage pool, and ubiquitous candy floss vendors will reflect the zoo and garden’s dual identity – it is also now a fun park focussed on mass appeal (an average of 1.8 million visitors make their way to the zoo and gardens every year). It would be easy for someone to be snooty about these tacky commercial add-ons but there’s a need to make some bucks here and there. At the end of last year, it was reported (incorrectly) that the zoo could potentially close as it had accrued US$34-million in land rent arrears, which turned out to be a miscalculation. Assurances were quickly stated. The zoo wouldn’t close. But clearly its financials aren’t lucrative. In the first half of 2024, Saigon Zoo and Botanical Gardens Co. Ltd. generated nearly VND73 billion ($2.9 million) in revenue, down 10 percent year on year, and VND4.68 billion ($184,325) in net profit. Meanwhile, at the south end of the park, the high rises of Vinhomes Golden River, a luxury apartment complex, are apparent above the treetops – the encroaching urban jungle looming over all and sundry in the zoo and gardens, a visible reminder of Ho Chi Minh City’s vertiginous rise and contemporary priorities as a megalopolis that can easily consume any green space to accommodate a growing population that had already surged well beyond the 10-million mark prior to the city’s territorial expansion in July 2025 that took the total past 14 million. In many ways, we can be thankful that the zoo and gardens survived at all, considering the levels of poverty in the post-war period when a wounded Vietnam was left to suffer in isolation and its collectivist economy floundered. In the late 70s and early 80s, basic goods – rice, meat, sugar, and even soap – were rationed, and there were long lines for food. In a city where destitution was rife, the animals must have suffered, too.

When a Vietnamese American writer – a former refugee who fled Saigon in April 1975 just before Northern Vietnamese soldiers took control of the city – returned for the first time in 1991, he decided to walk to the zoo for old time’s sake. Approaching the gate, he spotted a small crowd buying chunks of red meat from a member of staff. “An elephant had died, so they cut it up and sold what they could,” he told me. Delighted to have stumbled across what he saw as a handy metaphor that would appeal to some Vietnamese-Americans, he duly filed an article for a paper back in San Jose with a headline: ‘Death of an Elephant’.

But through the 1990s, Ho Chi Minh City began to emerge from the economic doldrums to become a magnet for foreign direct investment from countries, such as South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and Singapore. A manufacturing and export boom soon followed, and today it’s routinely described as a pulsing, dynamic, cosmopolitan business hub and a start-up mecca. With a rapidly growing middle class and a burgeoning elite, property development has become a hugely lucrative business in a rapidly developing city. In every inner-city district, skyscrapers and high-rise towers keep shooting up where old colonial villas (and less opulent buildings) once stood, forming a skyline that reminds some visitors of Chicago or Shanghai. For the last 10-12 years, this surging urban growth has powered a rapacious market where some developers (and many speculators) would happily carve up a large central space that covers about 160,000 square meters. Judging by lucrative property prices elsewhere, the zoo and gardens could be sold for billions of US dollars. Just beyond its shaded boundaries, in the nearby Ba Son area – a former shipyard and naval base, originally built by the French in the 19th century – newly developed luxury villas on plots of 435 square metres have been sold for US $16 million, and luxury condominiums have been listed at US $15,000 per square metre – mind-boggling figures when you consider the average monthly wage in Ho Chi Minh City is just 13-15 million VND (US $500 to 575).

All of which reminds me of a film called “Owl and the Sparrow” (2007) in which a runaway schoolgirl asks a lovelorn zookeeper whether the young elephant they’re feeding sugarcane wouldn’t be happier in the jungle. The zookeeper tells her no. The elephant has grown up in the Saigon zoo, so this is his home. But in spite of that attachment, the zookeeper adds the elephant is possibly going to be sold to a zoo in India and there is nothing anyone could do about that. “They [the city] could sell all the animals here. They could turn [this place] into a golf course,” he tells the girl.

But could the zoo and gardens really be sold one day? I doubt it, personally, though the very thought is enough to make me think I should take more walks through the park and around the zoo. I am guilty of taking many parts of the city for granted but ignoring the zoo and gardens for over a decade is undoubtedly my greatest oversight. How many times have I passed by the entrance while ‘trapped’ in the back of a taxi that’s inching its way through traffic? So when I left the city’s lushest and largest green space on the fifth day of Tet, I did so vowing I would return more regularly but with one condition. I would return on a Monday, a Tuesday, a Wednesday, a Thursday or a Friday – a regular run-of-the-mill weekday when the zoo and gardens will likely be a little quieter. At the very least – or with any luck – the music of Boney M won’t be playing; I will hear only the sounds of every living thing that resides there, and happens to be awake, and not for the first time in this city, I will shake my head and grin at the beauty of what was there all along. I just had to open my eyes and look.

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1. In Vietnamese, it’s Thảo Cầm Viên Sài Gòn

2. Jacqueline Lee Kennedy Onassis