Lost & Found: The Old Spanish Cemetery on Son Tra
When I first lived in Da Nang, I got interested in the history of the city and the local area (if you can believe that), and one of the things I kept hearing about was a cemetery that remained from the original French incursion into Vietnam, in 1858, supposedly not far from my house there. I never got around to finding it and left soon enough and forgot about it.
Fast forward to 2012, when I returned to Da Nang. This time, soon after moving in, I purchased a book about the city called "Da Nang Xua", which is basically Da Nang through old photos. It was a nice book and had some really neat old photographs of the city and area. I got excited about the idea of doing a parallel (you can see my final work here) project with photos from then and now, and one of the photos was of the old graveyard, so it quickly came back towards the top of my list. Unfortunately I couldn't get to finding it because I had to leave Vietnam early. I thought it was a lost cause at this point.
Fast forward to 2012, when I returned to Da Nang. This time, soon after moving in, I purchased a book about the city called "Da Nang Xua", which is basically Da Nang through old photos. It was a nice book and had some really neat old photographs of the city and area. I got excited about the idea of doing a parallel (you can see my final work here) project with photos from then and now, and one of the photos was of the old graveyard, so it quickly came back towards the top of my list. Unfortunately I couldn't get to finding it because I had to leave Vietnam early. I thought it was a lost cause at this point.
And one more jump forward, this time to Fall 2013. The weather was cool and perfect for driving and I was looking for places to adventure to during my open days. One day I decided it was high time for this mysterious missing graveyard to show itself, and I decided I wasn't going to go home until I found it. The general idea was that it was somewhere in the Son Tra area, between the intersection of Yet Kieu Street and the Thuan Phuoc Bridge, and the port of Son Tra. That left a several kilometer stretch of road to explore.
My initial thoughts were that it was somewhere on the premesis of the old American base, but that had been converted to a Vietnamese naval base, so there wasn't much option to find it in there. I looked hard on Google Earth and didn't see anything that could really be considered a cemetery, so I ruled that out. So for the next hour and a half I drove slowly down the road, stopping occasionally to peer over fences and walls and looking into backyards. Finally, when I was approaching the end of the road near Tien Sa Beach and the Tien Sa Port, I just happened to look up, and there it was- a black and white cross poking into the sky.
Set on a small hill a handful of meters above the port and the beach, the cemetery consists of a small chapel, with a tiny shrine on the inside, several labeled individual graves (probably the officers), and a number of mass graves dedicated to the soldiers who died. The strange thing was that a couple of the graves were labeled with Spanish names, and a couple of the names on the plaques inside the chapel were also Spanish. However, there was also French names, and French script on the plaques. I had thought this was an old French cemetery, but where was this Spanish influence coming from?
Set on a small hill a handful of meters above the port and the beach, the cemetery consists of a small chapel, with a tiny shrine on the inside, several labeled individual graves (probably the officers), and a number of mass graves dedicated to the soldiers who died. The strange thing was that a couple of the graves were labeled with Spanish names, and a couple of the names on the plaques inside the chapel were also Spanish. However, there was also French names, and French script on the plaques. I had thought this was an old French cemetery, but where was this Spanish influence coming from?
I dug a little deeper into the history and came up with some surprise information. At the point of France's foray into Indochina, things weren't necessarily going that well for the French, and they actually had to pay a whole band of Spanish mercenaries to fight for them. It is estimated that up to 80% of the approximately 2,000 Western combatants were Spanish commanded by a handful of French officers.
That explained it! Spanish soldiers, working for French overseers, fighting against the locals. Unfortunately at this point the Western soldiers were hardly prepared for the "savages" of the local area, and they were embarrassed in battle on the beach and the slopes of Son Tra. In the end, the French/Spanish lost hundreds of men. The few officers were honored with their own graves, but for all the soldiers who were simply lost or there wasn't much left to honor were all placed together in the mass graves. Everything fell into place. |
The neat thing about the cemetery is that it is still maintained and taken care of. I am not sure who does it, but the fact that this 154-year old building is in such of good of shape as it is is really neat. The grass gets mowed with fair regularity, and it looks like it gets fresh paint often too. The small shrines inside are also kept full and people obviously say prayers there often. It's really amazing that the locals all respect this place so much that so much care goes into it!
All photos copyright Kit Davidson unless otherwise noted.