Sit inside a cathedral built as a Vietnamese communal house, in stone and ironwood
A cathedral with no spire
A Catholic cathedral complex of nearly 22 hectares, built between 1875 and 1899, comprising one great church, five smaller churches, a stone bell tower, ornamental lakes and three artificial stone grottoes. Its formal title is Duc Me Man Coi, Our Lady of the Rosary.
Why it's unique
Phat Diem refuses European church architecture almost entirely. The roofs are the low, curved, tiled roofs of a Vietnamese communal house rather than spires, and the nave is carried on 48 monolithic ironwood columns in six rows, the two central rows around 11 metres tall. The Communist Party's own newspaper describes the bell tower's roof as a low, ancient curved roof like that of a dinh or a pagoda, and contrasts it explicitly with the spires of other churches.
The designing mind was Father Phero Tran Luc, and a cathedral guide quoted in the same paper describes his intent as harmony and integration between Catholicism and the nation's architectural culture. Inculturated church architecture exists elsewhere. A full-scale 19th-century cathedral complex executed in the structural vocabulary of Vietnamese temple carpentry and stone, at this scale and this completeness, is a different thing.
Before you go
Almost everyone photographs the bell tower from the lake and calls it done, which is the wrong way round. The complex is designed to be walked from the south, across the water and then the broad forecourt, so the buildings unfold in sequence. Entering from the car park sideways destroys the composition. Walk round to the south side and come in the way it was built to be entered.
Inside, two things people miss: the 14 carved stone relief panels flanking the sanctuary of the Jesus chapel, and the fact that the main facade's ornament is not Christian iconography at all but lotus, peach blossom, chrysanthemum, scroll and wine-gourd motifs. This is also where the first Vietnamese bishop was appointed, in June 1933, when every bishop in the country until then had been a European missionary.
It is a working cathedral and the seat of a diocese, so shoulders and knees covered, and expect to be shut out of the nave during Mass. Getting there is the real cost: 28 km each way from the city with no rail or convenient bus, so it is a half day by car or motorbike. Christmas here is a very large regional event and completely overwhelmed.