On 19 August 1945, a few days after the Japanese surrender in World War II, cadres of the Viet Minh entered Hanoi and used the steps of the still magnificent but temporarily scruffy Opera House to proclaim the success of the August Revolution and the foundation of an independent democratic republic. Thousands of peasants bearing machetes and bamboo swords were joined by equal numbers of urban dwellers, many of whom had heard of the Viet Minh for the first time only days before, to acclaim the victorious revolutionaries. A smaller-scale version of Charles Garnier’s Paris Opera, Nha Hat Lon, as the Opera House is known locally, was, with its Napoleonic panache and grandeur, just the place for large gestures and significant announcements.
Walking past this splendid and now thoroughly refurbished building 60 years and a couple of months later, my wife and I saw a poster advertising a ‘Gala Concert’ to be held on the following evening to mark 30 years of diplomatic relations between Vietnam and Germany. The guest conductor was Wolfgang Hoyer with the Vietnam National Symphony Orchestra and on the program were Beethoven, Wagner and Tchaikovsky. Before you could say ‘Ho Chi Minh masterminded the longest, most devastating and most successful war against Western colonialism’, we were negotiating the purchase of two of the last few tickets left. A snap at 80,000 dong each, even if our seats were so high up that we might suffer from nosebleeds and oxygen deprivation. But at least we were in. Going to a performance, the guidebooks assured us, was the only way to see the grand interior because the Opera House was otherwise permanently locked.
We scrubbed up a bit and, after a stroll through the humid, amiably frenetic, motorbike-clogged streets of the French quarter, arrived rather early—despite objections from my wife who favours the last-minute-dash approach to appointments. As we entered the foyer, we were handed a program each and then a young woman began ushering us up the stairs ‘to the reception’. Bewildered but obedient, we found ourselves in a vast, ornate chamber among a colourful, polyglot, voluble crowd, where we were plied with champagne and beautiful local food. An exquisitely dressed Vietnamese woman materialised at our side and introduced us to Christian-Ludwig Weber-Lortsch, the German ambassador to Vietnam who, on finding that we were not Germans, drew upon the smooth, diplomatic sangfroid that had no doubt ensured