Some facts about Sapa

Sa Pa or Sapa (Westernized spelling) is a town and district in the Lào Cai province in northwest Vietnam.

The town of Sa Pa lies at about 1600 meters of altitude. The climate is moderate and rainy in summer (May—August), and foggy and cold with occasional snowfalls in winter.

It is most likely that Sa Pa was first inhabited by highland minorities of the Hmong and Yao groups, as well as by smaller numbers of Tày and Giay, these being the four main minority groups still present in Sa Pa district today. The Vietnamese properly speaking had never colonised this highest of Việt Nam’s valleys, which lies in the shadow of Phan-Xi-Pǎng (Fansipan, 3143 meters), the highest peak in the country.

It was only when the French debarked in highland Tonkin in the late 1880s that Sa Pa, or Chapa as the French called it, began to appear on the national map. In the following decade, the future site of Sa Pa town started to see military parties as well as missionaries from the Société des Missions Etrangères de Paris (MEP) visit the site. The French military marched from the Red River Delta into the northern mountainous regions as part of Tonkin’s ‘pacification’. In 1894-96 the border between China and Tonkin was formally agreed upon and the Sa Pa area, just to the south of this frontier, was placed under French authority. From 1891 the entire Lào Cai region, including Sa Pa, came under direct colonial military administration set up to curtail banditry and political resistance on the sensitive northern frontier.

The first permanent French civilian resident arrived in 1909. With its attractive continental climate, health authorities believed the site had potential. By 1912 a military sanatorium for ailing officers had been erected along with a fully fledged military garrison. The remainder of the 1910s then gave rise to a steady correspondence within the colonial administration regarding the possibility of expanding the official use of Chapa into a hill-station which would be open to vacationing civil administrators and, perhaps, to some of the most affluent colonists who, at the time, were going back to France for their summer holidays. Initially, official villas were built only for the military ‘top brass’. Yet soon after, company villas were established by important corporations to be used as vacationing sites by deserving managerial staff. These industrial societies were forging ahead during this period of growth in Indochina, and consequently wanted to mark their economic success. The upper layer of the civil administration soon joined in with the Lào Cai Resident and the Tonkin Resident Superior having official residences erected. Then, from the 1920s onwards, several wealthy professionals with enough financial capital also had a number of private villas built in the vicinity.

Gradually, the privileged of colonial society were joined in Chapa by a less select group of French nationals. A few private entrepreneurs who ‘had the ear’ of the top administrators in Tonkin assessed that the hill-station could also be a profitable holiday destination for slightly less affluent, yet still desirable colonists, including an unknown but presumably small number of affluent Vietnamese vacationers. Three or four small hotels were erected and their owners jointly set up a promotional Tourist Bureau. Their target was modest in number and their guests always remained a minor proportion of Chapa’s benefactors.

Chapa’s Tourist Bureau launched a publicity campaign in 1924, publishing a Livret-Guide de Chapa. The booklet attempted to convince less affluent French clientele from the Delta to visit for short summer stays, with the healthy qualities of Chapa being praised, and the climate and contact with nature coming top of the list. Walking routes were indicated in the guide, as well as the local main attractions being highlighted including the town’s market to which ‘colourfully dressed Méo [Hmong] and Man [Yao]’ highlanders came to buy, sell and barter goods, and linger for social purposes. Walks or horse rides to the nearby picturesque Cát Cát waterfall were also keenly proposed. In 1928, according to information provided by transport businesses, 900 Europeans visitors answered this call, 90% of them for a stay of three weeks or less. A victim of its own success, the hill-station's hotels and the very few vacant villas that could be rented out were sometimes insufficient to accommodate all these visitors, and some years a number of families could not find a place to stay, not even in a ‘native house’.

With the early fall of the metropole in the Second World War, the the pro-Nazi Vichy government in France appointed Jean Decoux as Indochina’s Governor. Suspect in the Allies' eyes, the elite colonists living in Indochina no longer had the option of leaving for Europe for their summer holidays. After a short period of confusion, many turned their attention to the few holiday resort options within the Indochinese Union, with Chapa and Đà Lạt noticeably on the list. Thus, the Second World War constituted an unexpected and important cause of development for hill-stations in Indochina.

This new period of success was to be Chapa's colonial swan song however. At the end of the Second World War a long period of hostilities began in Tonkin that was to last until 1954. In the process, nearly all of the 200 or so colonial buildings that had been erected in Chapa were destroyed, either by Việt Minh sympathisers in the late 1940s, or, in the early 1950s by French air raids. The vast majority of the Viet population fled for their lives, and the former town entered a prolonged sleep. It was only in the early 1960s thanks to the New Economic Zones migration scheme set up by the new Socialist regime that fresh inhabitants from the lowlands started to instil new life in the site. Collective workers, farmers, and a few local Party cadres joined forces with the local minorities over the next thirty years to etch out a living from the difficult terrain. Of the town’s former colonial glory, only ruins remained, along with the memories of a handful of residents who dared to stay.

The short 1979 occupation of the northern border region by Chinese troops had virtually no impact on Sa Pa town besides forcing the Kinh population out for a month. Then, in the mid-1980s, major changes occurred at the national level that were to dramatically affect Sa Pa’s destiny. In 1986, the Vietnamese Communist Party introduced a range of reform measures known as Đổi Mới (economic renovation). The reforms, a process of moving away from central control towards a market economy while maintaining a Socialist state ideology, allowed for a multi-sector economy, decollectivisation, private ownership, and liberalised foreign trade and investment. The Đổi Mới era boosted the national economy and allowed for new employment opportunities in the private sector in Việt Nam, which in turn gave rise to new groups of affluent urbanites. Characterised by unparalleled levels of consumption, these groups are marked by a newly emerging lifestyle. Now, a metropolitan, nouveau riche increasingly engages in the consumption of luxury items, while expensive pleasurable pursuits have become central, not least of which is tourism.

As a counterpart, in 1992 the last obstacle to Sa Pa's full rebirth as a prominent holiday destination was lifted as, for the first time since the colonial period, the decision was made to open the door to international tourism from virtually all countries beyond the faltering Communist brotherhood. By the following year, Sa Pa was back again on the tourist trail, this time for a newly emerging local elite, as well as international tourists. Tourist arrival between 1995 and 2003 thus grew from a total of 4860 to 138,622. On average, this cohort is made of 79% Vietnamese and 21% foreigners.