Tao Đàn Park

Tao Đàn began as the private pleasure garden of Governor Lê Văn Duyệt in the early 19th century, known to locals as “Vườn Ông Thượng,” where he relaxed and watched performances that later evolved into cải lương.
After the French captured Gia Định citadel in 1859, they separated the garden from the palace with a new street (today’s Huyền Trân Công Chúa) and turned it into the Jardin de la Ville, later renamed Parc Maurice Long for colonial officials and elites.

Vietnamese residents nicknamed the park “Bo Ro,” likely from the French “beaux jeux” (elegant games), because it hosted early sports facilities like tennis courts, a football pitch and a swimming pool between 1896 and 1926.
This made Tao Đàn one of Saigon’s first modern leisure spaces where locals could watch and play organised sports under colonial rule.

After 1954 the garden was renamed Tao Đàn and became a major public park; by the 1970s, with thousands of trees, Saigon people called it the city’s “green lung.”
During the war years it also served as a gathering point for demonstrations and public events, so its lawns witnessed both picnics and protests that shaped southern urban life.

In 1992 a temple to the Hùng Kings was built inside the park and later restored in 2011, turning this former governor’s garden into a place where Saigonese now gather every Tết to honor Vietnam’s legendary founders.
It is unusual to find a national‑mythology temple embedded in what was once a French colonial leisure space, layering old Vietnamese identity over a European‑style urban park.

Over more than two centuries Tao Đàn has shifted from a governor’s private retreat to a colonial elite park, then to a mass public space where families exercise, children fly kites and old men play chess under the same trees that once shaded French officials.
That continuity makes it one of the few places in central Saigon where you can literally walk through three centuries of urban history in a single afternoon.