Vietnam National Fine Arts Museum

Located in Hanoi, the Vietnam National Fine Arts Museum displays approximately 2,000 artworks representing Vietnamese art from prehistoric times to the present day.

Planning your visit

The Vietnam National Fine Arts Museum occupies a French colonial building — a former boarding school for the daughters of colonial officials — and the irony is deliberate: a structure of the colonial administration now houses the national account of Vietnamese art. Around 2,000 works run from prehistoric Dong Son bronze drums through Cham stone sculpture, Buddhist statuary including a remarkable thousand-armed Avalokitesvara, folk woodblock prints and ceramics, to twentieth-century painting.

The modern galleries are the most interesting. The Ecole des Beaux-Arts de l'Indochine, founded in Hanoi in 1925, trained Vietnamese painters in French technique, and what emerged was a distinctive hybrid — particularly the lacquer painting and the silk painting, where oil-school composition meets traditional materials. Wartime work from the resistance period follows, including sketches made in the field.

It is quiet and rarely crowded, which is unusual in central Hanoi.

It stands directly opposite the Temple of Literature, and bookable options generally combine the two — the temple being Vietnam's first university, founded in 1070, which sets the cultural context the museum then carries forward. Current availability is shown below.