Reengineering the Valley: A History of Water and People in Việt Nam

In this text, Ngọc Nâu begins with the rumors of her family’s land being reclaimed by the Vietnamese state to reflect on a history of state power reshaping Thái Nguyên through colonial extraction, socialist resettlement, and neoliberal industrialization. Each wave redistributes land, labor, and water while concentrating risk on rural communities. Floods worsened by dams and concrete reveal development as political choice, producing sacrifice zones where certain lives and ecologies are rendered expendable.

In the spring of 2025, my uncle told my mother that our ancestral land would be reclaimed for a multi-billion dong industrial zone project in the near future. His information had come from an acquaintance, and my family thought it might just be a rumor—but in Việt Nam, these kinds of rumors usually become true. When one sees information spreading on social media outside of official government channels, there’s a high chance that it will later appear in the state newspapers and then become a reality. Indeed, this is exactly what happened here.

Hearing this news brought me back to a time before my own birth, 61 years ago, when the United States began bombing northern Việt Nam. My grandparents’ family had moved from the capital, Hà Nội, to a midland village in the north, in the Thái Nguyên province. The village is called Thanh Quang, and it is part of Phổ Yên city. In the 1960s, the government’s policy of relocating people to the northern mountainous areas was implemented. After the war of resistance against the French ended in 1954, and the North was completely liberated, the Fifth Central Resolution (July 1961) on agricultural development under the first five-year plan (1961–1965) established a policy to move people from the lowlands to reclaim the highlands. In 1961, President Hồ Chí Minh also launched a movement encouraging lowland residents to go to the mountains to build and develop the economy and culture under the leadership of the Party and the State. This was the largest national project in organized migration, and of great strategic importance to building the socialist North’s rear area. At that time, people often said that evacuation was part of following the shared ideal of the State, and my great-grandparents, who worked for the Revolution also left Hà Nội. Whether they left because they had to or out of personal reasons is unclear to me. My mother says my great-grandmother wanted to preserve a complicated relationship between her daughter and the daughter’s husband at that time. But when I asked my grandmother (my great-grandmother’s daughter) again, she insisted that the family moved to follow the revolutionary model. Since then, my grandparents and their children have lived in Thanh Quang village.

Thái Nguyên back then was not densely populated and the ethnic makeup was diverse. This included Kinh—also known as Việt people, the currently dominant ethnic group in Việt Nam—as well as Sán Dìu, Tày, and Nùng people. Not only were there ethnic groups migrating from northern mountainous provinces, but many others also came from the Red River delta provinces such as Thái Bình and Hà Nam. This previous wave of migrants had left because of hunger and floods. The village where my grandparents arrived did not have many migrants, whether Kinh or of other ethnicities. When I asked why, a villager—a Kinh ethnic whose family had lived there for fourteen generations—explained that the people here were very strict about allowing newcomers. To stay, like my grandparents’ family, one needed close connections with local authorities. The 89-year-old woman added that the land here was favorable for livelihoods because of its convenient terrain, rare droughts, abundant wells, numerous underground freshwater veins, soft muddy soil that was easy to cultivate, and villagers who knew how to build small dams to store water. Neighboring hamlets often suffered from floods and had much more difficulty farming. I asked her why this area didn’t host newcomers, if the state was encouraging people to reclaim new lands and develop new economies. She replied simply that the locals didn’t accept them; most migrants were sent further into mountainous regions like Đại Từ, Võ Nhai, or Phúc Thuận, which were more difficult to access, with less favorable terrains and agro-ecological conditions. Those who wanted to establish themselves often had to marry into local families or form sworn brotherhoods in order to connect with local people. History records show that in the early 20th century, during the French colonial period, many laborers from other provinces were brought to Thái Nguyên to work on plantations and in mineral extraction. In his book The Road to Bo Ra (2000), Andrew Hardy mentions that while searching for documents at the National Archives Center I, under the State Archives Department of Vietnam, he came across a file titled “Send 3,000 coolies to Thái Nguyên to develop a region.” The document was written by the director of an exploitative French colonial company for Central-Northern Tonkin (SAFCAT), addressed to the provincial administrator, requesting land to resettle mine workers in 1932.

The plantations back then were located in the valleys of the region, mainly cultivating rice, tea, sugarcane, and some coffee beans. Surrounding those valleys were large, low-altitude hills. Some places today still have coal and iron mining sites dating back to the French period. At that time, long-settled ethnic minorities were pushed to barren hills, making farming harder for them. The newcomers to the area often feared malaria. Flooding also occurred frequently, as two major rivers, the Cầu River and the Công River flowed around the area. After the Điện Biên Phủ victory against the French occupant in 1954, when the Communist Party came to power, 19 years later the government built an artificial lake named Núi Cốc in 1973. This lake stored water from small streams flowing down from the surrounding mountains and regulated water from the Cầu and Công rivers.

My grandparents lived within the cooperative system, mainly hunting and growing rice to feed their children. The irrigation canal near their place was a branch of the Công River connected to the Núi Cốc Lake, and the water was used by farmers for both irrigation and daily needs. My fondest childhood memory of visiting my grandparents is riding a motorbike over a tall dike, which ran beside a small canal winding through the fields. I loved walking along that path to visit the neighbors.

But after the number of local factories were constructed, the canal and its entire landscape changed beyond recognition. The small dirt road lined with green grass is now buried under concrete.

The endless rice fields and bamboo hedges have been replaced by a gray expressway, a cold lifeless color. Many villagers had to give up large portions of their farmland for infrastructure projects; for example, the elderly woman I interviewed said her family donated around 1,000 square meters of rice field to build the highway serving the industrial zone.

When the factories came, the need for clean water for production was prioritized, and moreover, the people along the canal no longer had rice fields requiring irrigation. The factories brought tens of thousands of workers from other provinces, and many people from northern mountainous areas took the path to the valley seeking jobs in the factories. Most had just finished high school.

The economic development policy had caused rapid changes, and nature was violently exploited. What was once a valley with a complete socio-ecological system: plantations, villages, and schools from the early 20th century had been drastically transformed. Even the school where Việt Nam’s first revolutionary journalists were trained eventually disappeared, submerged beneath Núi Cốc lake. To this day, the lake continues to be exploited by local authorities for various economic (industrial, touristic, spiritual, recreational…) purposes, as well as being a water source for factories.

As I write this text in November 2025, Việt Nam is experiencing a series of storms that the local media call “abnormal.” Not only are they more frequent, but their impacts are so strong that wastewater infrastructure can no longer handle the overflow. Recently, Thái Nguyên and many other central and northern provinces suffered unprecedented severe flooding. The combined rainfall from three storms Ragasa, Bualoi, and Matmo raised water levels nearly one meter higher than the historic flood peak of 1959. Heavy rains caused multiple landslides, worsened as there are now fewer large trees left to hold the soil. In addition, water released from hydroelectric plants rapidly swelled rivers in the downstream provinces. What makes these weather events worse than before, and life harder for locals, is that floodwaters now linger for a very long time.

Thinking of Nguyễn Phan Chánh’s painting Riding a Cow Across the Stream (1972), I’m reminded of my mother’s story about when she was young how she once rode a buffalo across a flooded stream to return home during the rainy season. My mother often said there used to be storms and floods back then too, but the water receded quickly, within a day. Today, even after the storm ends, the flooding remains. Part of it is the weight of urban growth: dense construction and layers of concrete leave the soil no space to breath or absorb water. Natural ponds and small lakes, once quiet buffers in the landscape, have been filled or built over, reducing the land’s ability to hold back sudden influx of water. Scientists and local communities have long warned about other contributing forces as well, such as the way hydroelectric dams alter river flow and release surges of water downstream. All of these changes shape the floods we now see, heavier and slower to fade.

The water comes and goes, never still, much like human life itself. But its path is no longer decided only by rain, soil, and gravity; it is also negotiated in meeting rooms, investment contracts, and zoning maps.

Dikes, dams, industrial parks, and resettlement schemes divert not just rivers but people, turning some villages into reservoirs of cheap labor and others into sacrifice zones, allowed to flood so that cities and factories can stay dry. The story of water therefore always takes me back to the history of migration here: waves of workers brought in for each new project, waves of families moved out when land is suddenly reclassified. In this shared ecosystem, where capital, power, and monsoon rains all flow through the same valley, the current keeps changing, whether we want it or not. In contemporary Việt Nam, the question is not simply how to live “in harmony with nature,” but whose lives and landscapes are treated as expendable each time development is planned, and whether another way of sharing land, water, and risk is still possible. ■