Cần Thơ, best known internationally for the Cái Răng floating market and its Mekong Delta scenery, is making a deliberate push to put its historical heritage front and centre — for locals and, increasingly, for visitors. The city has 108 officially recognised heritage sites: one special national relic, 31 national-level relics and 76 city-level relics, plus 16 items of national intangible cultural heritage.
The idea is straightforward: heritage sites are being used as outdoor classrooms. Students visiting the Chương Thiện Victory Site in Vị Tân Ward can see aircraft, artillery and tanks used in combat at an outdoor exhibition, alongside a monument honouring earlier generations. The Military Region 9 Museum has a similar effect — medical students quoted by local press described the artefacts as making the history they'd studied in textbooks feel tangible, and as a reminder of the peace they now take for granted.
The city is formalising this through "heritage schools" and "friendly schools with active students" programmes, combining site visits, extracurricular activities and heritage-protection work. Cultural and artistic events at the sites are also being tied to tourism development, which is where travellers come in: heritage visits and community-based tourism are being actively linked, and officials see culture as a form of soft power supporting cultural tourism and sustainable growth in the region.
There's a tech angle too. Cần Thơ has been adopting digital platforms, virtual reality and AI to digitise, manage and display its heritage — tools also finding their way into school programmes. Officials expect the 2026–2030 period to turn the sites into what they call "red addresses": living spaces for learning about revolutionary traditions, backed by new social investment and digital transformation. By the end of 2026, expect events around Vietnamese Culture Day and Vietnamese Cultural Heritage Day.
For travellers, this matters because Cần Thơ is developing into more than a night's stop on a Mekong Delta tour. If you're there during a cultural event or a school heritage day, sites like Military Region 9 Museum and the Chương Thiện Victory Site offer a genuine window into the region's wartime history — usually quiet, often free or very cheap, and far from the tour-group circuits. Pair them with an early-morning boat trip to Cái Răng market and you get both the living commerce and the historical memory of the delta in one trip.
