달랏: 커피와 소나무 숲
Xuan Huong Lake · Railway Station · Linh Phuoc Pagoda · Trai Mat
지역 또는 교통 참고 사진이며 약속된 방문지는 아닙니다. ©
Follow the town's eastern edge from the lake to the old railway station and the mosaic-covered pagoda. Break the climb with coffee and leave enough daylight for the return through hill traffic.
A town invented for the weather
Da Lat exists because the French wanted somewhere cool to go. In the 1890s explorers in the highlands — among them the bacteriologist Alexandre Yersin, a protégé of Pasteur — asked the governor-general Paul Doumer for a resort in the mountains, and he agreed. The first choice of site was Dankia; Étienne Tardif, on the road-building expedition of 1898–99, argued for the place you are standing in instead. What went up was villas and boulevards on the Lang Biang plateau at 1,500 metres, with boarding schools that were still teaching children from across Indochina into the late 1960s. The colonial emblem carried a Latin motto that doubles as an acronym of the name: Dat Aliis Laetitiam Aliis Temperiem — it gives pleasure to some, freshness to others. The freshness is the whole point. This is a subtropical highland climate in a country that is otherwise tropical, mild all year, which is why the postcards call it the city of eternal spring and why you will want a jacket at seven in the morning.
The lake that had to be built three times
The crescent of water in the middle of town is not natural. In 1919, on the initiative of the resident Cunhac, the public works engineer Labbé dammed the Cam Ly stream that ran through the valley; in 1923 a second dam was added below it, making two lakes. In March 1932 a storm broke both. The stone dam that holds the water today was designed and built in 1934–35 by the engineer Trần Đăng Khoa, and because it stood in front of the district mandarin's residence — Phạm Khắc Hòe, whom people called simply ông Đạo — the dam that doubles as a bridge has been Cầu Ông Đạo ever since. The lake got its present name in 1953, after the eighteenth-century poet Hồ Xuân Hương. It is about five kilometres around, twenty-five hectares, and more than two kilometres long, and every road in the old town eventually comes down to it.
Three roofs and a cog railway
Da Lat's railway station was built by the French between 1932 and 1938 as the terminus of the 84-kilometre line from Tháp Chàm on the coast. Paul Doumer approved that line and it was built between 1908 and 1922; the hard part was the climb, so a contractor was commissioned to build about ten kilometres of Swiss-style rack railway on the Sông Pha pass, gaining a thousand metres at gradients up to twelve percent. The station itself has three pitched roofs, read either as the three peaks of Lang Biang or as a highland rông house, and it is listed as a national historical and cultural monument. The through line is gone. What survives is seven kilometres of track from the station to Trại Mát, worked for visitors, and it runs beside the road you will ride to the pagoda — which is the best argument for taking the road rather than the train.
Twelve thousand bottles at Trại Mát
At the end of that seven kilometres stands the strangest building in the highlands. Linh Phước pagoda was begun in 1949 and finished in 1950, then rebuilt and extended from 1990 onwards by the abbot Thích Tâm Vị. Everything visible is mosaic: the main hall, thirty-three metres long and twelve wide, has two rows of columns faced in broken pottery, and the reliefs above them tell the life of the Buddha and episodes from the Lotus and Amitabha sutras in the same shattered china. In the courtyard a dragon forty-nine metres long is scaled with twelve thousand beer bottles, which is why locals call the place the bottle pagoda. In front of it the seven-storey Linh tower rises more than thirty-seven metres, the tallest bell tower of any pagoda in Vietnam, and inside it hangs a bell cast in 1999: 4.3 metres tall, 2.33 metres across the mouth, 8,500 kilograms.
Pines, coffee and the mountain of two names
Away from the mosaics the plateau does the work. The cool year-round weather is why Da Lat supplies the rest of the country with cabbage, cauliflower, artichoke, persimmon, tea and coffee, and why its greenhouses run up every slope; the flower trade rests on three species in particular — hydrangea, the Da Lat rose and the golden everlasting. Coffee came to Vietnam with French missionaries around 1857, and in the 1920s the French opened production zones in the Central Highlands; the arabica that Da Lat cafés are proud of is grown on hills like these rather than in the lowland robusta country. North of town the plateau ends in Lang Biang: Núi Bà at 2,167 metres and Núi Ông at 2,124, named in the K'Ho story of K'lang of the Lát people and H'biang of the Chil, whose families would not let them marry and whose deaths, in the story, united the tribes. Since 1 July 2025 Da Lat is no longer a city in its own right — the district level was abolished nationwide — but nothing on the ground has changed.
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