Vietnam National Museum of Fine Arts

The museum occupies a yellow colonial-era building on Nguyen Thai Hoc, close to the Temple of Literature, and opened as a national collection in the 1960s. It runs roughly chronologically over three floors. The early rooms hold Buddhist wood and stone sculpture, including a copy of the thousand-armed Quan Am from But Thap pagoda, along with folk woodblock prints from Dong Ho. The upper floors cover the twentieth century, when painters trained at the fine arts school in Hanoi took two traditional crafts, lacquer and painting on silk, and turned them into fine-art media. The lacquer panels of Nguyen Gia Tri and the silk paintings of the same generation are the reason to come.

What you actually see

• The lacquer galleries - eggshell, gold leaf and polished resin used as a painter's medium.
• Silk paintings - thin washes on stretched silk, a technique developed here in the 1930s.
• Buddhist sculpture - wooden bodhisattvas and a copy of the thousand-armed Quan Am.
• Dong Ho prints - folk woodblock images printed on paper grounded with crushed shell.

When to go

Open daily except Mondays. It is rarely busy, and mid-week afternoons are close to empty. Two hours covers the main rooms, three if you read the panels. The lacquer works look best in daylight hours, and the top floor gets warm in summer. Temporary exhibitions occupy the ground floor of the annexe.

Honest expectations

Labelling is thin and often gives only artist and date, so the twentieth-century rooms offer little context. Some rooms stay unlit until an attendant switches them on. Air conditioning is patchy. A number of major works are copies with the originals held elsewhere, which is not always stated clearly. The shop is poor.

Nearby

The Temple of Literature is a few minutes away and the Imperial Citadel a short walk north.