“The shimmering pine trees stand in silence / Branches and leaves seem to have sunk silently. / How can one distinguish between reality and fantasy!”
As these Hàn Mặc Tử lines testify to, Đà Lạt’s pine trees engender acute emotions. The Bình Định poet was far from the only writer to witness the trees and experience a wellspring of feeling that transcends the landscape and its foliage. For example, in the poem ‘In the Morning, Winter in Đà Lạt’ (Đà Lạt chớm đông), Yên Sơn writes: “I silently watched the vast pine forest / The green hills / The golden silk is the shimmering color of sunlight. / Spread very lightly like a shoulder around all things. / Suddenly I miss the distant old days.”
The trees most often appear in works that convey sincere misery, loneliness, and lost love. Long Vương, for example, writes: “The city is sad and cold, filled with pain. / The pine trees rustle like a web of sorrow / Crying for someone whose soul is broken and faded.” Similarly, Hồng Liễu uses them as companion images that evoke the despair of isolation: “Alone in the deserted pine forest / I am absent-minded, alone.” Meanwhile, they bring an uneasy nostalgia to Trần Tuấn Anh: “The pine trees rustle like a love song / Missing the days... waiting and longing.”
Striking a slightly different tonal register, Ái Nhân ends his Đà Lạt poem ‘Drunk Afternoon’ (Chiều say), with the lines “The pine trees sing in the wind / Let your soul crave... get drunk!” suggesting an emotional totality in the city so complete that reckless embrace of dissociation is the only reasonable response. Conversely, when describing how the city has degraded to a pathetic state, Phan Nhiên Hạo includes them in a metaphor of a helpless insect: “I saw a beetle trying to flip itself over its legs / tiny pines waving at the sky.”
Why do so many poems and songs focus on Đà Lạt’s pine trees? I think there is more to it than simply Đà Lạt, often called The City of a Thousand Pine Trees, contains a lot of them. I believe that pine trees are perfectly suited to exemplify and enhance Đà Lạt’s aesthetics and its reputation in the collective consciousness. The city’s unique French origins and temperate climate make it a city without parallel in the country, while the pine trees, found in very few other places in Vietnam, feel similarly unique. Such novelty invites extensive representation.
You don’t have to be a poet to notice the pine trees, of course. Most everyone who arrives in Đà Lạt immediately focuses on them: the deep brown trunks cloaked in a glossy splay of needles lining roads and covering distant hills that fill the crisp air with a fresh, resinous aroma. And it's obvious how the cold climate that compels couples to huddle closely in quaint cafes and the vast stretches of grass along lakes or secluded forests, result in the city’s relationship with romance.
But why the poems’ sadness? The emptiness and tranquility that fosters intimacy in the mountain city also allow for rumination and the assessment of emotional wounds and difficult memories. Perhaps the frequently tragic nature of love simply lends itself to bittersweet associations amongst those who visit the city on a romantic getaway. And of course, one feels most lonely when surrounded by couples, as Duy Sơn alludes to: “Sunset under the old pine tree / Watching leaves fall and flowers fade. / Looking at people, people turn their faces away / Watching the clouds also quickly pass by! Before and after, just me alone.” No other city in Vietnam contains this precise accumulation of natural imagery, history, human development, and individual circumstance. We feel this to be true, but as is often the case, the poets are best suited to articulate it, so we can be sure of our feelings.
Colonial French postcards of Đà Lạt. Photos via Flickr user manhhai.
Since its colonial founding, Đà Lạt has been discussed as a getaway that feels more akin to France than Vietnam, as understood by a 1908 account retold in the book Imperial Heights: Dalat and the Making and Undoing of French Indochina: “After the suffocating climb through the forests of fevers and death, the air becomes lighter, we find a pine-covered mountainous region. It is as if one were inhaling France itself.” Similarly, early promotional material and marketing texts, in both foreign languages and Vietnamese, have connected the city to romantic notions while myths and stories reinforcing an undercurrent of sorrow, which are then perpetuated in art. Most significant is the tale of đồi thông hai mộ. It’s said that a young couple was denied each other because they came from different classes. So forlorn by his parents’ refusal to allow their marriage, the young man requested to be transferred to the frontlines of war, where he died. Upon hearing the news, the young woman committed suicide in Than Thở Lake. A grove of pine trees fittingly rises above the two graves today.
Đà Lạt’s hills hold living fossils
Alongside singers and poets, the scientists have much to offer when it comes to our appreciation of Đà Lạt’s pine trees. To the untrained eye, Đà Lạt’s pines look no different than those seen in western Christmas movies or snowy epics from Japan. However, Đà Lạt’s species are quite special.
Situated at 1,500 meters of elevation at the southern end of the Annamite Range, Đà Lạt is part of the greater Langbiang biosphere. This cool climate allows for a variety of pine trees, including the most widely distributed Khasi or Benguet pine and some Sumatran pine. Amongst them, however, are two rarer species: the Vietnamese white pine, or thông năm lá (Pinus dalatensis) and the Krempfii pine, or thông lá dẹt (Pinus krempfii), found in very few places outside of Đà Lạt and its immediate surroundings. Owing to this rarity, they have both eluded significant scientific research until recently.
Pinus dalatensis. 3D rendering via Turbosquid.
The Đà Lạt pine resembles something the Platonic idea of a pine tree. Growing to 40 meters, it begins as a conical and domed tree with a reddish brown trunk and the conventionally pointy needles that one commonly associates with pine trees. To the average person, they look like the types of trees that fill fancy hotel lobbies in Saigon and Hanoi every holiday season, except their branches do not begin at the base of the tree as in spruce and fir pines.
The Krempfii pine is more unusual. Early paleobotanists had recorded pine fossils with large, flat needles — why they are called thông lá dẹt in Vietnamse — that they surmised were adapted for tropical climates millions of years ago. They weren’t known to still exist until French botanist M. Krempf described them in 1921 from a specimen growing in Nha Trang, where they can no longer be found. The discovery puts them in the same category of living fossils as the illustrious coelacanth fish.
Krempfii pine as first identified by M. Krempf via Harvard's Arnold Arboretum.
While few Krempfii Pines are being grown outside of Vietnam, some scientific work on them has resulted in significant knowledge about the evolution of pine trees. A type of conifer, pine trees are found almost exclusively in the northern hemisphere and are typically absent from tropical forests. While some conifers are abundant in the southern hemisphere, pines have been handicapped because their relatively inefficient xylem, low photosynthetic rates, and single-vein leaves are also ill-suited to compete in the crowded forest with shade covering the ground level where seeds sprout. Krempfii is different.
Photo of Krempfii Pines via iNaturalist.
Growing to a staggering 35 to 55 meters, Krempfii Pines rise above the canopy at elevations between 1,200 and 2,000 meters. Instantly recognizable, they do not have cone shapes, but rather flat, broad splays of branches that call to mind meticulously manicured bonsai trees. They reach such heights because of evolutionary adaptations that support their growth when they are very small. Their long, flattened, blade-like leaves function optimally in the low-light conditions of crowded tropical forest floors. Meanwhile, alterations to the physiology impact the hydraulic efficiency of their wood and leaves. These unique deviations from typical pine structures had baffled scientists and challenged their tidy classification systems, with genetic testing finally settling the debate as to if they are in fact pine trees. Their ability to survive in low-altitude rainforests provides valuable insight into the global dispersal of pine trees and suggests that in the course of millions of years, perhaps they could finally conquer the southern hemisphere, after all.
Krempfii pine's unique needle structure alongside seed cones. Photo via Harvard's Arnold Arboretum.
A pine tree growing in your heart
The conservation state of Krempfii Pines and Vietnamese white pines is not as dire as you might come to expect from investigations into the nation’s lesser-known flora and fauna, but it still yields depressing conclusions. Conceived as a colonial retreat, Đà Lạt’s forests were not harvested extensively for industry during the early colonial period. And these two pine species are too rare to have acquired more than niche ornamental value. Sadly, this cannot be said of the animals that lived amongst them. Tigers, panthers, elephants, jaguar, bear and deer all attracted French trophy hunters and members of the Vietnamese elite, including Emperor Bảo Đại, who transformed the pine forests into an amusement park of animal butchery. By the 1920s, the reckless bloodlust had decimated animal populations, and the colonial administration sought a way to balance the importance of hunting to the city’s economy with nature’s importance to tourism and aesthetics. Inspired by America’s emerging national park system, they established 16 Indochinese parks, including a “parc de refuge” that spanned the entire Langbiang Plateau.
These French conservation efforts served as a precursor to the Bidoup Núi Bà National Park, which was established by the Vietnamese government in 2004. But before its establishment, pine trees were recklessly harvested for paper production beginning in the 1930s. More responsible practices gradually emerged, including replanting efforts and increased preservation in the 1990s and 2000s, with acknowledgement of the importance of retaining the forests for the city’s tourism industry, the healthy lifestyles of residents, and to combat natural disasters.
Despite the collective understanding that Đà Lạt’s forests are worth more as natural settings than raw materials, they are at risk. Rapid development in the city itself involves the removal of trees, while the city’s agricultural fame is turning forests into endless expanses of greenhouses that are heating up the micro-climate. The removal of trees often involves illegal maneuvers. In 2022, criminals carried out the city’s largest deforestation plot. Meanwhile, individuals drill into the trees to extract sap while killing the trees, and elsewhere, people intentionally poison them so they die, and the once-protected land can then be designated as acceptable for farming.
Đà Lạt's hills are increasingly becoming covered by greenhouses. Photo by Thịnh Doãn.
If Đà Lạt’s pine trees continue to disappear, the city will become warmer and more dangerous, with deadly landslides and erosion incidents increasing. Animals, including muntjac, Owston's civets, sun bears, Annamite striped rabbits, Vietnamese greenfinches, and collared laughingthrush, will all lose their homes. Scientists may never be able to fully understand how and where pine trees evolved and what future conditions they might be suitable for. And, perhaps least of all, our poets will lose their inspiration. Bùi Chí Vinh wrote: “My heart grew a pine forest when I visited Đà Lạt.” What will our hearts grow if we visit and there are no pine trees to witness, no poets to write about them?
