Vietnam: The Opera House by night, Hanoi

The Hanoi Opera House is modelled on the Paris Opera designed by Charles Garnier and completed in 1875. It is known in Vietnamese as Nha Hat Lon or 'Big Song House' and opened in 1911 incorporating the same grand elements of Garnier's Napoleonic design. It remains the centrepiece of French architecture not just in Hanoi, but in all of former French Indochina and its presence would grace any city in the world. Before the Second World War, the Opera was at the centre of French cultural life in Hanoi. After independence, however, it gradually fell into disrepair. Occasionally Chinese or Russian artistes would appear - perhaps a performance of the militant ballet beloved of Madame Mao, 'The Red Detachment of Women', or a musical recital by a visiting fraternal ensemble from Moscow or Minsk - but by the mid-1980s even these limited cultural exchanges had ceased, and the once grand Hanoi Opera was all but abandoned. In 1994, the authorities decided to restore and reopen the Opera in a three-year project costing US million. Today the grandly colonnaded colonial edifice, repainted in mustard yellow and white, and filled with refurbished gilt mirrors and ornate grand stairways, must be every bit as magnificent as on the day it opened in 1911. As the Hanoi Opera has grown in confidence and popularity, so it has staged some quite unusual and innovative programmes - for example a version of Christoph Gluck's two-century old opera Orfeo et Euridice in Vietnamese.