Among women in red
SAPA: Northern Vietnam’s highland women are bearing much more than their colourful headdress suggests.
Mist arrives before light. It slips between the stalls and stones, curling around basket-loads of vegetables and jars of pickled plums. At this hour, the Sapa market is still stretching itself awake. The rattle and hum of another day slowly takes shape. A rooster coughs, and from somewhere unseen, the dull buzz of motorbikes can be heard.
One by one they appear; from the hills, the hamlets, following foot-worn tracks that snake through the rice terraces. Small women in thick indigo jackets, embroidered cuffs, and bright red headdresses heavy with woollen tassels and silver pins. Their arrival is unhurried but assured, like actors stepping onto a familiar stage. They lay out cloth, place thermoses of tea beside them, and begin the slow choreography of the morning’s trade.
I sit on a plastic stool near a food cart, nursing something hot and sweet. It has tofu pieces, like instant miso. One of the Red Dao women glances over and nods. Not exactly a greeting, more an acknowledgment. A few metres away, a younger woman arranges hand-stitched pouches on a low mat, her toddler strapped to her back in a cloth cradle patterned with stars.
There’s a quiet economy in their movements, each gesture practised, unpretentious.
Later, I follow a footpath east, where the fields drop steeply into valleys of shifting green. I’m walking with a guide named Vinh, whose family is Hmong but who speaks a little Red Dao, and a little English; more than enough to warn of snakes, and explain how his ancestors had migrated from southern China over centuries. Today, they make up over half of the ethnic minority population in Sapa.
The track is mud-packed, veined with stone, and flanked by banana trees and shrubs hung with spiders. Each bend reveals another improbable feat of human engineering: terraces stacked like pages into the slope, their curves soft but purposeful. From a distance they look almost decorative, like the hem of a finely pleated skirt. Up close, they are heavy with water, frogs, and labour.
In one village we stop inside a wooden house where children hover in the doorway and the kitchen ceiling is thick with smoke. Strings of maize, bundles of roots, and hunks of cured meat hang from the rafters like an edible mobile.
A Red Dao woman is boiling water over a low flame; her daughter rinses greens in a bamboo colander. It is not pristine, not posed, and entirely alive.
Woven lives
Ask someone who the Red Dao are, and you’ll get a story braided from myth, migration, and the stubbornness of memory. Originally from southern China, they’ve lived in Vietnam’s northern highlands for centuries, farming rice and cardamom, raising pigs, dying cloth, and maintaining intricate patterns of social organisation that rarely show up in guidebooks.
What’s striking isn’t just what they wear, but how much of it they carry. A Red Dao woman’s headpiece can weigh a full kilogram. Her jacket is hand-sewn and edged with red thread, silver coins, with cross-stitch motifs passed from grandmother to granddaughter. They takes months to make. Every detail has meaning, from the type of tassels to the presence (or absence) of a shaved eyebrow.
And yet, in town, these garments become currency. Spread out on sidewalks and market blankets, they’re bartered and handled, priced and repurposed. I watch one woman rearranging her stock as tourists walk past, phones raised. She looks both wary and unfazed, as if she’s performed this ritual too many times to be flustered.
Behind her, another sits at a treadle sewing machine in a shaft of sunlight. The cloth pools around her like a second skin.
Tourism’s new thread
Not far from here, in the village of Ta Phin, a quiet transformation is underway. Several Red Dao households have joined forces to run homestays: modest wooden lodges offering meals, herbal baths, and guided treks. The promise is twofold: cultural exchange and sustainable income.
One family shows me their guest ledger, thick with names from France, Japan, Australia. Their eldest daughter now speaks several languages with increasing confidence. Their pigs are fatter than their neighbours’. But another woman in the same village scoffs when I mention the program. “Too many rules,” she says. “And the money goes to the ones who already have.” Her house is smaller, darker. Her red headdress has lost some of its shape.
It’s the same story dressed in different fabrics: development offers a ladder, but not everyone starts from the same rung. The dream of eco-tourism is real, but like the terraces, it requires constant tending.
When a border was porous
From a certain hilltop, you can see China.
Or at least, you can see the direction it lies. Mist-bound and ambiguous most of the time, like a memory you’re not sure is yours. The border here is less a line than a thread pulled through history: the Red Dao’s ancestors walked down from Yunnan, carrying language and belief. Some families still have kin across the divide, though crossing now requires permits and patience.
There’s no sense of tension in the villages I visit; only the feeling that governments are distant, and mountains more constant than national flags. But you wonder, quietly, how porous identity becomes in a place like this. When your culture predates the country you live in, what does nationality even mean?
Back in Sapa, I return to the market on my final morning. The same women are there, more or less. Some smile. One remembers what I bought previously, and offers me a better deal. So I buy another embroidered pouch I don’t need, and she grins like she knows that.
Before leaving, I pause beside one of the older women. Her back is bent but her voice is strong. Her bold red headdress, thick with tassels and small brass bells, catches the light like a crown. She busies herself rearranging her wares, then notices me, and when I indicate I am not looking to buy, she turns away, adjusts her stool, and resumes her busyness.