Hotel Continental Saigon

Hotel Continental Saigon stands at 132-134 Dong Khoi Street in the centre of Ho Chi Minh City, beside the Municipal Theatre that residents still call the Saigon Opera House. Opened in 1880, it is the oldest hotel in the city and one of the oldest in South East Asia. It is neither large nor grand in scale. What it has is history: a three-storey French colonial building whose terrace was the meeting point of writers, diplomats and correspondents for the better part of a century.

History

The hotel was built by Pierre Cazeau, a French manufacturer of building materials, as a stopping place for travellers who had spent weeks at sea between Marseille and Saigon. The street outside was then Rue Catinat, the smartest address in French Indochina. The Continental changed hands several times in the decades that followed. In the 1930s it passed to the Corsican Franchini family, who ran it until 1975 and gave it the reputation that outlived them.

Somerset Maugham stayed here in the 1920s while travelling through Indochina. Graham Greene was a regular guest in the early 1950s and set scenes of The Quiet American, published in 1955, on the terrace and in the square outside. During the American war the terrace was known to the press corps as the Continental Shelf, and the Saigon bureaux of Time and Newsweek worked from rooms upstairs. After 1975 the hotel was nationalised. It closed for renovation in the late 1980s, reopened in 1989 and has since been run by Saigontourist, the state group that owns several of the city's historic hotels.

Architecture and design

The building is a sober colonial block rather than a palace, and its most distinctive features are practical answers to the climate. Ceilings are set high so that air moves through the rooms, the brick walls were made thick to resist the heat, and an arcade shelters the ground floor along the street. At the centre of the plan is a courtyard garden planted with frangipani trees, around which the rooms and restaurants are arranged. The famous street terrace was enclosed after 1975, so the garden is now the social centre of the house. The hotel is counted among the city's protected colonial buildings.

Rooms and suites

The Continental has about 80 rooms and suites on three floors, a small number for a luxury hotel in Ho Chi Minh City on this corner. They keep the proportions of the original building, with high ceilings and tall windows that open on to Dong Khoi, the theatre square or the inner garden. Guests who come for the literary association can ask about the rooms linked to Greene and to the war correspondents; the hotel keeps those connections without turning them into a theme.

Dining

Meals are served around the courtyard garden and in the ground-floor restaurants facing the street. Breakfast under the frangipani is the daily ritual of the house, and the restaurants serve Vietnamese and European cooking in rooms that have changed little in outline since the colonial period.

Weddings and events

The hotel offers meeting rooms and event spaces, and the courtyard garden is used for receptions and dinners. Capacities are modest compared with the city's modern towers, and the appeal is the setting rather than scale: a garden dinner or a small ceremony inside a building that is older than almost everything around it.

Location

Dong Khoi runs from Notre-Dame Cathedral down to the Saigon River through the historic centre, now the Saigon ward of the reorganised city and formerly District 1. The Opera House is next door, Lam Son Square lies in front, and the central post office, Nguyen Hue walking street and the river are a few minutes away on foot. The Opera House station of metro Line 1, opened in December 2024, is on the square. Tan Son Nhat International Airport lies roughly eight kilometres to the north-west.