Historic hotel
to launch promotions and gala events in 2002
The Sofitel Dalat Palace will celebrate its 80th anniversary in 2002,
highlighting a colourful and dramatic history that traces its roots from
a colonial past to the present unified Vietnam.
Festivities throughout the year 2002 include launching a period menu in
the hotel’s flagship Le Rabelais restaurant, musical concerts, period
music featured in the lobby, and golf events.
An elegant gala dinner dance to commemorate the hotel’s opening will be
arranged later in the year with the date to be announced shortly. All
advertising and promotional literature will be adapted to reflect the
hotel’s bygone era.
Dalat Resort Inc, a joint venture between Lam Dong Tourist Company and
Danao International, began returning the Dalat Palace Hotel to its
former glory in 1991.
The contract called for the renovation of the Dalat Palace Hotel, the
Dalat Du Parc Hotel (presently Novotel Dalat), 16 villas and an
additional nine holes to the golf course linking the Dalat Palace Golf
Club to the hotels. From this agreement the luxurious Sofitel Dalat
Palace reopened in 1995 and regained its rightful place as one of the
elegant Grande Dames of Asian hotels.
Not surprisingly, the construction of the Lang Bian Palace signalled the
beginning of present-day Dalat. Looking at an early image of the former
French colonial hill station of Dalat in the 1920s, one is struck by the
central location of the hotel around which the entire city was
conceived.
Once completed in 1922 after a long delay, the Lang Bian Palace
immediately became the centre of proper Western colonial society in
Vietnam’s central highlands. It is indeed curious that it was erected
before a post office, train station or city hall – even before the
city’s schools.
At the time, heady predictions touted Dalat as the future capital of
French interests in Southeast Asia. Featuring 38 luxury rooms, the Lang
Bian Palace boasted the most modern amenities of the time, as well as an
orchestra, tennis courts, and a private fruit and vegetable garden,
providing foreign ingredients like strawberries, which continue to be
grown in Dalat to this day.
By 1930 the hotel had added a golf course, a cinema and offered jazz
concerts. Meals in the hotel restaurant menu were simple but reflected
it European origins: “potage, grillades, pain, entrements chauds” etc.
As a final mark of culinary authenticity, hotel guidelines stipulated
that butter, and never grease, would be used for cooking.
In 1943 the rococo façade was replaced with a more stark, modernist
exterior, inspired by two other ‘Palaces’ in town, one occupied by the
last Emperor of Vietnam, Bao Dai.
Bao Dai took a fancy to the highland town and frequently held banquets
at the Lang Bian Palace. Hunting and the neighbouring hill tribes,
specifically visits to the nearby Lat or Koho villages, were attractions
to the hotel since its beginning.
This marketing peg romanticised images of simple, hardy, highland
peoples leading a rustic and ethnologically fascinating existence just
beyond the safety and comfort of the Palace walls.
In March 1945 the hotel was closed to guests and was used by
high-ranking Japanese officers, before finally re-opening in March 1946.
Some historians point to an important meeting at the then Lang Bian
Palace, at the end of World War II, as a defining moment in the birth of
the present Vietnamese state.
Famed Vietnamese warrior and liberation architect, General Vo Nguyen
Giap, stayed in the hotel’s Suite 101 in 1946 during the conference
between the Viet Minh and the French Government prior to the conference
in Fontainebleau. This meeting sowed the seed of resistance that would
lead to the end of French involvement in Vietnam.
The property was renamed Dalat Palace Hotel and remained under French or
Vietnamese management until the reunification of Vietnam and the
liberation of Dalat in 1975. |