SOFITEL DALAT PALACE CELEBRATES 80 GLORIOUS YEARS

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.