Lê Văn Tám Park

Le Van Tam Park, previously known as Mạc Đĩnh Chi Cemetery, is a park in Downtown Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. It formerly was a large and prestigious French colonial cemetery.

Mạc Đĩnh Chi Cemetery

The cemetery originated as a military cemetery administered by the French Navy for those killed during the 1859 battle for the Gia Dinh Citadel.
By the 1880s administration of the cemetery was transferred from the French Navy to municipal authorities and the cemetery was used for French governors and colonial officials, high-ranking Vietnamese politicians, generals, former war heroes, celebrities and prominent members of the South Vietnamese society.
The cemetery was built by the French and had a European style confined within a quiet environment, giving it an air of simplicity, eeriness, and majesty. Small winding roads, lined with eucalyptus trees interspersed with straight roads, gave access to all corners of the cemetery. Eight-foot, bone white concrete walls enclosed it all around and gave it an air of isolation and solemnity in the middle of the noisy neighborhood. There were magnificent mausoleums, eight to ten feet high and six to eight feet wide, erected by bereaved families to commemorate their deceased. Others were simple tombstones, but no less impressive, with a block of stone marking the gallant deeds of the beloved person. It was by far the largest, cleanest and best-kept cemetery in Saigon.
The main gate of the cemetery was located opposite the north end of rue de Bangkok, which was renamed as rue de Massiges in 1920 and the cemetery became known as the Cinietiere de la rue de Massiges. In March 1955 rue de Massiges was renamed Mạc Đĩnh Chi street, after the renowned ancient Vietnamese scholar and diplomat Mạc Đĩnh Chi and the cemetery then became known as the Mạc Đĩnh Chi Cemetery.
South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu were interred there in unmarked graves following their assassinations. The famous French correspondent for Time and Newsweek magazines François Sully and the American missionary Grace Cadman were also buried there. Other notable burials included Nguyen Van Thinh and Lê Văn Tỵ.

Rezoning into park

In the early 1980s, Vietnam's communist government declared the cemetery a corrupt reminder of the past. In 1983 the Ho Chi Minh City People's Committee passed a resolution to abolish the cemetery, and ordered all remains to be exhumed and removed. Family members were given two months to claim their loved ones, most of them was later relocated at Lái Thiêu Cemetery. Then the mausoleums and tombstones were bulldozed to the ground to create a children's park and playground.
The park is dominated by a sculpture of Le Van Tam, a communist martyr of the First Indochina War, who supposedly soaked his clothes in petrol and turned himself into a human torch to destroy a French fuel depot at Thị Nghè near Saigon in January 1946. In 2005 research showed that Le Van Tam was a fictional propaganda character created by the Viet Minh.