A Lake With No Turtle, a Market Built on Swampland

Every local calls the roundabout on Vo Van Tan and Pham Ngoc Thach "Turtle Lake," yet the turtle it's named for has not been there since the 1970s. The story goes that President Nguyen Van Thieu was warned by a feng shui master that a dragon slept beneath the city, its head under his palace and its tail at this intersection — and that the only way to keep it pinned down was to place a turtle statue on the tail. A pond and platform went up, a large concrete turtle was set inside it, and within a few years the statue was gone, quietly removed or destroyed under circumstances nobody agrees on. The name outlived the turtle by half a century.

Ben Thanh Market's clock-tower facade — one of the most photographed sights in the city — sits on ground that was reclaimed swamp and canal bank until the early 1900s. French planners spent decades arguing over where Saigon's central market should go before construction finally began in 1912; when it opened on 28 March 1914, locals reportedly found the building itself more astonishing than anything for sale inside, since nothing that large or that modern had ever gone up in the city before.