Tây Nguyên is not one plateau but a flight of them, stepping up and inland from the sea. Kon Tum sits at around 500 metres. The Pleiku and Đắk Lắk plateaus level off near 800. Mơ Nông and Di Linh run higher still, and the Lâm Viên plateau around Đà Lạt tops out near 1,500 metres — cool enough that the French built a hill station up there to escape the delta heat. All of them lie south of the Annamite Range, the long spine that divides Vietnam from Laos.

Most of the water leaves westward, which surprises anyone who expects Vietnamese rivers to run to the South China Sea. The Sesan drains the northern highlands and the Srepok the southern, and both feed the Mekong through Cambodia. Only a few short, steep rivers cut east through the escarpment to the coast.

The highlands were never absorbed by the lowland kingdoms that rose and fell around them, and that isolation preserved a great deal the plains lost. The anthropologist James C. Scott placed this country inside Zomia — the vast upland zone running from northeast India through southern China and mainland Southeast Asia, where communities stayed deliberately beyond the reach of tax collectors and standing armies.

Roughly two dozen peoples live here, speaking either Austroasiatic languages of the Bahnaric branch or Austronesian languages of the Chamic branch: Jarai, Bahnar, Ê Đê, Mnông, Xơ Đăng, Cơ Ho and others. Outsiders lumped them together. The French called them Montagnards, mountain people; many now use Degar for themselves. The Cham kings of the lowlands claimed them as vassals and traded with them for forest goods while leaving them to govern their own affairs. Champa's King Simhavarman III raised the brick tower of Yang Prong in Đắk Lắk around the turn of the fourteenth century, a lowland temple standing in highland forest.

Nearly two million hectares of the Central Highlands are basaltic soil, about sixty percent of all such ground in Vietnam, weathered from ancient lava into earth so fertile it asks little in return. Coffee took to it immediately. More than 290,000 hectares are under coffee here — roughly eighty percent of the national planting — and Đắk Lắk alone accounts for some 170,000 of them. Drink Vietnamese robusta anywhere in the world and it almost certainly grew on this plateau.

Buôn Ma Thuột is the capital of that trade, a city whose name turns up on coffee bags from Seoul to Stockholm. Pepper, rubber, cashew and mulberry for silk grow alongside it. The bargain has never been an even one: much of the plantation land was consolidated under state farms that by the mid-1980s controlled some seventy percent of the region's surface, and the people who had worked it in common were rarely the ones who got it back.

Set a bronze gong ringing in a Central Highlands village and you are not making music in the concert-hall sense. The gongs speak — at births, at harvests, at funerals, at the moment a buffalo is offered. Each player carries a single instrument, so a melody exists only when the whole ensemble gathers; no one person can perform the piece. UNESCO recognised the space of gong culture here as a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity on 15 January 2005, and the phrasing repays attention. What was honoured was not the bronze but the space around it.

The region's music runs far older than metal. In February 1949 a prehistoric lithophone — tuned stone bars now known as Ndut Lieng Krak — was found in Đắk Lắk and carried off to Paris, where it remains. Bahnar became the second language in Vietnam after Vietnamese to be written in Latin script, set down by French missionaries in 1861; Ê Đê followed in 1923.

France annexed the highlands to Vietnam in 1889, and Kinh Vietnamese settlement followed — slowly at first, then as deliberate state policy under the Republic of Vietnam and again after reunification. The indigenous peoples are now outnumbered in their own homeland. They resisted every wave: FULRO fought the Saigon government and then Hanoi's, and mass demonstrations over land and religion in 2001 and 2004 led the state to close the region to foreigners for a time.

The pressure has not eased. Logging output has fallen by roughly two thirds since the early 1990s, less from restraint than from there being less forest left to cut. Soviet-era surveys put the bauxite under these plateaus at around eight billion tonnes, and the mines proposed to reach it remain among Vietnam's most contested projects, opposed by scientists and highland communities alike. On 12 June 2025 the National Assembly redrew the country into thirty-four provinces and cities, merging the Central Highlands with the South Central Coast. As an administrative region it no longer exists. The plateaus, of course, do.