Qualla: Central Highlands (Vietnam)

Central Highlands (Vietnam): Introduction

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

For centuries the Vietnamese of the coastal plains looked up at these plateaus and declined to climb them. The high country held tigers, they said, and poisoned water, and malevolent spirits; they called its inhabitants Mọi — savages — and stayed down in the rice deltas. Then French planters discovered that the black volcanic soil grew coffee as well as any on earth. Land written off as uninhabitable became the most valuable agricultural ground in the country, and nearly everything that has happened in the Central Highlands since flows from that reversal.

Central Highlands (Vietnam): A Staircase Above the Mekong

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

Central Highlands (Vietnam): The People Who Were Here First

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 sout...

Central Highlands (Vietnam): Black Earth, Dark Roast

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 —...

Central Highlands (Vietnam): What the Gongs Are For

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 wh...

Central Highlands (Vietnam): A Region That No Longer Exists on Paper

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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...