The Lotus Stupa at Tân Huê Viên: A Landmark I Watched Get Built

I was three days out of gallbladder surgery, still moving like a man twice my age, looking like death warmed up, when I asked my friend who’d come to fetch me from Hoàn Mỹ Cửu Long hospital in Cần Thơ to stop for a cà phê sữa before we drove home. He pulled off the highway into an unfinished construction site with a coffee cart parked out front, and while he went to order, I got out of the car anyway, because I have never once in my life been able to leave a strange building alone, especially as an ADHD overthinker.

That building turned out to be Liên Hoa Bảo Tháp, the Lotus Stupa, a semi complete topic of discussion. For years before that day, the site had sat completely still, and nobody I asked seemed to agree on why. Money, permits, take your pick, the delta has never been short of rumours for a stalled construction site. Work had clearly picked up again by the time I got there, though, because what I actually found was two buildings wearing one address. The food hall next door was finished and doing brisk business, tour buses parked out front and staff working the counters, while the lotus itself, thirty seconds’ walk away, was still very much a construction site.

I hobbled around the edge of the stupa in hospital-fresh stitches while a few construction workers stopped what they were doing to watch the foreigner picking his way over the rubble, phone in hand, snapping away, which, fair enough, I would have watched too. Inside the shell, the steel frame stood open to the sky like ribs, and somehow the golden Buddha at the centre was already in place, sitting patiently in the middle of all that exposed metal as if the building would eventually get around to growing up around him.

By an entrance, a pair of enormous wooden dragons were quietly witnessing the progress, cement bags still stacked at their feet, and a stone dedication marker had already been set, dated and ready, for a building that clearly wasn’t finished yet.

It was inaugurated in late January 2026, finished at last, the dome closed in and gilded, the dragons presumably finished too. I haven’t been back inside myself since that first hobbling loop around the site. What I know of the finished version, I know from the highway, driving past at speed, catching the colour out of the corner of my eye.

What Liên Hoa Bảo Tháp actually is

The stupa sits on National Highway 1A in An Hiệp commune, Châu Thành district, close enough to where I live that it barely counts as an outing. On a clear day, I can literally see it from a classroom window at the language center where I work. It’s the work of Tân Huê Viên, the province’s biggest bánh pía maker, and it’s built at a scale that’s genuinely hard to read from photos: 68 metres tall, 99 metres across, with a gilded Medicine Buddha inside standing close to 7 metres. It was inaugurated in late January 2026, so as of this writing it’s still only a few months old, which is part of why so little has been written about it in English.

What makes the visit worth the stop isn’t only the building. Tân Huê Viên’s whole operation is here, so a walk through the lotus stupa turns into a walk through the actual bánh pía production line, with tastings and a shop at the end of it. You can watch the pastry get made a few hundred metres from a seven storey gilded Buddha, which is the kind of pairing that only makes sense in the Mekong Delta.

If you go, entry is free and the site is open from 7am to 8pm. There’s no ticket booth logic to navigate, no tour to book ahead, you just turn up. Bring a bit of time, because between the stupa itself, the factory floor, and the inevitable tasting, it’s easy to lose an hour without noticing.

I still think about that first visit more than I think about the finished, postcard version everyone photographs now. The golden Buddha waiting patiently inside all that raw steel is the image that stuck, and so is the food hall already packed with tour groups thirty seconds from a roof still being welded shut, and me in the middle of it, three days out of surgery, hobbling between the two like I belonged there. I was in no state to be climbing over a construction site, and did it anyway, and the building itself spent years looking like it might never get finished either. We both took the slow way round. Mine just started with a hospital bed instead of a foundation.