Khánh Hoà Provincial Museum Nha Trang

There is an early-twentieth-century French building at 16 Trần Phú, on the seafront strip, the same block as the Yasaka hotel at number 18. Thousands of people walk past it to the beach every day without knowing it is the provincial museum. It may be the most overlooked historic site in Nha Trang, not because it is far but because it advertises nothing.

The museum was created by a decision of 13 June 1979, then called the Phú Khánh Provincial Museum — the name of the old province that joined Phú Yên to Khánh Hoà. According to the national tourism authority's listing it holds nearly 10,000 original artefacts and more than 5,000 photographic documents, arranged by theme: the ancient cultures of Khánh Hoà, the revolutionary struggle, the life of Hồ Chí Minh, and the province's heroic mothers.

What is most worth the visit is the prehistoric layer, and nowhere else in the city tells it. Stone axes and stone ornaments of the Xóm Cồn culture, roughly 3,500 years old; a Nha Trang bronze drum around 2,000 years old; Cham stone carving from the ninth to fourteenth centuries; old coinage and trade ceramics from the ninth to eighteenth. If you have climbed the Po Nagar towers and wondered what came before the Cham here, the answer is in those cases.

One more thing worth knowing so the visit does not disappoint: the display space is far smaller than the store. The figure of nearly 10,000 artefacts is what is held, not what is shown. Sources disagree about the galleries — one says two rooms totalling about 200 m², another four thematic rooms. Whichever is right, this is a forty-minute stop rather than a morning.

In the same trip: the Po Nagar towers for the Cham material out of doors, the Alexandre Yersin museum about a kilometre south for another small city museum, and the Oceanographic Institute for a far larger collection. For history outside the city there is the Diên Khánh cluster.