Exhibition «Thời thanh xuân từ Đường Trường Sơn đến Đường 1C huyền thoại»

   A wooden sampan stands in the middle of the gallery, built at full scale over two months in Cà Mau by the same craftsmen who made these boats half a century ago. Around it, 3D mapping and motion sensors cycle through the dry season, the rainy season and then the war. This is how Hanoi is telling the story of two supply routes that carried weapons, medicine and very young people to the south.

   The show opened on the morning of 25 August, staged by the Vietnamese Women's Museum with the War Remnants Museum from Ho Chi Minh City and the veterans' liaison board of the southern youth union, and timed to 81 years of independence. It runs in three parts. The first covers the Trường Sơn route: nearly 20,000 km of motor road cut through the mountains, and more than 2 million soldiers and cadres who moved along it. The second covers Route 1C, the quiet water artery of the Mekong Delta, where over 13,000 tonnes of weapons and thousands of tonnes of food and medicine were pushed through melaleuca swamps, canals and bombing — at the cost of 399 young volunteers killed and 327 left permanently disabled. The third is about what came afterwards: searching for comrades, recovering remains, returning portraits to families and raising memorials.

   The objects on display are personal rather than ceremonial. A notebook still carries the slogan its owner copied out at nineteen; there is an aluminium cup, a checked khăn rằn scarf, diaries and commendation certificates, handed to the museum by former youth volunteers and veterans on the opening day itself. If you know this war from documentaries, it looks different here: not a map of offensives but names, faces and what a fifteen-year-old carried to the front. Captions throughout are in Vietnamese and English.

   The museum sits about 500 m from Hoàn Kiếm lake and opens every day of the week. Alongside this show it keeps a permanent display on women in the family, in history and in fashion, with an audio guide of nearly 60 stories in six languages, a lift and step-free access.

   The opening also included a panel discussion, «Thanh xuân gửi lại tuyến đường 1C», with three witnesses: Lâm Thị Minh Tâm, former deputy political officer of Company 4 on Route 1C; Võ Ngọc Diệp of the southwestern youth union office; and Võ Tuyến Lệ, a former platoon leader and nurse with Battalion 410. That programme ran once, on opening day only, and the organisers have not published how many objects the exhibition holds.

   The museum is open daily from 8am to 5pm, and mornings are the quietest time to walk through. Some cases are worth standing at for a while: behind a belt buckle or a school exercise book sits somebody's interrupted youth.