Sapa recently celebrated 100 years of tourism - marking the arrival of French colonials in the early twentieth century. They were looking for a mountain escape from the sticky Hanoi summer. Ethnic Hmong people arrived a few centuries before the French and they remain an important, if marginalised, part of the tourism economy. This woman, in her mid 80s, has seen most of those 100 years of tourism and sells traditional fabric to tourists passing through. It's been a patchy 100 years from a tourism perspective. War against the French, the US backed South Vietnamese government and the Chinese, combined with hardline communism, closed the area down to visitors for more than half of the century.
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