Ernest Hébrard took charge of urban planning in French Indochina in 1921 and built a hybrid that had no precedent: French civic massing — axis, wings, symmetry — set under stacked Vietnamese tile roofs, with ventilation lattice and deep verandas doing the climate work that European facades could not.

The palette is architectural fact, not mood. Limewashed light-yellow walls, ochre on institutional facades, red-brown layered roof tiles, blue-painted window joinery and near-black bottle-green shutters. Everything is matte; nothing reflects.