VietNamNet Bridge - Despite six years of construction work, Quang Binh Museum is still incomplete. Truong Son wonders will it ever open.

Central Region Construction Corporation (Cosevco) managed to win the construction contract and assigned an affiliate company to make it all happen. Although the main structure has been completed the project is nowhere near completion. Le Hung Phi, director of the province’s Department of Culture, Sports and Tourism (DCST), is happy to leave the blame at Cosevco’s doorstep.

The company has apparently undergone major changes in leadership, has been running at a loss and lacks working capital. He says this is why after the foundations had been completed the entire project sat in limbo for a whole year. After Phi’s department sent several letters to Cosevco, urging construction on, Cosevco set up a management body to supervise work and the supply of capital in February this year. In March Cosevco and DCST signed an appendix to the contract, extending the deadline for completion of work to August 30, 2008.

By early April the project was still not underway. The contractor was warned in writing that if work was not continued by April 30, the provincial People’s Committee would be informed and the contract would be terminated. Work started up again but, considering the project is still far from completion, this appears to have been a false dawn.

Roughly 13,000 antiques and other items to be displayed in the museum are piled up on the construction site or in the provincial stadium. Some of antiques date back to prehistoric times. There are copper axes and drums from the Dong Son period and Champa ceramic pots from the sixth to 11th centuries.

In the past six months, as they had to wait for the new museum, 13,000 antiques and other exhibits of Quang Binh General Museum were stored on the ground floor and in the yard of the provincial stadium. The antiques have not been arranged in any order. They have been left scattered across the site.

Large exhibits like a plough donated by Uncle Ho to Dai Phong Cooperative – one of the country’s trumpeted cooperatives in the socialist era – sits exposed to the sun and rain. With hot summers and cold winters in Quang Binh many antiques will deteriorate quickly. “It is contrary to regulations to store antiques like that,” admits Nguyen Manh Hau, the deputy director of the museum.

“But how can we preserve antiques, if there are no proper facilities?” Those who presume that work will be completed soon are sorely mistaken. According to Le Hung Phi in order for the museum to open, besides the main museum building, the interior display room must also be completed. Bids are only now being made for this part of the project as well as for the museum’s garden and according to him the entire museum and its related facilities will not be completed until 2011 at the earliest.

(Source: Timeout)