LookAtVietnam – Viet Nam’s first toy museum is to be established by early 2012 in Luong Son district of the northern province of Hoa Binh.

Happy faces: Children play with traditional toys at an exhibition held by the Centre for Research and Support of Vietnamese Children.

The museum will cover 38,000sq.m at Choc Hill, in Luong Son’s Dong Xuan commune, 30km northwest of Ha Noi centre.

Land for the project was gifted by the Binh Minh Ltd Company.

Plans call for to have displays of domestic and foreign toys, which children can look at and play with in special exhibition rooms of about 300sq.m.

In all, 18 exhibit houses will be built in two-storey houses on stilts with concrete pillars, wooden floors and bamboo walls.

The houses will be divided into categories such as indoor toys, discovery toys (which require creativity), outdoor water toys and traditional toys.

The museum will function as a non-profit and self-funded business, said centre director Nguyen Thi Huong. Visitors would pay to enter and while children play, parents could use other services such as a cafe and internet access.

There may be exhibits of old toys used by famous artists and politicians and from any families wanting to display their collections.

“We worry most over getting modern Vietnamese and foreign toys because our budget is limited,” Huong said.

A centre survey showed 80 per cent of foreign toys sold in Viet Nam were made in China. While diversified in form and materials, many Chinese toys are cheap but they don’t meet safety standards because they contain too many chemicals.

Toys from other countries are scarce and expensive, Huong said.

Some Vietnamese toy makers concentrated on producing toys for export. The prices were much higher than the production costs. For example, a match box size wooden toy could cost VND200,000 ($12).

The centre has collected about 5,000 different toys, 1,250 of which are registered. People owning at least 500 objects can register to establish a private museum.

The collection is dominated by traditional toys like bamboo kites, puppets, iron boats and baked clay toys. It includes some from northern ethnic groups like Muong, Tay and Dao.

Many kids are delighted at first when visiting toy shops in downtown HCM City or Ha Noi but are soon disillusioned.

Most of these shops only sell expensive toys made by foreign manufactures like Martell and Barbie. Not many Vietnamese parents can afford to spend VND200,000 ($11) or more for a small toy at these shops.

This is one reason why Vietnamese children and their parents are turning to Chinese-made toys that are becoming increasingly ubiquitous.

“I prefer buying Chinese toys for my kids because they’re generally cheaper, more modern, and have more moveable parts compared to locally made products which are static,” Nguyen Thi Thu Trang, a mother of two young kids in HCM City, said.

A small wooden toy automobile made locally costs VND90,000 ($5), while a Chinese product with an engine and a remote control costs only VND45,000 ($2.5).

Though domestic firms have begun to produce a wide range of toys in recent years, their sales remain low due to high prices and simple designs.

“The underdevelopment of the country’s toy industry is largely due to the lack of investment,” Le Phi Nga, a toy designer in HCM City, said.

She said local firms should invest more money to improve their production lines and designs to compete with cheap imports from China

VietNamNet/Viet Nam News