A 3-meter frog pleads to the heavens: a Mid-Autumn folk tale lit up at a Ho Chi Minh City shrine

In an old communal house over 160 years old in a downtown neighborhood of Ho Chi Minh City, Dinh Son Tra, a giant toad lantern about 3 meters tall now stands in the courtyard. Built from split bamboo strips (nan trúc) and handmade dó paper (giấy dó), it's the centerpiece of "Cốc Cốc Tùng Tùng," a Mid-Autumn display built around the Vietnamese folk tale "The Toad Sues Heaven" (Cóc kiện Trời). At night, light from inside shows through the paper, and families and passersby stop to look up at it. This is a quieter, more narrative way to enjoy Mid-Autumn, distinct from the tourist lantern streets.

Students who built a 3-meter toad out of bamboo and handmade paper

This display was created by university students in Ho Chi Minh City gathered under the cultural research collective "Tàng The Culture Lab," with member Tôn Bảo Minh explaining the aim behind it. The craft group "Khởi Đăng Tác Khí" co-organized the display. Alongside the central toad figure, supporting characters from the folk tale, tigers, bears, crabs, bees, foxes, a coiling dragon, butterflies, fish, and even a traditional Mid-Autumn offering table, are all lined up in the same handcrafted style.

The build reportedly took about 80 days. Without using pre-made frames or plastic, the process of splitting and bending bamboo and layering on sheets of handmade paper takes more work the larger a figure gets. According to the makers, children and younger visitors first gasp at the sheer size, while adults lean in to study the seams and how the frame is put together. It's designed to showcase the materials and process itself, not to function as festival merchandise.

Why "The Toad Sues Heaven" was chosen for this year's Mid-Autumn

"The Toad Sues Heaven" is a Vietnamese fable in which, during a long drought that left the land parched, a small toad leads its fellow creatures up to heaven to negotiate and bring back the rain. It's a story of the weak and small banding together to stand up to nature's injustice, tied to agrarian society's memory of praying for rain.

The makers cite last year's typhoons, floods, and prolonged heat waves as the reason they chose this theme. Rather than simply dressing up the festival's festivities, they use an old story to carry a very present question about climate and disaster in a form that reaches children too. Broadening Mid-Autumn from just "a night for kids" into a space for retelling the community's memory is what makes this display new.

What separates the din of the lantern streets from the quiet of the communal house

Vietnam's Mid-Autumn Festival often brings to mind the colorful, crowded scenes of Hoi An's lanterns floating on the river, or the lantern stalls lining Luong Nhu Hoc Street in Ho Chi Minh City. If it's a flashy tourist show you're after, Mid-Autumn or not, Da Nang's Dragon Bridge still draws families on weekends with its fire- and water-breathing performance (Da Nang's Dragon Bridge fire show: when can you see it now?lists the show times).

The display at Dinh Son Tra sits at the opposite end of that spectrum. There's no music playing at the entrance, no string of photo-op setups. Under the beams of an old communal house, you walk slowly from one figure to the next, each carrying its own part of the story, tracing where it comes from. It's a different kind of experience from a Mid-Autumn spot built mainly for photos. For those who want to start with photos, there's the option of building a trip around Hanoi's cafés (5 Hanoi cafés for Mid-Autumn photos, without waiting for the full moon)Creative Week in Hoi An's Old Town: six days touring workshops and makers over the holiday), and for those who want to get close to the makers and their process, a workshop tour in Hoi An is the closer fit. Even under the shared banner of "seeing Mid-Autumn," where you go changes depending on whether photos, shows, or handiwork are what you're after.

What makes this display memorable isn't only the scale of the figures. The fact that the venue is an active communal house over 160 years old is itself part of the experience. A Vietnamese đình enshrines a village's guardian spirit and has doubled as a gathering place, serving as the center of the local community. Placing folk-tale lanterns in that space makes the story and the location feel continuous with each other.

A commercial event space could recreate a similar look with fixtures and lighting. But figures placed beneath a communal house's pillars and tiled roof give visitors a sense of "seeing this land's story in this land's building." For travelers, it's an entry point into the culture of local everyday life, away from the crowds of famous tourist spots. For local families, it's a once-a-year excuse to let their children experience tradition. How the venue is chosen directly shapes the quality of the experience.

What a handmade display like this suggests for Japanese makers and regional tourism

This display holds lessons for anyone in Japan working with crafts or regional goods. First, it's designed to show the process, not just the finished piece. By opening up the process, splitting bamboo, layering paper, taking 80 days, visitors come to value the effort rather than just the price tag. It echoes the idea of carefully showing "raw materials and process" on a product exhibition floor or a D2C landing page. Second, it ties an old folk tale to this year's climate as a theme. Tradition only catches younger people's interest once it's translated into a present-day concern, rather than simply put on display as is.

Third, there's the match between venue and story. Bringing together a place's own building, its own food, and its own story in one setting creates an experience that's hard to reproduce with a single photo. For businesses working with land-rooted food, like Kyoto's dried vegetables or Kyotango's dried fruit, a design that bundles together "origin, process, and backstory" rather than the product alone offers a way out of price competition. The fact that a group of Vietnamese students drew a crowd through handiwork and story shows that editorial skill matters more than scale.

From the market's side too, this format adds another destination to visit. Vietnam's Mid-Autumn shopping season is led by mooncakes and toy sales, and crowds tend to concentrate at big shopping malls and lantern streets. Adding a narrative-driven display staged at cultural or religious sites gives an outlet to people who want to avoid the crowds at famous spots, or families who want a calmer time with children, and creates a reason to travel out to a downtown communal house.

It's also worth noting that the makers are a non-profit student group. It shows that a striking combination of materials, story, and venue can draw attention without a large budget. Using a local communal house or community hall as the venue, with local young people curating the theme, is a format that's easy to reproduce in other cities, with room to extend beyond Mid-Autumn to other annual events. From a traveler's perspective, a display that changes its theme every year gives a reason to come back and see "what they're showing this year."

Practical information for the Dinh Son Tra Mid-Autumn display

Admission conditions, fees, and the exact address may change with local announcements, so check the latest information before visiting. Good times to consider are right after opening on weekends, when it's calmer, or a relatively quiet weekday afternoon.

This Mid-Autumn, add "an hour to see a story" to your trip

If you're traveling to Ho Chi Minh City during Mid-Autumn, it's worth adding an hour to see the folk-tale lanterns at a downtown communal house, on top of the color of the lantern streets and shopping malls. The display runs through October 11, open from the afternoon on weekdays and from the morning on weekends. If you want to start with photos, there's Hanoi's Mid-Autumn cafés; if you're after a flashy show, there's Da Nang's fire-breathing performance; if you want to get close to the handiwork, there's a workshop tour in Hoi An, pick your destination by what you're after, and this year's Mid-Autumn won't be just one color. A story about a small toad going up to negotiate with heaven now stands as 3 meters of bamboo and paper inside an old communal house, put at least one plan on your itinerary to see it for yourself.

Sources

• Tuoi Tre, "Người dân thích thú ngắm cóc khổng lồ kiện trời giữa đình cổ TP.HCM" (September 7, 2026)