At dusk the garden of Chùa Dơi comes apart. Thousands of flying foxes that have spent the day hanging in the fruit trees inside the monastery walls unhook themselves, circle once over the roofs, and stream out across Sóc Trăng to feed. They will be back by morning. They have been doing this long enough that almost nobody uses the pagoda's actual name - Wath Sêrâytêchô Mahatup, which Chinese and Vietnamese speakers wore down into Mã Tộc - and everyone simply calls it Chùa Dơi, the Bat Pagoda. This is a good introduction to the city, which has about fifty pagodas inside its limits and a habit of being known for the odd detail rather than the grand one.
Work on Chùa Dơi began in 1569, which makes it older than almost anything else standing in the delta. It is a Khmer Theravada monastery and looks it: a main hall roughly twenty-one metres long and eleven wide, roofs curving up at the eaves into naga serpents, a stone Buddha inside and another sheltered by the hood of the serpent Mucalinda. The grounds run to four hectares of monks' quarters, fruit trees and stupas. Vietnam listed it as a national heritage site on 12 February 1999. Eight years later, in 2007, fire destroyed the main hall entirely - a building that had stood through four centuries and a war gone in a night. It was rebuilt and reopened by April 2009. Out among the stupas are graves marked with the image of a five-toed pig, a genuinely unusual local devotion that the pagoda has never bothered to explain to visitors.
Ngô Kim Tòng left school after the third grade and taught himself to sculpt. Beginning in 1928 and continuing until his death in 1970, the fourth-generation keeper of a small temple called Bửu Sơn Tự filled it with thousands of figures modelled in clay - Buddhist, Taoist and Confucian deities, a lotus throne with a thousand petals, a thirteen-storey tower holding 208 niches and carried on 126 dragons. Everyone calls it Chùa Đất Sét, the Clay Pagoda. In 1940 he cast four pairs of enormous candles: three pairs standing 2.6 metres and weighing 200 kg apiece, one smaller pair of 100 kg each. The two smallest were lit when he died in 1970 and have burned without interruption ever since. At their present rate they are expected to last seventy or eighty years. A man who could not finish primary school built a clock out of wax that will outlive everyone who watched him light it.
The Maspéro, which runs through the middle of the city, is not a river. French engineers dredged it in 1908 to link Sóc Trăng with Phụng Hiệp thirty-three kilometres away, and locals also know it as the Cầu Quay canal. Once a year it becomes the most-watched stretch of water in the Mekong Delta. On the fifteenth day of the tenth lunar month, during the Khmer festival of Ok Om Bok, ghe ngo - long, narrow, brilliantly painted boats pulled by large crews of rowers - race down the Maspéro past a purpose-built grandstand. Khmer communities from across the delta send crews, and how a village's boat finished is a matter that gets discussed for the rest of the year.
Sóc Trăng's most exported object is a pastry. Bánh pía is a flaky Teochew confection descended from a Suzhou-style mooncake - the name comes straight from the Teochew word for pastry, 餅, pia - brought by Chinese settlers and now made in quantity here and in nearby Vũng Thơm. The classic filling is durian with mung bean paste and a salted egg yolk at the centre, though taro, coconut and shredded pork fat all turn up. In Saigon the same thing is called bánh bía; in the delta the Teochew pronunciation holds. For an actual meal, Võ Thị Sáu Street is the place to go, with hotpot restaurants in the 100,000 to 150,000 dong range and kitchens serving countryside dishes that visitors either embrace or quietly decline - snake, and rice-paddy rat, which delta farmers have eaten as a by-product of the harvest for generations.
You can walk across the whole city in under an hour, which is the fastest way to understand it. Sóc Trăng had 221,430 residents in 2018 across 76.15 km², a Kinh majority alongside a substantial Khmer Krom minority and an established ethnic Chinese community - a mix you can read directly off the temple architecture as you go. It was promoted from town to city by decree on 8 February 2007. Very few people here speak English and foreign tourists remain scarce, but they are received warmly rather than warily. Xe ôm drivers wait on the corners beside their motorbikes; agree the fare before you get on. Ho Chi Minh City is 231 km and about five hours by bus from Miền Tây station, Cần Thơ an hour up National Highway 1A. Since 12 June 2025, when Sóc Trăng province was dissolved, the city has been a ward of Cần Thơ - a change that alters the letterhead and nothing else about the bats.
Sited at 9.67°N, 105.83°E, inland from the South China Sea coast and a short distance south of the Hậu River. From 2,000-4,000 ft the city reads as a compact grid split by the arrow-straight Maspéro canal, ringed by paddy that gives way to shrimp ponds toward the coast. Look for the multi-tiered pagoda roofs and stupas, which catch the light distinctively against the low concrete townscape. The disused Sóc Trăng Airfield (IATA SOA, 3,200 ft asphalt, runway 03/21) lies about 9 nm east-southeast and is not usable. The nearest operating field is Cần Thơ International (VVCT/VCA, elev. 10 ft, 3,000 m asphalt runway 06/24), some 26 nm north-northwest; Cà Mau (VVCM/CAH) is about 65 nm southwest. Terrain is flat at sea level with no obstacles beyond masts and temple spires. Clearest conditions run December through March; the May-October monsoon brings low cloud, heavy afternoon rain and reduced visibility over the delta.