Qualla: Vũ Quang National Park

Vũ Quang National Park: Introduction

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On 21 May 1992, a survey team working in the newly protected forests of Vũ Quang obtained a skull from a local hunter. The horns were wrong. They were long, dark, almost straight and nearly parallel — nothing like the curved hooks of the serow that shares this country. The next day the team came across a second pair in the Annamite Range on the reserve's northeastern edge, and the arithmetic became unavoidable. The Ministry of Forestry biologists Do Tuoc, Vu Van Dung, Le Van Cham, Nguyen Van Sang and Nguyen Thai Tu, working with John MacKinnon of the World Wide Fund for Nature, had found a large mammal that science had no name for. The WWF announced it on 17 July 1992. It was the first large mammal discovered in this part of the world in fifty years.

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Vũ Quang National Park: The Animal Nobody Has Seen

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

They called it saola, a local name, and also the Vu Quang ox. Formally described in the journal Nature in 1993, it became Pseudoryx nghetinhensis — the species name built from Nghệ An and Hà Tĩnh, the two provinces whose forests it haunts. It stands about 84 centimetres at the sh...

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Vũ Quang National Park: The Forest Kept Producing

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The saola was not a one-off. In 1994, working the same forests of Vũ Quang and central Laos, researchers described the giant muntjac, Muntiacus vuquangensis, the largest of all the barking deer at 30 to 50 kilograms and, like the saola, now listed as critically endangered. Five f...

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Vũ Quang National Park: The Mountain Before the Science

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Long before biologists came here, Mount Vũ Quang was a headquarters. When the Cần Vương movement rose against French rule on 5 July 1885, the scholar-official Phan Đình Phùng — born in Hà Tĩnh, a first-place graduate of the imperial examinations, and a censor who had made enemies...

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Vũ Quang National Park: What the Park Is Now

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The area was declared a forest reserve in 1986 and elevated to a national park in 2002, covering 550 square kilometres of Vũ Quang District in Hà Tĩnh Province, managed by the provincial People's Committee. It is high, wet, close to the Lao border, and thinly walked. Conservation...

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