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Real-estate trader Nguyen Xuan Bien is either a very smart guy, or a guy with very well-placed friends, though in Vietnam these days it usually amounts to the same thing.

In July 2009, Bien heard from friends at government agencies that plans were afoot to move the national government’s administrative centre from Hanoi to the neighbouring precinct of Ba Vi. Bien quickly bought 18,000 square metres of land in Ba Vi, at a price of 200,000 dong per square metre, or a total just over $150,000.

Lo and behold, in March, the government announced a new Master Plan for the City of Hanoi, in which the government’s administrative centre would indeed move to Ba Vi sometime before 2030.

By the time the new plan was made public, rumours about the proposed move were widespread, and the price of land in Ba Vi had tripled. Mr Bien got out while the getting was good, selling his land at 600,000 dong per square metre, and turning a $300,000 profit.

The idea of moving the administrative centre to Ba Vi had elicited a certain amount of public surprise, first because Ba Vi is 35km from the city centre, and second because most of Ba Vi is a national park, with 1000-metre-high mountains.

This led to a certain amount of sceptical speculation about the goals of the announcement. When the new plan was presented to the National Assembly in June, several deputies accused government officials of wanting to profit on land they owned in the district. Others suspected less mercenary, if no less ignoble, motives.

“Moving the administrative centre to Ba Vi is just a way for officials to say they’re going on business when in fact they’re going on holiday,” said Assembly member Pham Quoc Anh.

Another Assembly member, Le Van Cuong, complained that putting the administrative centre in Ba Vi would violate the tenets of feng shui, the Sino-Confucian philosophy of spatial arrangement that exerts great traditional influence in Vietnam.

This wasn’t an idiosyncratic complaint. An influential landscape architect named Tran Thi Thanh Van, who last year helped lead popular opposition to a hotel project (later cancelled) in a Hanoi park, said she thought the Ba Vi proposal was a serious problem.

Feng shui, at least as practiced in Vietnam, isn’t just about arranging fountains and mirrors. The flow of air, water and lines of force is seen as related to national geography and power. Specific locations are granted a certain mystical importance in the national ideology. “The Ba Vi district is a place of rest,” Van said. “But Hanoi is the brain of Vietnam. If you put the brain in a place of rest, Vietnam’s brain will be slow.”

By August, opposition to the Ba Vi administrative centre idea had become acute, both among the public and at lower levels of government. On August 19, the Hanoi city government told the national government it was opposed to the move: Ba Vi was the “green lungs” of the city, and was too distant from the city centre anyway. The national government acquiesced. The administrative centre is now slated to occupy an area in the Tu Liem or My Dinh districts, west of the city’s central West Lake.

That left the real-estate investors who had flocked to buy land in Ba Vi holding the bag. Over the past two weeks, speculators have rushed to dump their land, and prices have plunged to 120,000 dong per square metre, below their levels before the shenanigans got started last summer.

“The market is almost frozen,” says Nguyen Van Hai, deputy chairman of the Ba Vi District People’s Committee. “Many investors are willing to sell at a loss, but you can count the buyers on your fingers.”

That doesn’t bother Bien, who unloaded his position months ago. He has a number of friends who got caught and have asked him to find buyers for their land, but he hasn’t been able to help most of them. If you don’t want to get sunk in the Vietnamese real-estate market, it helps to be cynical. Very cynical. To judge by Bien’s example, it helps if you think the whole thing was a sham from the get-go.

“When I bought the land, I already knew the plan to move the Hanoi administrative centre to Ba Vi was just a trick to drive up land prices,” Bien says. “I never thought I would hold it for long. They were never going to move the administrative centre to Ba Vi.”

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