As you may know, market is for trading: buying and selling but no one buys or sells love at the Love Market. Ironically, lovers take advantages of the market to see each other. Therefore, Love Market is the place where people date and express their feeling and affection.
Love Market
The market just is held on Sunday morning for people coming here to exchange or buy and sell the necessary utensils for daily life so it is always very crowded. Because villages in Sapa are sparsely populated, people living in far-away villages had to go in advance from Saturday to be able to join the market on Sunday. They arrived at the town on Saturday evening, and took a rest. In the market, young villagers would have a chance to get to know others by joining activities such as playing traditional games, playing leaf-horns, singing and dancing... The performances of them were full of romantic melodies expressing wishes for an eternal love. Not until the market finished, happy memories were left in the minds of many mountain people. After that night, some were lucky to find out the match and made a promise to date on the next market. Many of them later became husbands and wives. From then on that night was known as the Love Market - a beautiful cultural feature of the Sapa region.
Each men bring their own intrusment for performances
On Saturday afternoon, many girls dress up in colorful costumes and silver ornaments. They hang little bells on their outfits in order to add festive atmosphere. They look for the guys dressing in traditional clothes of the same colors who hold in their hand small radio blaring cheerful songs. People stand in groups, singing and dancing their traditional dances until the night comes.
Love Market in Sapa is gaining more and more attention of not only the ethnic people but also the travelers from many places in the world. Recently, space for Sapa Love Market is recreated at Tourist Information and Promotion Center of Lao Cai Province starting from November 8th, 2014. In the campus of the Center, many activities are organized to reconstruct the love market of H’Mong and Red Dao people in Sapa such as: wife kidnapping, H’Mong Khen dancing, blowing leaves, lip trumpets or flute and singing love songs ... This is the place where visitors can experience and feel the spirit and the "love" of ethnic minority people. This is significance activity when the number of tourists to Sapa is growing, helped create more space for visitors traveling to the resort in Sapa, increase income for ethnic minorities, while also reduce annoying touts.
The love market has long been the not-to-be-missed event reflecting special culture of people of mountainous areas in general and of Sapa in particular. In addition to love market, there are a lot of traditional markets in Sapa to which you should pay a visit.
