Hoan Kiem’s Giant Turtle

In the midst of a very long article reviewing the eating establishments and the The Ho Chi Minh Museum of Hanoi, Vietnam, there’s a surprising update on the Old City’s most famous cryptid.

Here’s what we learn from Simon Busch, in the January 28th edition of London’s Financial Times:

The turtle of Hoan Kiem Lake sounds terribly lonely. Such experts as there are on this most elusivecreature, Vietnam’s only slightly less fabulous version of the Loch Ness Monster, contend furiously over its likely age and its species – even its sex is unknown – but they do seem to agree on its size. Its shell is thought to measure a metre and a half long by just over a metre wide, which makes its extremely rare sightings in a body of water that stretches no more than 600 metres from shore to shore, in the middle of Hanoi, all the more mysterious.

Legend has it that the turtle first appeared in the 15th century, when it arose from the waters of the lake to reclaim from King LeLoi, out boating with his courtiers, a magic swordlent him by the gods toexpel a rampaging Chinese army. Professor Ha Dinh Duc, recently retired from Hanoi National University and probably the foremost authority on the turtle, thinks the real animal could indeed be that old: the adult of a hatchling the king himself may have released into Hoan Kiem some 600 years ago (Galapagos turtles live almost half as long). He also insists this awesomely long-lived beast is the last of its kind – that when it does finally die, it will die truly alone.

Hanoians revere the legendary denizen of Hoan Kiem, in part because of its putative survival through so many centuries of their country’s history and in part because of its role in a tale of Vietnamese victory overa great, invading power. What many of them do not believe – given that its snout is only apparently glimpsed above the water every decade or so and that it has never been caught – is that the turtle exists.

Loren Coleman About Loren Coleman
Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct). Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015. Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.

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