The paint job to give the Saigon Central Post Office, one of Ho Chi Minh City’s icons, its traditional tasteful coating has been complete, nearly three months after its previous paint was blasted by experts and the public as too bright and intense.

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The edifice, located at No. 2 Cong Xa Paris Street in District 1 in the downtown area, now looks gorgeous as ever with its tasteful, light yellow coating.

The 124-year-old edifice, which is of immense historical and cultural value and is now one of the city’s major tourist attractions, is a stone’s throw from the Saigon Notre-Dame Basilica, another signature structure in the area.

One of the city’s most prominent icons and tourist attractions, the Saigon Central Post Office was constructed by a French company in 1891 and is rich in elegant French architecture elements.

The structure underwent a major revamp starting August last year, the first such restoration after four decades.

The facelift, which cost around VND5 billion ($233,013) in total, mostly consisted of applying a new layer of paint with a brighter shade of yellow and repairing the roof and walls which dripped and flaked off over years of use, representatives of the Saigon Central Post Office told Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper.

The new paint, which was applied to most of the edifice’s surface in December last year,  met with criticisms from the public, architects, and artists who complained that yellow was too bright and intense for the old, French-style building, and incongruous with its environs.

In February this year, the city’s Architecture Planning Council reached a consensus on another shade of color for the post office.

The new coating is almost identical to the one that was applied on the edifice in the first place over 120 years ago.

According to Dang Thi Nga, director of the Ho Chi Minh City Post, the entire expenses for the painting and re-painting jobs were covered by a local paint company and the construction unit.

Tuoi Tre News provides readers with some photos featuring foreigners and locals posing with the newly-coated Saigon Central Post Office in the background on March 6.

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