Looking at an early picture of the French colonial hill station of Dalat circa 1925, one is struck by the centrality of an edifice around which the entire European resort seems to have been conceived. Completed in 1922, this monumental hotel, known at the time as the Lang Bian Palace (since rebaptized the Dalat Palace Hotel), was designed as a site of colonial leisure and power at the centre of Indochina's premier site of French villeggiatura, ‘discovered’ by Dr Alexandre Yersin in 1893, and earmarked for development into a hill station by the Governor General of Indochina, Paul Doumer in 1897–8. According to the geographer Robert Reed, the Lang Bian Palace ‘function[ed] almost immediately as the nerve center of proper Western colonial society in the highlands.’