Few people know about Quan Am Phat Dai (Quan Am: Guanyin — the Goddess of Mercy), a pagoda where Quan Am Nam Hai festival takes place right in front of Nha Mat Estuary in Bac Lieu City, one of the spiritual destinations where travelers often visit on the first days of Tet, or Lunar New Year.

Completed in 1975, Quan Am Phat Dai covers an area of 2.5 hectares and has many beautiful architectural works such as the main hall, houses for monks, guesthouses, a commemorative house, a ritual yard for Quan The Am, and Buddhist relics. Some buildings have been put into operation and in the coming time, this pagoda will be a solemn worship area and a tourist attraction in Bac Lieu.

It takes about 10 minutes traveling by car amid an enormous area of shrimp rearing ponds full of sea breezes, bird sanctuaries, old longan orchards and the Nha Mat Bac Lieu Estuary, and tourists will arrive at Quan Am Phat Dai where they can enjoy fresh air, open space with incense scent, the murmur of sea waves and the sound of bell tolling and fading out. This pagoda offers tourists tranquility to experience and purge the soul and dust of life.

Quan Am Nam Hai festival is often held for three days from the 22nd to the 24th days of the third lunar month. The festival includes many rituals and gatherings such as requiems, parades, dragon and kylin dances, photo displays and a trade fair selling local specialties.

Nature does not offer this place weeping willows and pristine white sand dunes or thousand-year-old temples and pagodas. The place is also not a holy land of Buddhist pilgrims. However, Bac Lieu has an 11-meter-tall Boddisatva statue looking out to the sea as if she was blessing fishermen with safety anytime they sail to the open sea. When the boats are filled with fish, they will come back home following the direction of the statue. Tourists will pay a visit to ancient houses which depict a fertile Bac Lieu land of the six southern provinces in the early 20th century. Visitors will enjoy southern amateur music and anecdotes about Bac Lieu debauchee. All these things seem to attract travelers to return to this land whenever they have a chance to go to the coastal province of the Mekong Delta.