Da Nang Story · August 2026
The Queen Who Lives On The Mountain
One of the rarest and most colourful monkeys on earth lives on the green mountain you can see from My Khe beach.
Stand on My Khe beach and look north. That round green mountain sitting in the sea is Son Tra. Most people look at it and see a nice view, or the white statue on its side. Almost nobody knows what lives up there.
Her name is the red-shanked douc langur, and people who study primates call her the queen of them. It is not a poetic exaggeration, it is what she looks like. Grey body, white forearms like long gloves, deep chestnut red legs, a golden face with white whiskers, and blue eyelids. Nothing else in the forest looks remotely like her. Photographers travel from other countries to sit still on that mountain and wait.
She is also disappearing. In 2020 she was reclassified as critically endangered, the last step before extinct in the wild. Something like half the world population has gone in the last thirty to forty years, lost to hunting and to forests being cut and broken into pieces. Counts on Son Tra vary depending on who is counting and when, but a few hundred live there, which makes this small mountain one of the most important places on earth for the species.
Think about what that means. A critically endangered primate, one of maybe a few thousand left anywhere, lives on a mountain fifteen minutes from a city of over a million people. In most countries you would fly for a day and hike for two to see something this rare. Here you ride out along the coast road.
They live in family groups, usually ten to thirty together, and they spend the day in the tops of the trees eating leaves. Early morning is when they move and feed. Go out on the Son Tra road just after sunrise, ride slowly, and watch the canopy rather than the road. What gives them away is not the colour, it is the movement, a branch dipping when there is no wind. Then you see the red legs.
Take nothing with you but time. Do not feed them, do not play calls on your phone to bring them closer, and keep your distance. She has survived on that mountain while the city grew up around her, and the least the city can do is let her be. Look up on your way past. She is right there.
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