An air raid shelter found at the landmark Sofitel Legend Metropole Hanoi

A long-forgotten air raid shelter was found earlier this week at the landmark Sofitel Legend Metropole Hanoi when construction workers, who laid the foundation of a new garden bar, struck the shelter’s roof.

After excavating more than two meters of earth and reinforced concrete and then jack-hammering through a 278-millimeter ceiling, the hotel opened the hatch on a warren of flooded corridors, chambers and stairways.

In August, the hotel’s general manager, Kai Speth, and his chief engineer dropped through a square meter-wide hole bored into the ceiling, illuminating a subterranean space of nearly 40 square meters.

They found an old wine bottle, a still-intact light bulb, air ducts, graffiti and eerie echoes of a war that ended almost four decades ago and that raged all about this shelter during the so-called Christmas Bombings, the U.S. terror bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong in particular from December 18-30 in 1972.