The Embassy of Vietnam in Sri Lanka has pledged USD 50,000 toward the renovation of the Vietnamese section at the Colombo Public Library, an agreement signed between Colombo Mayor Vraie Cally Balthazaar and Vietnamese Ambassador Trinh Thi Tam on Tuesday.
The donation follows the recent state visit of Vietnamese President To Lam to Sri Lanka in early May, the highest-level Vietnamese visit to Colombo in decades. Renovation work on the Vietnamese section is expected to be completed by 2027.
The Colombo Public Library, located opposite Viharamahadevi Park in central Colombo, houses dedicated foreign-language collections that have long served as small windows into the country’s bilateral cultural ties. The Vietnamese section, like several others, dates from earlier diplomatic phases and has been due for both physical renovation and collection refresh.
The pledge sits within a broader uptick in Sri Lanka-Vietnam ties since the To Lam visit, which produced bilateral commercial undertakings reportedly worth around USD 1 billion across trade and investment MoUs and a parliamentary address by the Vietnamese President framing Sri Lanka as an Indian Ocean partner for Vietnam’s outward engagement.
The library project is comparatively small in dollar terms but is a cultural-diplomacy signal — the kind of follow-up gesture that typically lands a few weeks after a high-level state visit, anchoring the bilateral upgrade in tangible community-level deliverables.
Mayor Balthazaar’s office said the agreement was the first concrete cultural-cooperation deliverable since the new Council took office and welcomed further embassy-led restorations of library collections.
