Chau Doc

The upper delta around Châu Đốc was Khmer country, thinly settled marsh and forest, until the Nguyễn lords pushed their authority west in the 18th century. The town proper dates from that period, and its importance was fixed in the years between 1819 and 1824, when the official Thoại Ngọc Hầu directed the digging of the 87-kilometre Vĩnh Tế canal from Châu Đốc to Hà Tiên for the emperors Gia Long and Minh Mạng, a huge undertaking carried out by Vietnamese and Khmer labourers at great cost in lives. The canal drained land, opened a shipping route and drew the border in practice as well as on paper.

Its position made it a frontier garrison and a trading town in equal measure. Chinese merchants, Cham Muslims who had moved down from Cambodia, Khmer villagers and Vietnamese settlers all lived along this stretch of river, and the town became a transit point for goods and people moving between the two countries. Under French rule it was a provincial seat; in the 1930s and 1940s the surrounding province became the heartland of the Hòa Hảo Buddhist movement, founded nearby in 1939.

The late 1970s brought the worst of its history. Cross-border raids by Khmer Rouge forces struck the villages along the frontier, and in April 1978 some 3,157 civilians were killed at Ba Chúc, south-west of the town, where a cemetery and memorial now stand; the attacks were among the causes of the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia that followed. Since then Châu Đốc has lived from farming, fish and pilgrimage, with the Bà Chúa Xứ temple drawing steadily larger crowds. The national administrative reform of 2025 merged Vietnam's provinces into fewer and larger units, and Châu Đốc, until then a provincial city, is now a ward of the enlarged An Giang province.

Châu Đốc is the most religiously mixed town in a religiously mixed region. The Bà Chúa Xứ temple below Sam Mountain honours a female deity whose stone statue, found on the hill and brought down by tradition in the early 19th century, is believed to grant prosperity; pilgrims come from across southern Vietnam to make offerings, borrow money symbolically from the goddess and return the following year to repay it. The scale of the devotion is unusual, and the festival in the fourth lunar month fills the town for days.

Around it are Theravada pagodas of the Khmer Krom, Mahayana temples, Chinese assembly halls, Catholic churches, Hòa Hảo prayer houses and the mosques of the Cham community across the river. The Cham here are Muslim, speak their own Austronesian language alongside Vietnamese, and are known for hand-woven cloth and for a diet and calendar distinct from their neighbours'. Relations between the communities are long-standing and easy, and intermarriage is common.

Local manners follow the delta pattern of open hospitality and quick friendship, with an added carefulness around religion: visitors are welcome at ceremonies but are expected to dress modestly, keep out of the way, and treat shrines, mosques and offerings with respect. The commerce that surrounds the temples, from incense stalls to fortune telling, is part of the scene rather than an imposition on it.

Châu Đốc is a small place by Vietnamese standards, a town rather than a city in feel, with farming wards around its edges. The centre is compact and busy, built of two- and three-storey shophouses, and the river is its main street: ferries and small boats cross constantly, and rows of house-rafts are moored along both banks.

Work comes from fish, farming, trade and pilgrimage. The floating farms raise catfish and basa for processing plants downstream, an industry that boomed with exports and has since been squeezed by prices and disease; rice, maize and vegetables grow on the flood plain; and cross-border trade, legal and otherwise, has always been part of the local economy. The temples support a whole service economy of hotels, coaches, restaurants and stalls.

The rhythm of the year is set by the water. When the flood comes down from Cambodia between about August and November the fields go under, fishing replaces farming for a season, and families shift their work to the boats; when the water falls, the land is planted again. Days begin before dawn at the market and on the river and slow to a halt in the early afternoon heat. The concerns people voice are those of the whole upper delta: fewer fish each year, weaker floods, riverbank erosion and the young leaving for work in the cities.

Châu Đốc's name means fermented fish to most Vietnamese. The market's mắm rows sell tubs of salted, fermented fish in dozens of kinds — whole, shredded, sweet, pungent — of which mắm thái, shredded fish with green papaya and sugar, is the best known. It is eaten with rice and raw vegetables, or dissolved into lẩu mắm, the delta hotpot served with a tray of river greens, banana flower and water-lily stems.

The town's everyday dish is bún cá, rice noodles in a turmeric-coloured broth with flaked poached snakehead fish, lemongrass and prahok-scented seasoning that shows its Khmer ancestry. The flood season brings cá linh, small silvery fish that arrive in enormous numbers with the high water, simmered with điên điển flowers in a sour soup, and it brings water lilies and sesbania blossom to the market with them.

Two local products sweeten everything else. Thốt nốt, the sugar palm that grows across this corner of the delta and into Cambodia, gives a pale juice drunk fresh, a soft brown sugar sold in discs, and the jelly-like seeds used in desserts. Khmer and Cham influence shows in the cakes — bánh bò thốt nốt, a spongy palm-sugar cake, and the beef and curry dishes of the Cham villages, which are halal and use more spice than Vietnamese cooking generally does.