Ha Tien

Hà Tiên is the youngest of the delta's old towns and the most unusual in origin. In the last years of the 17th century Mạc Cửu, a merchant from Guangdong who had left China after the Manchu conquest, settled on this stretch of coast under the Cambodian king, who granted him the Khmer title of Okna, and built a port, opening gambling houses and trading with ships from across the Gulf of Thailand. In 1708, faced with raids and with Siamese pressure, he submitted to the Nguyễn lords of Vietnam and was confirmed as its governor, so the town entered Vietnam by agreement rather than conquest.

Under his son Mạc Thiên Tứ the port reached its height. He fortified it, minted coin, and founded a literary society, the Chiêu Anh Các, whose members wrote a celebrated cycle of poems on ten scenic views of Hà Tiên — the lagoon, the caves, the hills and the sea — printed in 1737 and fixing the town's reputation in Vietnamese letters. A Siamese army under Taksin besieged and took the town in 1771, and the Mạc principality was absorbed into the Nguyễn state. The Vĩnh Tế canal, dug between 1819 and 1824 from Châu Đốc to Hà Tiên, tied it to the rest of the delta.

France ruled the town from the 1860s as a quiet provincial port. Its worst modern period came in the late 1970s, when Khmer Rouge forces raided across the border and killed civilians in the villages around it, and the fighting emptied the area before the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia. Since the 1990s the border has reopened, the ferry link to Phú Quốc has grown, and the town has lived from fishing, trade and a modest tourism. In June 2025 Kiên Giang province was merged into An Giang and the city was dissolved into the wards of Hà Tiên and Tô Châu.

The town's identity rests on the Mạc family and the poetry written under them. The tombs on Bình San hill are tended as a shrine rather than a monument, incense is burned there daily, and the annual commemorations of Mạc Cửu are the town's principal civic occasion, alongside the spring festival that recalls the Chiêu Anh Các poets. Few small Vietnamese towns have so literary a self-image, and the ten classical views are still quoted on signs and in schoolbooks.

The population is mixed in a way that reflects that founding. Vietnamese, ethnic Chinese descended from the port's merchant families, and Khmer villagers live side by side, and the temples show it: Mahayana pagodas, Chinese assembly halls with their red and gold altars, Theravada Khmer pagodas in the surrounding communes, Cao Đài temples and Catholic churches. Cambodian influence runs through the food, the language and the market, and many families have relatives across the border.

Everyday manners are those of the delta — open, talkative, generous with food and drink, and not much given to formality — with the ordinary Vietnamese courtesies of modest dress at temples, shoes off at the door, two hands for giving and receiving, and deference to age. Life is lived early and outdoors, and the bridge over the channel fills at dusk with families, students and people selling snacks from handcarts.

Hà Tiên is small, a few tens of thousands of people in a compact grid of shophouses between the lagoon, the channel and the hills. It is a border and ferry town, and the flow of people through it — traders, bus passengers, holidaymakers bound for Phú Quốc — gives it more movement than its size suggests.

Fishing is the main industry, with a working quay, boatyards and sheds where the catch is dried and salted; farming on the plain behind produces rice and pepper, and salt is made on pans along the coast. Cross-border trade with Cambodia matters, as does the tourist traffic, which has grown since the ferries were improved. Building has accelerated along the waterfront and towards Mũi Nai, and the strains are the familiar ones: pressure on the lagoon and the mangroves, waste, and a local economy that still depends on a good fishing season.

The day begins before dawn at the market and the fishing quay and stops in the worst of the afternoon heat. Late in the day the beach and the waterfront fill, seafood stalls light their grills and the town stays out until fairly late. Young people leave for Rạch Giá, Cần Thơ or Ho Chi Minh City to study and work, and the town's population rises sharply on holiday weekends.

Hà Tiên eats from the Gulf of Thailand and cooks with a Khmer and Thai accent that sets it apart from the rest of the delta. Its signature is bún kèn, rice noodles under a mild sauce of coconut milk, fish and curry spices, topped with shredded fish, herbs, cucumber and green papaya — a dish it shares with Phú Quốc and with Cambodian cooking across the border.

Seafood is the everyday food: squid grilled whole, crab steamed and eaten with salt, pepper and lime, scallops baked with spring onion and peanut, and fish cooked in a sour broth with tamarind and pineapple. Gỏi cá trích, raw herring cured in lime and rolled in rice paper with grated coconut, appears here as on the island. The market's dried squid, fish and shrimp, and the salt from the coastal pans, are what visitors carry away.

The sweets show the same borrowings. Xôi xiêm, sticky rice with a soft palm-sugar custard, takes its name from Siam; bánh thốt nốt, made with the sugar palm that grows along the border, is a Khmer cake sold in the market; and chè, iced sweet soups of beans, jelly and coconut milk, is drunk through the afternoon. Coffee is taken strong and iced with condensed milk, and beer is drunk with the evening grill.