Hoi An

Hội An stands on a branch of the Thu Bồn near the sea, in a delta that was part of Champa long before it was Vietnamese. The Cham port of Đại Chiêm Hải Khẩu traded from here with the Arab, Indian and Chinese worlds, and archaeology has found ceramics and coins from across maritime Asia. Vietnamese settlement followed the southward expansion of the 15th and 16th centuries.

Under the Nguyễn lords, who ruled the south from Huế, the port became one of the busiest in Southeast Asia. From about 1600 Chinese and Japanese merchants were permitted to live in their own quarters, and Portuguese, Dutch, English and French ships called on the monsoon winds for silk, ceramics, pepper and aromatic wood. Europeans knew it as Faifo. The Japanese quarter faded after Japan closed itself to foreign trade in the 1630s; Chinese communities from Fujian, Guangdong, Hainan and elsewhere stayed, built their assembly halls and dominated commerce into the 20th century.

Decline set in as the river silted and the Nguyễn emperors favoured Da Nang, which the French then developed as the regional port. Hội An became a quiet provincial town, and its poverty preserved it: there was no money to replace the old timber houses, and the fighting of the 20th century largely passed it by. Conservation work from the 1980s, led by the Polish architect Kazimierz Kwiatkowski, brought it back to notice; UNESCO listed the old town in 1999 as a well-preserved trading port of the 15th to 19th centuries, and tourism has since transformed the economy. Floods remain part of the town's story, and Quảng Nam province, of which Hội An was a provincial city, was absorbed into Da Nang in 2025.

The town's identity is built on the mixing that made it: Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese and European elements in its architecture, and Chinese congregations that still run their halls, keep their festivals and maintain the temples of Thiên Hậu and Quan Công. Lunar-calendar ceremonies, ancestor rites and the memorial days of the assembly halls fill the year, among them the Mazu festival kept by the Chinese community on the 23rd day of the third lunar month, while the fishing villages race boats in the first lunar month to pray for a good catch.

Craft is the other tradition. Kim Bồng carpenters, Thanh Hà potters, Trà Quế market gardeners and the town's silk weavers and lantern makers all long predate tourism, and the tailoring trade, with its shops making clothes to measure in a day or two, grew out of that skill base as visitors arrived. The silk lanterns hung along every street have become the town's signature, and on the 14th night of each lunar month the centre turns off its electric lights for them.

Living inside a World Heritage Site shapes daily manners. Building heights, colours and signs are controlled, motor traffic is restricted, and residents negotiate constantly with the demands of visitors. Locals are used to foreigners and generally patient with them, and many families have run the same premises for generations.

Hội An is a small town by Vietnamese standards — until the administrative reforms of 2025 it was a class-3 city of Quảng Nam province, now part of Da Nang — and tourism, tailoring, handicrafts, fishing and farming carry the economy between them. The busiest hours are early morning, when the market and the fishing quay work, and the evening, when the old town fills; the middle of the day is hot and comparatively quiet. Many people who work in the centre live in the surrounding villages and commute in by motorbike.

The rhythm outside the old town is still rural. Rice is grown right up to the edge of the hotels, prawn ponds and nipa palms fill the delta at Cẩm Thanh, and boats go out from Cửa Đại and Cù Lao Chàm. Alongside this sit hundreds of homestays and small hotels run by families who have converted their houses, and a foreign resident community drawn by the beaches.

The pressures are those of a small place with very large visitor numbers: rising land prices, crowding in the narrow streets, waste and water management, and the loss of ordinary shops in the centre to souvenir and tailoring businesses. Coastal erosion at Cửa Đại has eaten into a beach that resorts were built behind, and autumn flooding is a recurring cost. Residents' pride in the town is nonetheless strong, and the restrictions that preserve it are broadly accepted.

Cao lầu is the dish found almost nowhere else: thick, chewy, pale noodles with slices of marinated pork, fresh herbs, bean sprouts and crisp squares of fried noodle, dressed with a few spoonfuls of dark, concentrated broth rather than a bowl of soup. The noodles owe their texture and colour to rice soaked in lye water, which tradition holds must be drawn from the town's old wells. Alongside them come bánh bao bánh vạc, translucent rice dumplings filled with shrimp, mushroom and spring onion, topped with fried shallots and called white roses in English, and hoành thánh, wontons served in soup or fried.

The wider province supplies mì Quảng, wide turmeric-tinted rice noodles with pork, shrimp or chicken, peanuts, herbs and a sesame rice cracker, served with only a little broth. Cơm gà Hội An is the local chicken rice, and the town's bánh mì, with pâté, cold cuts and herbs in a light baguette, has a reputation far beyond central Vietnam. Seafood comes in from Cửa Đại and the islands: squid, mackerel, clams and crab, grilled or cooked into noodle soups.

Sweet things and snacks belong to Cẩm Nam, where riverside stalls serve chè bắp, a sweet soup of young corn from the sandbanks, and bánh đập, a crisp grilled rice paper folded over a soft steamed rice sheet and dipped in fermented anchovy sauce. Coffee is strong and filtered, often iced with condensed milk, and the town also brews fresh beer and makes rice wine in the surrounding villages.