Phu Quoc

Phú Quốc sits closer to Cambodia than to the Vietnamese mainland, and its early history belongs to the wider Gulf of Thailand, used seasonally by fishermen and traders. By about 1680 it belonged to the principality of Hà Tiên, the maritime polity founded by the Chinese merchant Mạc Cửu under Cambodian patronage, which then turned to the Nguyễn court in Vietnam. The French missionary Pigneau de Behaine used the island as a base through the 1760s and 1780s to shelter Nguyễn Ánh, the fugitive prince hunted by the Tây Sơn who became the emperor Gia Long — an alliance that shaped Vietnam's next century.

Under French rule the island was a minor colonial outpost producing fish sauce, pepper and coconut, and it came with Cochinchina into modern Vietnam. Its sovereignty has been disputed more than once: Cambodia has claimed it, and the island was seized by a Khmer Rouge raiding party on 1 May 1975 and retaken by Vietnam soon afterwards. From 1953 to 1975 South Vietnam's largest prisoner-of-war camp stood at An Thới, holding some 40,000 prisoners in 1973 in conditions later documented in detail; a section of it is preserved as a museum.

For decades afterwards the island remained poor and remote, known for its fish sauce and its dogs. That changed quickly in the 2000s and 2010s: a new international airport opened in December 2012, roads were built the length of the island, and large resort and entertainment complexes went up in the south, along with a cable car to Hòn Thơm. In June 2025 Phú Quốc left Kiên Giang province — itself merged into An Giang that month — to become one of Vietnam's new special administrative zones, and the speed of the building is the island's central issue.

For all the new hotels, Phú Quốc is still a fishing island. The harbour at Dương Đông, the stilt village at Hàm Ninh and the port at An Thới organise the year around the weather, and the shrines reflect it: Dinh Cậu on its rock at the river mouth is where crews make offerings before sailing, and the whale worship of the southern coast, in which a stranded whale is buried and honoured as a protector of fishermen, is observed here as along the mainland shore.

The population is almost entirely a settler one, drawn from the delta provinces and, more recently, from all over Vietnam by the tourism boom, with a long- established Khmer and Chinese presence. That mix shows in the food and the temples, and in an atmosphere that is friendlier to newcomers than many Vietnamese places, since almost everyone is one.

The island's products are a point of identity. Nước mắm from Phú Quốc is the fish sauce most prized in Vietnam, and families have run the same vats for generations; pepper from the island is sold by the colour and the grade; and the Phú Quốc ridgeback, a local breed of dog with a whorl of hair along its spine, is a source of considerable local pride. Everyday courtesies are Vietnamese — modest dress away from the beach, shoes off indoors, respect for age — and Vietnamese holidaymakers, not foreigners, now make up most of the visitors.

About 180,000 people lived on the island at the 2020 count, most of them along the west coast between Dương Đông and An Thới. The town is the centre of ordinary life, with the market, the schools, the hospital and the harbour; the resort strips are a separate world of shuttle buses and staff accommodation, and the north and east remain villages among forest and pepper farms.

Work divides between fishing and fish processing, pepper and cashew farming, and tourism, which now employs a large share of the island and has pulled in workers from the mainland. Construction is constant. Land prices have risen enormously, and with them the strains that follow: pressure on fresh water, rubbish and sewage disposal, power supply, and the loss of forest and shoreline to building. Flooding has become a serious problem when heavy monsoon rain meets cleared land and blocked streams.

Days start before dawn at the harbour, when the night's catch is landed and sorted for the market and the fish-sauce vats. The heat empties the middle of the day. In the late afternoon the beaches fill, the night market sets up its tanks and grills, and by mid-evening Dương Đông is at its busiest — while the resorts in the south run to their own schedule entirely.

Seafood dominates, and it is cooked simply: crab steamed and served with salt, pepper and lime, squid grilled over charcoal, scallops baked with spring onion and peanut, and whole fish cooked over the fire. The dish that belongs to the island is gỏi cá trích, raw herring cured in lime juice and tossed with onion, chilli, herbs and grated coconut, then rolled in rice paper and dipped in a peanut sauce.

Breakfast is often bún quậy, a Phú Quốc invention: fresh rice noodles in a clear broth with fish or squid paste, where the diner mixes a dipping sauce from salt, sugar, lime and chilli at the table. Hải sản nướng, the mixed grill of shellfish at the night market, is the standard evening meal, and nhum, sea urchin, is eaten grilled with spring onion when it is in season.

The island's exports flavour everything else. Nước mắm Phú Quốc, made from anchovies salted straight from the boat and fermented in wooden vats for about a year, is the base of nearly every dipping sauce in the region. Phú Quốc pepper, grown on poles across the interior, is served as a dip of salt, pepper and lime rather than ground over food. Rượu sim, a sweet dark wine pressed from rose myrtle berries gathered in the forest, is the local drink, and coconut, cashew and tropical fruit fill out the markets.