Hội An has a problem for a certain kind of traveller. It is a beautiful, heavily visited town, and after two days walking streets of yellow houses and coloured lanterns you can end up feeling you have seen a very well-preserved postcard and not much else.
The way out is not to look for another town. It is to cross the river and go three kilometres out of the old centre, where there is a set of villages that have spent four or five centuries each doing one single thing: clay, timber, vegetables, silk. They are not an attraction added on to the old town. They are what holds it up.
01 A thousand and sixty-eight houses have to be maintained
Let us start with the figure almost nobody connects to the trades. Hội An's old town gathers 1,360 listed monuments across 30 hectares, and 1,068 of them are preserved old houses. It has been inscribed as a World Heritage Site since 4 December 1999.
A thousand and sixty-eight houses of timber and tile, in a climate that unloads 2,205 millimetres of rain a year and where the river floods almost every autumn. That does not preserve itself. It takes people who know how to replace a beam, remake a lattice, cut a tile to size, and who know how to do it the way it was done.
Those people exist, they have a name and they live on the other side of the Thu Bồn. That is the thread of this trip: not seeing craft as a show, but seeing the maintenance system of a World Heritage town.
02 Kim Bồng: the carpenters across the river
Kim Bồng sits on the right bank of the lower Thu Bồn, in the commune of Cẩm Kim, and you cross to it by ferry from the old town itself. The trade goes back to the sixteenth century, when carpenters arrived from Thanh Hóa and Nghệ An, in the north, and settled beside the port that was then booming.
The timber structures of much of the old town's housing were made here, and they are still repaired here. Boats are built here too. Kim Bồng's carpentry was recognised by the Vietnamese government as national intangible cultural heritage on 21 November 2016.
The detail worth looking for is a sign for a wood carvers' training workshop funded by UNESCO in April 1997. It predates the World Heritage inscription and explains part of the story: first somebody had to make sure there would still be people who knew how to do it.
A thousand and sixty-eight timber houses in a place that gets 2,205 millimetres of rain a year do not preserve themselves.
03 Thanh Hà: clay three kilometres away
Thanh Hà is about three kilometres from the old town, upriver, and it makes pottery. The village was formed between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, in what was then the village of Thanh Liêm, so it is contemporary with the port's rise.
What is produced here is the usual thing: brick, roof tile, kitchen ware, unglazed terracotta pieces. That is, exactly the materials the old town is made of. The connection is not accidental: the town was built from what was three kilometres away.
You can walk it along narrow alleys, go into family workshops where several generations are working and try the wheel. It is the most accessible stop of all and the one that works best if you are travelling with children.
04 Trà Quế: the market garden that supplies the kitchens
Trà Quế is about 2.5 kilometres north of the old town, in the commune of Cẩm Hà, and it too was formed in the sixteenth century. Nothing is manufactured here: things are grown. Aromatic herbs and vegetables, on small beds fertilised with weed from the nearby lagoon.
It is the third leg of the same system. This town's cooking depends on those beds just as its houses depend on the carpenters of Kim Bồng and the tiles of Thanh Hà. Four centuries of division of labour spread across five kilometres.
The visit here is more physical than at the other two: you walk between the beds and in many places you can join in the garden work. Go early, because it is the first thing to get hot.
05 The lanterns and the rest
Silk lanterns are Hội An's most visible trade and the one that has adapted most to the visitor, but that does not disqualify them. They are still assembled by hand, with a bamboo frame and a stretched silk cover, and there are workshops where you can build one in a couple of hours and take it away folded.
To that add silk itself and tailoring, which is what many people know the town for. If the process interests you more than the product, ask for the workshops where you can see the loom and not just the fitting room.
The useful test for telling a workshop from a shop window is simple: look at whether what is made there is also sold to local people. A potter who makes roof tiles as well as figurines, or a carpenter who repairs boats as well as carving souvenirs, still has a trade with customers.
06 How the trip is put together
Four to six days is enough and there is no need to change accommodation: everything is under five kilometres from Hội An. One day for Kim Bồng crossing by ferry, another for Thanh Hà, half a day for Trà Quế first thing and the rest for the old town and the silk and lantern workshops.
The ground is flat — you are on the Thu Bồn's alluvial plain — so a bicycle solves every journey without effort. The only real obstacle is the river, and that is what the Cẩm Kim ferry is for.
In the end, what changes this trip is the order in which you look at things. If you enter the old town after seeing where the tiles come from and who repairs the beams, it stops being a well-preserved postcard. It becomes a building of a thousand and sixty-eight pieces that somebody still maintains by hand.
