Hội An — the lantern town

When night falls over the old town, something magical happens. One by one, hundreds of silk lanterns light up — red, yellow, pink, blue, shaped like spheres, diamonds, bulbs — and mirror themselves in the river that runs through the city. Children set little floating candles adrift on the water, and they scatter like fallen stars. The car-free streets fill with a slow-moving crowd, the air smells of incense and soup, and the ochre facades of the old houses take on the color of honey. Welcome to Hội An (roughly "hoy ann"), the town of lanterns, surely the most endearing of Vietnam's cities — a miraculously preserved old merchant port where you feel you're traveling back in time.

A port at the crossroads of worlds

To understand Hội An, you have to go back several centuries. Between the 15th and 18th centuries, this town in central Vietnam was one of the most flourishing trading ports in all of Southeast Asia. Its river, the Thu Bồn, opened onto the sea and welcomed ships that came and went with the monsoons (the seasonal winds that governed all navigation back then).

Merchants came from everywhere: Chinese, Japanese, but also Dutch, Portuguese, and Indians. They traded silk, ceramics, spices, tea, and precious woods. Some settled, married local women, built houses, temples, and assembly halls for their communities. It's from this mixing that Hội An's very particular soul was born: a Vietnamese town, yes, but woven with Chinese, Japanese, and European influences still visible at every street corner today.

Over time, the port silted up and the great trade moved elsewhere, notably to nearby Đà Nẵng. Paradoxically, this decline was a blessing: frozen in its slumber, the town was neither destroyed nor over-modernized, and it crossed the centuries almost intact. Today its old town (phố cổ, "feu koh," literally "the old quarter") is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The Japanese covered bridge

If one had to choose an emblem, it would be the Japanese covered bridge, in Vietnamese Chùa Cầu ("chua kow"), which literally means "the pagoda-bridge" — a bridge that shelters a small temple. Built centuries ago by the town's Japanese community, it's a covered wooden bridge with a curved roof, spanning a small canal.

At each end, statues of guardian animals keep watch — dogs on one side, monkeys on the other. Legend tells several stories about them; it's said, for instance, that the bridge was begun in a Year of the Monkey and finished in a Year of the Dog. Inside, a tiny altar is dedicated to a protective deity. This small bridge, graceful and intriguing, is so dear to the country that it appears on Vietnamese banknotes.

The old houses and the assembly halls

To wander through Hội An is to step into its old houses (nhà cổ). Some families have lived in the same dwelling for many generations and open their doors to visitors. Inside you discover an architecture designed for trade and for the climate: a shop on the street, an open courtyard in the middle for light and air, a warehouse giving onto the river at the back. The dark wood is finely carved, blending Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese motifs.

Many of these houses still bear the marks of floods: each autumn the river can rise and flood the ground floor, and you sometimes see, painted on a wall, the marks of past great inundations. Residents have learned to live with the water, hauling furniture and goods upstairs when the river swells.

The Chinese communities, for their part, left behind sumptuous assembly halls (hội quán), at once places of worship and communal houses where merchants from the same home region gathered. Ornate gateways, ceramic dragons, courtyards perfumed by incense spirals burning slowly overhead: these places breathe the fervor and prosperity of times past.

The town of tailors and artisans

Hội An has also always been a town of skilled hands. Its most vivid reputation today is that of its tailors (thợ may, "theu my"). In hundreds of workshops, you can have a shirt, a suit, or a dress made to measure in a surprisingly short time — sometimes a copy of a garment brought in as a photo. This tradition extends the town's great textile past: here, silk (lụa) has always been queen, from the silkworm's thread to the shimmering fabrics.

Around it, a whole world of craft endures: the pottery of the neighboring village of Thanh Hà, the fine woodwork of Kim Bồng, the making of lanterns. For Hội An's famous lanterns don't fall from the sky: artisans patiently bend bamboo rods into frames and then dress them in stretched, colored silk. Many workshops invite visitors to make one with their own hands.

The lanterns and the full-moon festival

But it's at night that Hội An reveals its purest beauty. Every evening, the lanterns already transform the old town into a colored dream. And once a month, at the full moon (rằm, "zam"), the magic doubles: it's the lantern festival. On that night, electric lighting is dimmed as much as possible, and the town lives only by the trembling glow of lampions and candles.

On the Thu Bồn River, custom has it that you set little paper floating lanterns adrift, a candle lit at the center. As you give them to the current, you make a wish, a prayer for a loved one, a word of thanks. Dozens, hundreds of these little lights drift slowly away over the black water, carried by the river's flow. The sight is overwhelmingly gentle.

All around, the festival is in full swing: traditional music, old-fashioned games, stalls of bánh (cakes and fritters) and local specialties like cao lầu, those thick noodles unique to Hội An that, it's said, can be found nowhere else, because the water used to make them supposedly comes from the town's ancient wells.

A port cuisine, blended and generous

A town of trade and encounters, Hội An also has one of the country's most refined cuisines, itself born of that mixing. Beyond the cao lầu already mentioned, two dishes are worth the trip on their own. The first, hoành thánh (dumplings and wontons inherited from Chinese cooking), fried or in broth, crisp and delicate. The second, a little marvel with a charming name: bánh bao bánh vạc, nicknamed "white roses," because these translucent, hand-pinched rice-flour dumplings look like tiny flowers of pale petals.

You should also try Hội An's bánh mì, that sandwich born of the meeting between the baguette inherited from the French and Vietnamese flavors — pâté, herbs, pickled vegetables, secret sauces — which certain stalls in town have made so famous that people queue for one, still warm, crisp outside and soft within. This street food is best enjoyed at random through the markets, a stool beneath you, watching life go by.

Simply getting lost

The real pleasure of Hội An can't be planned: it's gathered by strolling. Rent a bicycle (xe đạp) and glide between the rice fields and palm groves down to the beach. Sit by the water with an iced coffee and watch the boats go by. Haggle over a conical hat. Let yourself be surprised by an alley, a courtyard, a temple. In the evening, come back to the lanterns, again and again.

At the town's edges, the countryside extends the stroll. The market-garden village of Trà Quế grows its fragrant herbs by age-old methods, between rows of lettuce; the water-coconut groves of Cẩm Thanh are explored aboard the famous round bamboo basket-boats, the thúng chai, which the rowers sometimes spin on the spot to delight visitors. And if you push a little farther, you reach the sanctuary of Mỹ Sơn, a cluster of brick temples built by the ancient Cham kingdom, also UNESCO-listed — proof that this central region was, long before the age of merchants, a crossroads of civilizations.

Few towns can hold together, the way Hội An does, the weight of history and the lightness of a festival evening. You arrive for the old stones; you leave with, in your eyes, the glow of a candle drifting away on the river.

Vietnamese to remember

• Hội An (hoy ann) — the "town of lanterns," a former merchant port
• phố cổ (feu koh) — the old town, the old quarter
• đèn lồng (den long) — the lantern
• Chùa Cầu (chua kow) — the Japanese covered bridge, emblem of the town
• chùa (chua) — the pagoda, the Buddhist temple
• nhà cổ (nya koh) — the old house
• hội quán (hoy kwan) — the assembly hall of a merchant community
• thợ may (theu my) — the tailor
• lụa (loo-ah) — silk
• rằm (zam) — the full moon (a festival day)
• cao lầu (kao low) — the signature noodles of Hội An
• sông (song) — the river