Hội An

Where it sits. Hội An stands on the north bank of the Thu Bồn river in Quảng Nam Province, about four kilometres inland from the South China Sea and 30 kilometres south of Da Nang. The old town is compact — a grid of five or six streets running parallel to the river, with Trần Phú as the spine — and it is walkable end to end in twenty minutes. Beyond it lie sandbanks, water-coconut channels and rice fields, then the beaches of An Bàng and Cửa Đại, and 15 kilometres offshore the granite Chàm Islands, a UNESCO biosphere reserve.

The story behind it. This stretch of coast was a Cham trading port well before the Vietnamese arrived, and from the late 16th century Hội An — Faifo to Europeans — became one of Southeast Asia's principal international harbours. Chinese and Japanese merchants settled in their own quarters under the Nguyễn lords, joined by Dutch, Portuguese and later French traders, exchanging silk, ceramics, pepper, cinnamon and medicinal products on the rhythm of the monsoon, which pinned crews here for months at a time. The Japanese community was withdrawn in the 1630s under the Tokugawa isolation policy; the Chinese stayed and built the assembly halls that still organise the old town. Hội An declined in the 19th century as the Thu Bồn silted and Da Nang took the deep-water trade, and that economic failure is exactly why the architecture survived: nothing was rebuilt because nobody had a reason to. UNESCO inscribed Hội An Ancient Town in 1999 as an exceptionally well-preserved example of a Southeast Asian trading port.

On screen. Hội An's screen history is French and American in equal measure. Régis Wargnier used the town in Indochine in 1992, filming among locations in Hạ Long, Huế and Tam Cốc, and its unrenovated shophouse streets did much of the work of putting a 1930s colonial world on camera. Ten years later Phillip Noyce shot The Quiet American here, adapting Graham Greene's novel with Michael Caine and Brendan Fraser; Hội An stood in for parts of 1950s Saigon and its riverfront appears repeatedly. The town is also a fixture of Vietnamese period drama and, more recently, of the international short-form video economy, which has changed the streets more than either film did.

What you actually see today. The signature building is the Japanese Covered Bridge, a short roofed span built by the Japanese community around the turn of the 17th century, with a small temple to the guardian deity Trấn Vũ set into its northern side and pairs of stone dogs and monkeys at its ends. It appears on the 20,000 đồng banknote. A full structural restoration completed in 2024 drew heavy criticism in Vietnam for leaving the bridge looking too new — a fair debate about whether conservation should preserve patina or fabric. Beyond it: four Chinese assembly halls, of which the Fujian hall dedicated to the sea goddess Thiên Hậu is the most elaborate; merchant houses such as Tấn Ký, built in the 1740s and lived in by the same family for seven generations, with Chinese poetry inlaid in mother-of-pearl and flood-level marks on the wall; the Quan Công temple; and rows of ochre-washed shophouses with wooden shutters and moss on the roof tiles. A ticket bought at the town's booths admits the holder to a set number of heritage sites.

Food and cloth. Two local dishes are properly local. Cao lầu is a thick, chewy noodle with pork, greens and crisp squares of fried dough, traditionally made with water from a particular ancient well and lye from Chàm Islands wood ash, which is why it is difficult to reproduce elsewhere. Bánh bao bánh vạc, the white rose dumpling, is made by a handful of families who supply most of the town. Hội An is also Vietnam's tailoring capital, with hundreds of shops turning around made-to-measure clothing in a day or two; quality varies enormously and the cheapest quotes generally reflect it.

Getting there and timing. Da Nang international airport is 40 minutes away by taxi, and the coastal road past Marble Mountain and My Khe beach is the pleasant route. February to May is dry and mild; June to August is hot; the rainy season peaks in October and November, when the Thu Bồn regularly floods the old town and shopkeepers move stock upstairs using ceiling pulleys installed for the purpose. On the 14th day of each lunar month the town cuts its electric lighting for the lantern night, and silk lanterns and paper candles on the river do the rest. Streets are flat and mostly pedestrianised, which makes the old town more wheelchair-friendly than most Vietnamese heritage sites, though the old houses have high thresholds and steep internal stairs.