Hội An Ancient Town

Hội An Ancient Town is the historic core of Hội An, a small town on the Thu Bồn River in central Vietnam, close to where the river meets the South China Sea. From the fifteenth to the nineteenth century it was an international trading port. Merchants from East Asia, Southeast Asia and Europe came here to buy and sell, and some of them settled and built their houses, temples and meeting halls.

Unlike many old ports, Hội An was never rebuilt as a modern city. When its trade declined in the nineteenth century, the town kept its narrow streets and wooden buildings. UNESCO describes it as an exceptionally well-preserved example of a traditional Southeast Asian trading port, and inscribed it on the World Heritage List in 1999.

The name Hội An, written 會安 in Chinese characters, can be translated as “peaceful meeting place”. European sailors and missionaries called the town Faifo, a name that probably came from the Vietnamese Hội An phố, “the town of Hội An”.

The old town lies along the north bank of the river. Its main streets run parallel to the water, crossed by short lanes that lead down to the riverside. Shops once faced the street at the front, while their back doors opened onto the river so that goods could be loaded straight from boats. The streets closest to the river, such as Bạch Đằng and Nguyễn Thái Học, were built on land that formed as the river deposited sediment in the nineteenth century.

The most common building is the tube house: a narrow, deep shop-house, often only 4 to 8 metres wide but 10 to 40 metres long. From front to back it may contain a shop, a living area, an open courtyard that brings in light and air, more rooms, and a kitchen at the rear. An ancestral altar usually sits in an honoured position inside. Many houses have two storeys, with heavy timber frames, tiled roofs and carved wooden panels.

Along Trần Phú Street stand the assembly halls built by Chinese communities from different home regions, such as Fujian, Guangdong, Chaozhou and Hainan. They served as temples, social clubs and mutual-aid centres. There are also Vietnamese communal houses (đình), Buddhist pagodas, family chapels and a few French colonial buildings with pastel façades from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

By an inventory made around 2000, the World Heritage site contained about 1,360 historic structures, including some 1,068 old houses, wells, shrines, pagodas, temples, communal houses and tombs, and one bridge.

A Chinese assembly hall is best read from the street inward. A decorated gate opens onto a courtyard, often with plants, stone lanterns or a pond, and beyond it stands the main hall with the altar of the community’s patron deity. Carved roof ridges, dragon and phoenix motifs, and incense coils hanging from the ceiling mark these spaces as places of worship, while side rooms were used for meetings and for helping newcomers from the same home region.

The symbol of Hội An is the Japanese Covered Bridge, known in Vietnamese as Chùa Cầu, “temple bridge”. It is a wooden footbridge about 18 metres long with a tiled roof, crossing a small stream that once separated the Japanese quarter from the rest of the town. A small temple is attached to one side of the bridge.

Tradition says Japanese merchants began building it in the 1590s, but the exact date is uncertain. The bridge appears as the “Hội An Bridge” on a Vietnamese map of the seventeenth century. In 1719 the Nguyễn lord Nguyễn Phúc Chu visited and gave it the name Lai Viễn Kiều, “Bridge for Guests from Afar”, which is still written on a plaque above the temple door.

Statues of monkeys stand at one end and dogs at the other. One explanation is that building began in a Year of the Monkey and ended in a Year of the Dog. A legend links them to a giant catfish-monster (in Japanese folklore, the namazu) whose movements cause earthquakes; the bridge was said to pin it down. Because the bridge was repaired many times, in 1817, 1865, 1915, 1986 and again in the 2020s, very little of its original Japanese form survives.

Long before the town took its name, the lower Thu Bồn valley was a meeting point between sea and land. Archaeologists have found dozens of sites of the Sa Huỳnh culture, an Iron Age culture known for jar burials, in the Hội An area. Finds such as Chinese Han-dynasty coins suggest that trade reached here by the last centuries BCE.

From around the second century CE the region became part of the lands of the Cham people, who spoke an Austronesian language and built the kingdom or federation of kingdoms known as Champa. The Thu Bồn valley was one of Champa’s heartlands: the religious sanctuary of Mỹ Sơn and the royal centre at Trà Kiệu lie upstream, and the river mouth near Hội An served as a harbour on the maritime trade routes linking China, Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean. Chinese and Arab sources describe Champa as a supplier of aromatic woods, such as eaglewood (agarwood).

The Vietnamese state of Đại Việt expanded south over several centuries. In 1471 the Lê emperor Lê Thánh Tông defeated Champa decisively, and the Thu Bồn region came under Vietnamese rule. Vietnamese settlers moved into the area, although Cham communities and influences remained in central Vietnam.

Hội An’s great age began in the late sixteenth century, when Vietnam was divided between two rival families. The Trịnh lords dominated the north, while the Nguyễn lords ruled the south, called Đàng Trong. From 1558 Nguyễn Hoàng governed the southern region, and he and his successors encouraged foreign trade. They needed revenue and imported goods, including copper and weapons, for their long wars with the Trịnh.

Timing mattered. In 1567 Ming China reopened private overseas trade but continued to forbid direct trade with Japan because of piracy. Japanese and Chinese merchants therefore met in neutral third ports in Southeast Asia. Hội An was ideal. Between 1604 and 1635 the Tokugawa shogunate licensed Japanese merchant voyages on so-called Red Seal ships, and dozens of them sailed to Hội An, more than to almost any other port. Japanese silver and copper were exchanged for Chinese silk, Vietnamese sugar, agarwood and other goods.

A Japanese quarter grew up on one side of the stream, and a Chinese quarter on the other. Portuguese traders and Jesuit missionaries were active here too, and Dutch and later English merchants tried to establish trading posts. Merchants arrived with the seasonal monsoon winds and stayed for months, holding a great trade fair each year.

When Japan restricted overseas travel in the 1630s, the Japanese community shrank and gradually blended into local society. Chinese merchants, many from Fujian, took their place. After the fall of the Ming dynasty in 1644, Chinese refugees loyal to the Ming settled in Hội An and founded the village of Minh Hương. They married local women, became Vietnamese subjects, and played a leading role in the town’s commerce. An English visitor in 1695 recorded that only a few Japanese-style houses remained and that the Chinese now controlled most of the trade.

The late eighteenth century brought disaster. During the Tây Sơn uprising, Trịnh forces captured the region in 1775 and much of the commercial district was destroyed. An English visitor in 1778 described the ruins of what had been a handsome brick town. Merchants fled south, and although Hội An was rebuilt, it never regained its former importance.

Nature also turned against the port. The river mouth and the channels linking Hội An to Đà Nẵng silted up, making it hard for larger ships to reach the town. The Nguyễn dynasty, which unified Vietnam in 1802, restricted trade with Western countries. After 1888, when Đà Nẵng became a French concession, much commerce moved there.

Most of the houses and assembly halls visible today actually took their present form in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when Vietnamese and Chinese residents rebuilt the town. Hội An remained a regional market and administrative centre, but in the twentieth century it became a quiet backwater. That quietness spared it from the wartime destruction and rapid redevelopment that transformed many other Vietnamese cities.

Hội An is not a museum emptied of people. Families still live and trade in many of the old houses, and some houses have been cared for by the same family for generations. The assembly halls still hold festivals for their patron deities, such as the sea goddess Thiên Hậu (Mazu), protector of sailors.

The town’s religious landscape reflects its many communities: Vietnamese communal houses honouring village guardian spirits, Buddhist pagodas, a temple to the Chinese god Guan Yu (Quan Công), ancestral chapels of Chinese-Vietnamese families, and Japanese merchant tombs in the fields outside town.

Traditional crafts and foods add to the town’s identity: lantern making, tailoring, carpentry, and dishes such as cao lầu noodles. Since 1998 the town has held a monthly Full Moon Festival, during which electric lights are dimmed, motor traffic is banned in the centre, and lanterns and candles light the streets and river. The festival was proposed as part of heritage conservation efforts, and it has become one of Hội An’s best-known images.

Interest in conserving Hội An grew in the 1980s. The Polish architect and conservator Kazimierz Kwiatkowski, who worked in Vietnam on the monuments of Huế and Mỹ Sơn, also studied and promoted Hội An until his death in 1997. Vietnamese, Japanese and other international experts carried out surveys of the old houses, and a statue of Kwiatkowski now stands in the town.

The Vietnamese government listed the town as a national heritage site in 1985. UNESCO inscribed it as a World Heritage Site in December 1999, recognising it as an outstanding material expression of the fusion of cultures over time in an international commercial port, and as an exceptionally well-preserved traditional Asian trading port. In 2009 it was upgraded to a Special National Heritage Site, and a buffer zone protects its surroundings.

Conservation faces real challenges. The low-lying town floods almost every year during the rainy season, from about September to January, when the Thu Bồn rises into the streets; timber buildings suffer from damp and termites. Climate change and sea-level rise add to these risks. Mass tourism brings income but also pressure: many residents have turned houses into shops, cafés and tailors, and some have moved out of the centre.

Hội An’s heritage is also tied to its natural setting. Together with the offshore Chàm Islands, the town forms part of the Cù Lao Chàm–Hội An Biosphere Reserve, designated by UNESCO in 2009, and in 2023 Hội An joined the UNESCO Creative Cities Network. Conservation officials therefore try to protect not only buildings but also the river, the surrounding villages, the fishing economy and the crafts that give the town its character.

Hội An raises classic problems of heritage authenticity. Timber buildings in a humid, flood-prone climate need constant repair, and many elements have been replaced over the centuries. What makes a house “authentic” is therefore less the age of each beam than the continuity of form, craft technique, use and ownership. The repeated restorations of the Japanese Bridge, most recently in the 2020s, have prompted public debate about how much renewal is acceptable and which historical layer should be shown.

Dating the buildings is difficult. Few houses carry reliable construction dates, and written records are scattered among Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese and European sources. Architectural surveys since the 1990s, including cooperation between Vietnamese and Japanese researchers, have dated most surviving houses to the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, after the destruction of 1775. The townscape is thus a rebuilt trading town that preserves an older street plan and building tradition rather than a direct survival from the seventeenth century.

The town’s image also carries national narratives. In Japan, Hội An is remembered as a centre of the Red Seal trade and the Japanese diaspora before the closure of the country. In China and among Chinese-Vietnamese communities, the assembly halls testify to the Ming loyalist Minh Hương. Vietnamese historiography emphasises the policies of the Nguyễn lords and the southward expansion of the Vietnamese state, a story that for the Cham meant conquest. Historians increasingly write Hội An into a regional history of the South China Sea, in which ports were nodes of mobile, mixed communities rather than possessions of one nation.

A further debate concerns tourism. Heritage listing brought prosperity to a town that had been poor, and tourism now dominates its economy. Yet studies and official reviews have warned that rapid tourism growth threatens the sustainability of Hội An and of the nearby marine protected area around the Chàm Islands. Researchers ask whether a heritage town remains “living” when many original residents leave and houses become stage sets for visitors, and how income from tickets and tourism can be returned to the families who maintain the buildings.

Our knowledge of Hội An’s trade combines very different kinds of evidence. Vietnamese sources include a seventeenth-century route map that marks Hội An and its bridge, and later official records. Japanese sources include Red Seal licences and a painted scroll of the Chaya merchant family showing a voyage to Hội An and its Japanese quarter. European sources include the dictionary and maps of the Jesuit Alexandre de Rhodes and the reports of English and Dutch merchants such as Thomas Bowyer (1695) and Charles Chapman (1778).

Underwater archaeology adds another perspective. The so-called Hội An wreck, found near the Chàm Islands off the coast and excavated between 1996 and 1999 by a team including Vietnamese salvage specialists and Oxford University archaeologists, carried a large cargo of Vietnamese ceramics of the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century. Nearly 300,000 artefacts were recovered, and part of the cargo was later sold at auction, a decision that raised ethical questions about the commercial exploitation of underwater heritage.

Land archaeology in and around Hội An has revealed Sa Huỳnh cemeteries, Cham remains and the traces of the Japanese and Chinese periods, and the town’s museums display trade ceramics from China, Japan, Thailand and the Islamic world. Together, maps, texts, standing buildings and excavated objects allow historians to reconstruct Hội An not as an isolated monument but as a hub in networks linking Nagasaki, Guangzhou, Manila, Batavia, Malacca and beyond.