Hoi An

Hoi An has a languid, easy-going pace that makes it easy to forget about the modern world. Last night, I was walking home after playing pool. I crossed over the Japanese covered bridge (the most famous Hoi An landmark, also on the Vietnamese 20,000 dong notes) out of the livelier area of town into an area where everything was dark. I would have thought that the street was completely empty of people and houses if I had not seen the same street during the day. On the unlit street, the stars were bright in the sky. The only sounds came from the bats flying around.

Hoi An used to be a busy maritime port up until the early 20th century, when mechanized ships transferred all the commerce from Hoi An to Danang. Hoi An had been a port in ancient times for the Cham people as early as the 7th century AD, as demonstrated by excavated pieces of pottery that are displayed in the town's Museum of Ceramics. Trade in ceramics and other commodities brought many traders from all over Asia to Hoi An, and the Japanese and Chinese both had enclaves in Hoi An during the 17th and 18th centuries. Along with the influences of these cultures upon the city's architecture were the European colonial influences of the Portuguese and the French, and you get buildings that at times reminded me of the French Quarter in New Orleans, whereas other buildings reminded me of the Gion tea houses made of wood that I encountered during my trip to Kyoto. Indeed, the similarities between Japanese and Vietnamese architecture perhaps encouraged the two countries to work together in planning and executing the restoration of valuable historical buildings in Hoi An, starting during the 1990s and continuing today.

It was much like stepping into a time capsule of what life in the early 1900s would have been like when I wandered down some of the town's really old streets. Tailors in silk are constantly trying to get you into their shops, woodworkers are pounding away with hammers and chisels to create new carvings, and the fierce sunlight bleaches and fades the colors of the buildings.

The town contains many assembly halls that were built as gathering places for the different ethnicities of people that settled in the city for business. The ornate assembly hall I visited of the Fujian Congregation also served the purpose of a temple. Huge coils of incense hung from the ceiling of the hall and slowly burned, deities with gold-leaf exteriors shone in the light cast by candles on the altar, and murals depicting events from folk tales flanked the inside main entrance of the hall.

Later, I walked down a street with a row of houses whose fronts were all French colonnaded. Some of the other houses combine elements of Japanese architecture, Chinese architecture, and Vietnamese architecture all in the same house, depending on the room or the floor of the building. One of the houses that I visited was built in the middle of the 19th century and had been handed down over seven successive generations of the same family. The house had been able to withstand five large floods because of the house's strong wood, although the family had to live on the second floor to be above the level of the water during these catastrophes. In the beautiful interior of the house and peering out at the sunlit street, it's difficult to imagine the damage some of these floods must have caused to houses along the riverfront and all the additional restoration work that must have happened as a result.