Hoi An: fields before lanterns
Tra Que · An Bang · Cam Thanh · Ancient Town
Illustrative regional or transport photo; not a promised stop. ©
Ride the open lanes between vegetable plots and the coast while it is still cool. Save the old town for late afternoon, when the bike is parked and the river becomes the centre of the evening.
A port the river made
Hội An sits on the last few kilometres of the Thu Bồn, where the river breaks into arms and islands before the sea at Cửa Đại. Everything the town became follows from that geography. Over fifty sites of the Sa Huỳnh culture have been found here, mostly on the old sand dunes along the river, and Han-dynasty coins and Western Han iron tools show trade reaching the estuary as early as the first century BCE. Under Champa the settlement was called Lâm Ấp Phố; between the seventh and tenth centuries the Chams held the spice trade of this coast and grew rich on it. The river was the reason: goods came down from the highlands and from as far as Laos and Thailand, and went out through the estuary. When you ride the lanes east of town you are riding across that delta — sand under the asphalt, water on both sides, and a horizon of nipa palm where the river meets the tide.
Faifo: Japanese ships, Chinese halls
The name Hội An appears in the late sixteenth century, just as the town's great period began. In 1567 the Ming lifted their ban on trade with Southeast Asia while still restricting exports to Japan, which pushed Japanese merchants to buy Chinese goods in southern ports instead. The Nguyễn lords Nguyễn Hoàng and his son Nguyễn Phúc Nguyên built up Đàng Trong and its foreign trade, and Hội An became the busiest international port in the region. Between 1604 and 1635 at least 356 Japanese merchant ships sailed to Southeast Asia; seventy-five of them docked at Hội An in thirty years, against thirty-seven at Trịnh-controlled Tonkin. A Japanese quarter had formed by 1617. Europeans knew the place as Faifo — the missionary Alexandre de Rhodes defined Hoài Phố in his 1651 dictionary as a Japanese settlement in Cochinchina. The Chinese communities left five assembly halls, all on the even-numbered side of Trần Phú street, and the French added their own townhouses in the nineteenth century.
The bridge with two names
The covered bridge at the western end of Trần Phú was paid for by Japanese merchants around the seventeenth century, which is why it is still called the Japanese Bridge. It is a wooden structure on brick and stone piers, roughly eighteen metres long, roofed, arched over a stream that runs out to the Thu Bồn. In 1719 the lord Nguyễn Phúc Chu visited and gave it a second name, Lai Viễn Kiều — the bridge that welcomes guests from afar. It has been rebuilt six times: 1817, 1865, 1915, 1986 and, most recently, in a full restoration begun on 28 December 2022 that cost over 20.2 billion đồng, split equally between the province and the town, and reopened on 3 August 2024 after nineteen months of work. Each restoration removed a little more of the Japanese detail and added Vietnamese and Chinese; what stands is a Vietnamese building with a Japanese name. You have seen it before: it is on the back of the 20,000 đồng note.
One thousand three hundred and sixty relics
On 4 December 1999, at its twenty-third session in Marrakech, UNESCO inscribed the old town on the World Heritage list as a well-preserved Southeast Asian trading port of the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries. The listed area counted, as of December 2000, 1,360 relics: 1,068 ancient houses, 11 wells, 38 shrines, 19 pagodas, 43 temples, 23 city-god pavilions, 44 special tombs and one bridge. Offshore, between 1996 and 1999, nearly three hundred thousand artefacts were raised from a wreck by Vietnamese salvage teams working with Oxford University's marine archaeology division. In 2023 the town joined the UNESCO Creative Cities Network. The old town is also still a living place, which is the point of the lantern evenings: at each full moon, between 17:00 and 22:00, the houses, shops and restaurants switch off their electric lights and the streets are lit by the moon and by lanterns.
Why the fields come before the lanterns
The old town is walked, not ridden: you park at the edge and go in on foot. That single fact sets the shape of the day. Ride early, while the lanes between the vegetable plots and the coast are cool and empty, and keep the town for the evening. Trà Quế, four kilometres north-east, is eighteen hectares of herb beds worked by 202 households and 326 people; its growing method went onto Vietnam's national list of intangible cultural heritage in April 2022 and UN Tourism named it one of its Best Tourism Villages in 2024. East of that the water takes over: the nipa palm of Cẩm Thanh, part of the Cù Lao Chàm–Hội An Biosphere Reserve in UNESCO's Man and the Biosphere network, where fishing, crab and shrimp still pay for houses. South across the bridges is Cẩm Kim, an island of workshops and quiet lanes. Since the 2025 administrative reform all of this is formally part of the Da Nang municipality — the signs and the people still say Hội An.
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