Vietnam Travel > Travel Special Features > Vietnam - A Coastal Journey > Hoi An - Where Time Stands Still
Hoi An - Where Time Stands Still
It's spring in the year 1967 and Hoi An's harbour is a forest of masts. In the market, sailors and traders push their way past stacks of colorful silks, green tea, ivory and beeswax. Chinese peddlers sing the praises of their medicinal herbs; Portuguese merchants display the latest firearms; Indian traders offer fragrant oils and spices.
Today, standing in Hoi An's central market surrounded by woman selling bananas and world-weary chickens, it's still possible to imagine those great trade fairs, when all of the earth's riches were on display. Lock past the crockery sellers and the fishwives to the Thu Bon River – Hoi An's former lifeline. Brightly painted wooden boats bob sleepily in the harbour and children paddle in the muddy water.
Now, leaving the river behind, push through the covered market in the town spare, where you're met by Chua Ong, the long, red-faced temple built in 1653 and dedicated to a larger-than-life Chinese general. Resist exploring its shady, incense-wreathed interior and head left along Tran Phu Street, past the finely wrought wooden shop-fronts of the merchant's houses and the gaudy red facades, lies Hoi An's best-known monument: the wooden Japanese Covered Bridge.
From the mid-15th century until 1639, when the Japanese Shogun prohibited foreign travel, Hoi An - or Fai Fo, as it was then known - had a sizable Japanese community. Built in the mid-16th century, the Japanese Covered Bridge linked "Japanese Street" (Tran Phu) with the Chinese district. But, along with this mundane purpose, the bridge had a more romantic raison d'etre.
According to local legend, the bridge was built following a series of devastating earthquakes in Japan. Geomancers had determined that en evil dragon - like creature by the name of Cu lay beneath the earth, with its head in India, its tail in Japan and its heart in Hoi An. Whenever the beast moved it caused natural disasters. The bridge, built on its weakest point, is said to have killed the creature.
Far Fo, however, had its own Achilles heel; the trading town's fate was sealed when the harbour became choked with silt in the late 18th century. Then China's ports were forced open and the schooners and junks moved on, leaving Hoi An to its self, like an old man nodding off in the sun and dreaming of past adventures.
Of course, it is thanks to the town's having been stuck in the mud for centuries that visitors are now coming back. Declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1999, Hoi An is a conservationist's dream, a town where cars and motorbikes are banned from the oldest streets, antique building are lovingly preserved and restored, and history and business go hand in hand.
Visitors can sit among family heirlooms in Tan Ky House, a late eighteenth century jack wood shop-house. They can sip lotus tea in the 200-year old Tran Family Chapel, while learning about the family's fortunes over the past 13 generations. And, on the 15theve of each lunar month, they can participate in the town's lantern festival, when all electric lights and appliances are shut off and the streets are bathed in the jeweled glow of hundreds of colored silk lanterns.
Random Photos
