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River, where fleets of them
float through water-coconut
groves, the boatmen singing
and rocking to music as tourists
shriek in delight.
While few make the boats
by hand anymore, on Cam Kim
Island south of town, you can
still find 85-year-old Do Sung
squatting in his workshop, a
cigarette dangling from his
mouth as he hammers and
weaves. It takes him a month
to make a 4- to 6-foot-diameterboat, cutting long strips of bam-
boo, interlacing them on the
floor, then waterproofing the
basket with tree resin and water
buffalo dung. He will offer you
a chair with a smile so you can
watch him work.
A stroll through the streets
of the town at night can be mag-
ical if it’s not a weekend or a
holiday, when the crush of tour-
ists is almost overwhelming.
The wow factor comes from
the glowing lanterns, andHuynh Van Ba, 75, is the pio-
neer of their proliferation.
Before Vietnam opened to
tourism, lanterns were mostly
red and white paper globes con-
fined to the Chinese pagodas and
temples. When the travelers
arrived, they wanted to buy them.
“Foreigners were adoring
them, but there was only one
problem,” Huynh remem-
bers: The lanterns proved too
fragile to transport. So in the
1990s, government officialsAs a port city, Hoi An melds Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, and European influences.
above (2):
Do Sung has been mak-
ing bamboo basket boats
for six decades. At left,
he starts a boat, weav-
ing bamboo strips to
form the shell; each boat
takes a month to build.
Local fishermen still use
the boats, but he sells
them mostly to hotels
and tourist businesses.top left:
Japanese merchants
constructed this bridge
in Hoi An in 1593 to
connect their part of the
town with the Chinese
section. It was later
rebuilt and houses a
small temple on the back.top right:
Huynh Suong with one
of his signature bamboo
bird cages embedded in
tree roots. He is a 14th-
generation woodworker
and helps run his fam-
ily’s carpentry business.67