Hoi An, Vietnam

HỘI AN, VIETNAM | "The Ancient Town of the Lanterns"

Hội An is the most perfectly preserved ancient trading port in Southeast Asia — a UNESCO World Heritage Site on the Thu Bồn River delta of central Vietnam where the 15th to 19th century merchant architecture of the Japanese, Chinese, and European trading communities has been maintained without interruption, creating a living townscape of yellow-ochre facades, covered wooden bridges, and assembly halls that documents the full diversity of the Indian Ocean trading world in a single square kilometer. The city was the most important trading port in the region during the 17th and 18th centuries, when Chinese, Japanese, Dutch, Portuguese, and Indian merchants occupied distinct neighborhoods and built the temples, warehouses, and meeting halls that define the townscape today. On the 14th of every lunar month the electricity is cut and the Ancient Town is illuminated entirely by the multicolored silk lanterns that hang from every building.

The colors are the specific palette of a tropical merchant city: the warm yellow-ochre of the lime-washed facades that appears in every photograph of the Ancient Town, the deep red of the Chinese paper lanterns hanging above the Thu Bồn River at the full moon festival, the brilliant green of the rice paddies visible at the edge of the town, and the extraordinary golden light of the lantern festival evening when the river fills with floating flower boats and the entire Ancient Town glows with a warm, diffuse illumination that has no equivalent in any other city.