Hue to Hoi An

On Friday morning, the group headed by bus south from Hue to visit Danang and then spend this weekend in the 17th century trading port of Hoi An. We started our trip south heading over the famous Hai Van Pass, a finger of mountains that juts east-west from the Truong Son Range into the sea. This stretch of road was first built by King Minh Mang in 1820, and it winds up one side of the ridge and then down the other, about 10 km on either side. At the pass, we stopped to admire the views of Hue to the north and Danang to the south. While students such as Darren enjoyed the prospect of arranged marriages with the postcard sellers, I climbed up the hill across the street to check out three distinctive watchtowers. The first was built by Ming Mang out of brick and is one of the tallest such structures. Behind it then the French built in the 1880’s a second brick tower. Finally, in the 1960’s, Americans added a third squat tower built out of concrete. The Viet Minh captured this strategic place along the only road connecting the two cities in 1952 from the French-African Legionnaires. It was repeatedly fought over again in the 1960’s.

In Danang we stopped at the Cham Museum, a colonial-era museum established to house the relics of valuable Cham statues and artwork from the various ancient Cham cities located as far north as Nghe An and south to Nha Trang. Who are the Chams? They were once a powerful sea-trading nation along the central VN coast from 200 BC to 1400 CE. They had extensive ties with India and China but really drew their cultural ties most strongly with the Indian merchant world—Cambodia, Srivijaya, East Java, and the Malabar coast of India. They followed Hinduism and as OW Wolters has argued adapted basic Hindu styles to perhaps more local forms – such as the rounded yoni that is covered around its side with breasts.

After stopping for lunch, we paid a visit to the marble carving shops at Marble Mountain. This mountain overlooked the first and largest US Marine Base, a spot overlooking China Beach where over a hundred thousand US Marines landed in 1965. I suppose it is a good thing that the students had no real interest in such historic trivia; our tour guide Phuoc explained that especially from May – July he leads dozens of American veterans who have a much harder time putting their painful memories from this place to rest. Perhaps inspired from the museum, Scuppy continued on her theme and proceeded to check out the funny bottoms here. Currently, she gets a real kick out of bottoms. Always gets a laugh.

Before we arrived at our hotel just outside Hoi An, we stopped in at a silk factory, the commodity that made this a thriving port town in the 1600’s. Hoi An was a red seal port, meaning it was one of the very few ports licensed to trade with an isolationist Ming-Qing China. China was in turmoil especially after the fall of the Ming in 1644. Chinese, Japanese and Portuguese trade associations made this small, once deep-water port their home, courtesy of the Vietnamese family that ruled this former Cham territory, the Nguyen. Hoi An had previously in the 13th and 14th century been a Cham port for the older but much smaller commerce in Indian and Chinese goods. After watching how silk is spun from a cocoon of the silkworm, we visited the showroom and Darren Schemmer, staying in character as an aspiring politician, chose a new silk tie for his growing collection. The factory is also one of many places that sells a kind of embroidered picture sewn by a team of ladies working in what seemed like pretty good conditions. The similarity to photographs is really incredible, and its all done by hand.