Hoi An - Historical tour

Ben is great, first we stopped at the market for my ginger, then found Sara’s New Year decorations.
We started the tour of the old town at the Quang Dong assembly hall which was built by the Chinese to worship the sea god to give them safe passage. They even built a small model of the Great Wall of China to remember home. In the temple there were suspended coils of incense for different prayers, which take a month to burn!
We then went to the ceramics museum which is an old merchants house, before visiting a merchant’s house that is still lived in by the same family for 8 generations. There was a mark in the house to show where the floods have come upto - frighteningly high. When the property is flooded in the rains they put everything on the second floor. They are called long houses so in the front is the business, in the middle they have a courtyard to give light and air and at the back is the living quarters and kitchen. Finally the Japanese bridge. It was built by them as they were on one river bank and the Chinese on the other. It has a monkey statue at one end and a dog statue at the other to show which year it started and finished. Just after it was finished the Japanese were recalled to Japan so this is the only piece of Japanese architecture left in Vietnam.Read more