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Pho Hoi An

About 25km (15 miles) southeast of Da Nang and near the coast, the ancient town Hoi An nestlese on the banks of the Thu Bon River, a few kilometres inland from the coast. This charming old town was once a flourishing port and meeting place of East and West, in what was centrel Dai Viet under the Nguyen lords. Hoi An appeared in western travelogues in the 17th and 18th centuries as Faifo or Hai Po. Originally a sea port in the Champa kingdom and known as Dai Chien, by the 15th century it had become a coastal Vietnamese town under the Tran dynasty.

At the beginning of the 16th Century, the Portuguese came to explore the coast of Hoi An. Then came the Chinese, Japanese, Dutch, British and French. With them came the first missionaries - Italian, Portuguese, French, Spanish. Among them was Alexander of Rhodes, who adopted the Roman alphabet for the Vietnamese language.

For several centuries, Hoi An was one of the most important trading ports in Southeast Asia and an important centre of cultural exchange between East and West. By the beginning of the 19th century, Hoi An's soical and physical environment had changed drastically. The conflict between the Trinh and Nguyen lords and the Tay Son caused Hoi An considerable damage. Moreover, rivers changed course as the mouth of the Thu Bon silted up and prevented the flow of sea traffic. Another port was built at the mouth of Song Han - Da Nang, replacing Hoi An as the centre of trade.

Today, Hoi An is a quiet town of about 120,000 people - 12,000 of them living in the old quarter that has been restored an renovated as something of a historical showpiece for tourists. Many of the older homes, buillt with wood beams, carved doors and airy, open rooms, have been turned into souvenir shops fronting as museums.

In the early 1980s, UNESCO and the Polish government took the initiative and funded a restoration programme to classify and safeguard Hoi An's ancient quarters and historic monuments. Unfortunately many of Hoi An's monuments are threatened by yearly floods (mainly between October and November) when water spills over the river banks and submerges some streets in two to three metres of water. Hoi An is today a UNESCO World Heritage Site (www.hoianworldheritage.org). An admission ticket of 75,000 dong gains you entry to all its old streets, one each of the three museums and assembly halls, one of the four old houses, a traditinal music concert and a temple. The sites are open daily from 7am to 6pm.

Hoi An has become a popular tourist spot. In fact, older residents worry that the very thing that makes Hoi An attractive - its quiet charm - is being ruined. People will kindly invite visitors into their homes to look at the architecture, but some locals demand a donation. Today, in the old part of town, nearly 80 percent of the people derive their income from tourism. The rest of the residents work primarily as fishermen.