Want the Ultimate Souvenir? Head to Vietnam's Oldest Pottery Village
The Chăm people have been crafting the (super) old-school way for centuries.
I was inside Làng Gốm Chăm Bàu Trúc for about two hours before he beckoned me. Despite the scorching 98-degree heat, the man wore blue jeans, a long-sleeved red polo shirt, a checkered neck warmer and a bright yellow cap that would have made him stand out from the crowd if there was one. But there wasn’t. Just the woman behind the store’s counter, a few potters going about their day within, and me. In fact, I’d hardly noticed the overdressed man, as I was so focused on thoroughly inspecting the bowls and baby Buddhas poised in the Anjali Mudra and marveling at the devil-faced masks strung along the walls.
This was in Bàu Trúc, which is about a full day's drive from the capital of Hanoi. It's the oldest pottery village left in Vietnam—one inhabited by an ethnic minority group that originated around the 2nd century and was later influenced by Indian and Indonesian migrants. UNESCO officially put Chăm pottery on its “Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding” in 2022, noting that a lack of youth interest is one of the reasons it may go extinct, along with a lack of access to raw materials. But in the meantime, about 80% of the 500 families who live in Bàu Trúc still support themselves by making jars, pots, and vases.
Once the man signaled for me to follow him, we headed toward a kiln made from stacked bricks. Its hollow interior was barely visible through two triangular holes from which gnarled logs protruded. He pointed to the kiln and then to himself before pushing some wood into the fire.
But the man wasn’t finished with me. Instead, I followed him deeper into the building, past the gated entrance I’d entered from, and past some entwined trees with green leaves that sharply contrasted with the terracotta-colored pots they shaded. We finally stopped on a sheltered wooden patio where he began to unravel layers of wet cloth to reveal a beautiful little sculpture. It looked like a church—or some kind of religious building—with a pointed roof at its center that was surrounded by four smaller domes. It also had arched windows and doors and stood on a pillar of thick clay that elevated it high above the ground. Just as he did at the kiln, the man in the red polo pointed to the sculpture and then back at himself, his eyes shining with pride.
“Wow,” I exclaimed, assuming my enthusiasm would bypass the obvious language barrier.
But a man named Tuan, who appeared to be in his 40s, stepped in to translate anyway.
“He’s telling you he made it,” he said.
Tuan told me that, until relatively recently, men in his village were only allowed to do heavy lifting and carving, because it was considered common knowledge that they didn’t have the patience. I nodded, remembering an older woman in a coral maxi dress with a tasseled maroon scarf wrapped around her head who I’d seen earlier that day. She was walking in dizzying circles around a clay pot and gripping its edge with a wet cloth. Occasionally she’d stop to re-wet it in a metal bucket filled with murky water.
According to Tuan, that woman would eventually walk a little more than six miles to make a single pot. “All of us work from 6:30 am to 6:30 pm,” he explained. “I have been to many countries but I haven’t seen any pottery villages like this—they all use turning tables but here we don’t.”
I then asked about the kiln that the man in the red polo had shown me. “The Chăm people only use outdoor kilns,” he said. “If the weather is hot enough, sometimes we just leave them to air dry with a wet cloth on top, but most of the time they get put in the outdoor kiln.”
The pieces either came out reddish brown or black, with the latter coloring the result of soaking cashews in water and spraying it onto the pottery. With a new appreciation for how much this pottery was a labor of love, I did one last lap around the store. I ended up taking home two souvenirs: a smiling snail and a horned-bull ashtray. If I remember correctly, the cost was around eight dollars in total. But thanks to Tuan, I know they’re practically priceless.