Exhibitions of Hoi An Museum of Folklore

The Museum of Folklore in Hoi An is home to 490 artifacts that are classified in 4 themes: folk visual arts, folk performing arts, traditional craft villages, and folk activities. To see all of these, visitors need to walk around a large house with a total area of 900 m2. In the future, 350 other artifacts will be added soon (now, preserved in the storage).

From the entrance on Nguyen Thai Hoc Street, visitors will see a demonstration of silk making, one of key industries in Hoi An in both past and present. Between the 15th and 19th centuries, this town was a major marketplace in Southeast Asia, where locals and foreign merchants traded silk and fabric products. Nowadays, there are still some hundreds of tailors here. Lots of tourists come to Hoi An to make fashion items such as suit, dress, shirt, pant, etc.

Hoi An is the land of different folk performing arts, such as the Heavenly Dog Dance (mua thien cau), Ba Trao singing, Bai Choi bingo game. The Heavenly Dog Dance (or Unicorn Dance) is seen during the Mid-Autumn Festival which occurs on the 15th day of the 8th lunar month (around the 8th full moon). It’s kind of similar to the Lion Dance (mua lan) that is seen in the same festival. Young local boys will hold a heavenly dog head made by paper and perform. Meanwhile, other teammates will play drums, or act as other figures. When dancers come to a family, everyone will bow their heads and pray to express the respect to ancestors, and then dances to ward off bad evils. Due to war and introduction of modern dances, this folk dance becomes less popular or is only seen in special occasions.

On the other hand, Ba Trao singing is exclusive for fishermen living in central Vietnam, particularly two important festivals in their life: ‘whale festival’ and ‘festival of praying for fishes’. Performers are all men, wearing traditional costumes and rowing the paddle while singing. A group is from 10 to 16 persons. Some musical instruments are played throughout the performance.

The next performing art introduced is Bai Choi (or Hoi An Bingo Game), the traditional card game in villages across central Vietnam. Local people play it on a large and open yard in the spring, especially in the New Year Festival. In this yard, they build bamboo huts, and the players will sit there to play. The host has a tub containing many cards, each card has a word, and each player has three cards. To play, the game leader will shake the tub to let one card fall out. Based on the word on the falling card, he/she sings a song about it, and also lets players know what the word is. The game finishes when a player has three cards matched. At night, near An Hoi Bridge, visitors have the chance to watch and play this folk game with locals. In 2017, it’s honoured to be Unesco intangible cultural heritage of humanity. See more information & details

The next exhibition shows traditional works (fishing, trading, farming, selling traditional medicines), and handicraft villages in Hoi An. Thanh Ha Pottery Village is the only surviving pottery making village in the area. Local people here made pottery products by hand from a potter’s wheel, from some hundreds of years ago. At artisan’s houses, visitors can learn how to make an object by clay. On the other side of Thu Bon River, Kim Bong carpentry village is home of skillful artisans who specialized in building boats and carving wooden sculptures, carvings, furnitures or souvenirs. Fine wood buildings inside the Hoi An Ancient Town are constructed by their ancestors. The last long-standing craft is tailoring. In the past, Hoi An was a busy stopover in the Maritime Silk Road where foreigners came to buy silk and fabric. Nowadays, loads of tailor shops are in the city that are widely known for quick suit making.  

The fourth theme of the Museum of Folklore is about the life of people. Visitors will see a space of traditional Vietnamese houses with different places for cooking, eating, sleeping, and worshipping. Other communities of Hoi An, such as Chinese and Japanese, have their own space like that as well. At another corner of the exhibition, the costumes of all three nationalities are displayed, to let us know better about what and how they wear daily. Last but not least interesting, wedding customs of Vietnamese people in town have some differences to northerners or southerners. It’s definitely a good subject to learn about.

The exhibition on the ground floor, by the entrance on Bach Dang Street, introduces traditional lantern making and mask painting. If interested, visitors can join local artisans in making an item and then bring it home as a souvenir.