Three of the Old Town’s four museums are about a Hoi An that has gone: burial jars, shipwreck ceramics, a vanished port. This one is about the Hoi An that is still running. The card game you hear being sung by the river at seven every evening is in a case here. So is the lion head that comes out at Mid-Autumn, the loom that clothed the port, the chisels from the carpentry village across the water, and a whole wedding laid out as it used to be.

Hoi An Museum of Folk Culture: what it covers

The museum opened on 24 March 2005, the fourth of the Old Town’s specialist museums after History and Culture (1989), Sa Huynh (1994) and Trade Ceramics (1995). The Museum of Folk Culture puts 483 objects across 369 m² of display space, with another 346 in store, and organises them into four themes: folk fine art, folk performing arts, traditional crafts and everyday life.

It is run by the Hoi An Centre for Cultural Heritage Management and Preservation and is one of the twenty-one sites on the Old Town ticket. The distinction from the other three is worth holding onto: this collection is not archaeology. Nearly everything in it has a living descendant somewhere within a few kilometres — a workshop, a kiln, a boat, a song.

Where it is and walking there

Address 33 Nguyen Thai Hoc, with a second entrance at 62 Bach Dang on the riverfront. Both doors work, and the smart move is to go in one and out the other — you arrive on one street and leave on a different one. From our shop at 84 Phan Chau Trinh it is 700 m, about 9 minutes on foot, measured on Google Maps: east along Phan Chau Trinh, right down Le Loi to Nguyen Thai Hoc, then left a short way — brown two-storey timber frontage on your right.

• On foot. Nguyen Thai Hoc and Bach Dang are deep in the pedestrian core, closed to motorbikes 9:00–11:00 and 15:00–21:30. See the Old Town vehicle-free hours, or leave the bike with us for free.
• From the Japanese Covered Bridge: six minutes east along Nguyen Thai Hoc.
• From Hoi An Market: three minutes — same street.

Ticket, hours and the closed day

Two dates to keep straight, because the Old Town museums do not all rest on the same day: this one closes on the 20th, and the Sa Huynh Culture Museum closes on the 10th. If your single full day lands on either, the other one is open.

Both doors have a ticket check, and panels are in Vietnamese and English throughout. How the ticket works overall is in our guide to the Hoi An entrance ticket, and the machines in the smart ticket kiosks.

The Museum of Folk Culture is a 57-metre house

Before you look in a single case, look at the building. It is a classic port-town house taken to an extreme: 57 m long, 9 m wide, two storeys, timber floors, and open at both ends — shopfront on Nguyen Thai Hoc, river landing on Bach Dang, with a sky-well and a wooden staircase in between. It is generally described as the largest two-storey timber house in the Old Town.

That shape is the whole economic logic of old Hoi An in one plan. Goods came off a boat at the back, were stored in the middle, and were sold at the front. Duc An and Tan Ky have the same street-to-river arrangement; this one is simply much bigger. Stand in the sky-well and look up at the ironwood columns and the stacked roof beams before you start reading labels.

The other museums tell you what Hoi An used to be. This one tells you what people in Hoi An are still doing.

Four themes, in the order to walk them

• Ground floor, front room — folk fine art. Carved wooden deity figures, roof-beam and door carving, ink paintings, gilded boards, plus the painting of the old port and the scale model of the town.
• Ground floor, middle — folk performing arts. The Thien Cau lion head used in Hoi An’s own Mid-Autumn dance, the instruments and costumes of hat ba trao (the fishing villages’ oar-rowing chant), and the cards and bamboo huts of bai choi.
• Ground floor, rear towards Bach Dang — traditional crafts. A ghe bau trading boat and fishing nets, merchants’ scales, farming tools, a herbalist’s cabinet, the chisels of the Kim Bong carpenters, the wheel and pots of Thanh Ha pottery, and silk looms.
• Upper floor — everyday life. Vietnamese, Chinese and Japanese dress from the port years, household objects, and a traditional wedding reconstructed in full with mannequins, offering trays and costume.

Eight objects worth stopping for

• The port painting and the town model. First room. Everything afterwards makes more sense once you have seen where the river used to run.
• The Thien Cau lion head. Hoi An’s Mid-Autumn dance uses a horned “heavenly dog” head that is noticeably different from the lion of Hanoi or Saigon. It comes out on the streets here every autumn.
• A set of 30 hand-painted bai choi cards with a model bamboo hut — the game and sung calling that UNESCO inscribed as intangible heritage in 2017.
• The ghe bau. The sail-driven cargo boat of the old port, with the nets, traps and round basket boats of the Cua Dai fishing villages.
• The silk loom. Sericulture and weaving from Ma Chau in Duy Xuyen, which supplied cloth to the whole port.
• Kim Bong chisels and the Thanh Ha potter’s wheel. The two villages across the river that built the Old Town and tiled it.
• The herbalist’s cabinet of many small drawers — the same kind of counter still standing in Duc An.
• The wedding upstairs. Bride, groom, offering trays and dress, laid out complete. It is the photograph most people take away.

See the bai choi cards, then go and hear them

This is the reason to visit the Museum of Folk Culture rather than read about it. Bai choi is part card game, part call-and-response singing: players sit in bamboo huts, a caller sings a verse that riddles the name of a card, and whoever holds it shouts. It was inscribed by UNESCO as intangible cultural heritage of humanity in 2017, and central Vietnam takes it seriously.

In the museum you see the painted cards and a model hut in a case. Then you walk out of the back door onto Bach Dang, turn towards the An Hoi bridge, and from about 19:00 most evenings there is a live bai choi session on the riverbank — real huts, a real caller, and it costs nothing to stand and watch.

Museum case at five o’clock, living version at seven, three minutes apart. No other exhibit in the Old Town lets you do that, and it is worth arranging your evening around.

Which of the four museums to spend a stub on

They are all on the same ticket, so the question is only which stub you spend. With children, or with any interest in how things are made, this is the one.

Best hour, manners and photographs

• Manners: old timber floors and an old staircase — walk, do not run, and do not let children climb on the boat or lean on the loom or the wedding mannequins.
• Photography: allowed without flash. The three shots are the upper balcony looking down into the sky-well, the loom in sky-well light, and the wedding tableau.
• With children: the lion head, the cards, the boats and the wedding are the four places they stop. Forty-five minutes is about right.
• Accessibility: the upper floor is up a timber staircase with no lift, so the everyday-life section is not step-free.
• Flood season: October to December, when Bach Dang floods the back door shuts — use the Nguyen Thai Hoc entrance, and note the ground floor can close for a few days when the water is high.

What to pair it with

• Hoi An Market — three minutes along the same street. See the crafts in cases, then see people doing them for a living.
• Duc An Ancient House — four minutes, the same street-to-river house type with the bookshop story.
• The Cantonese Assembly Hall — five minutes, where you can see the “original” of the carved deity figures on display here.
• The Museum of Trade Ceramics — four minutes on Tran Phu.
• Bai choi on the riverbank — from about 19:00 on Bach Dang near the An Hoi bridge, three minutes from the back door, free to watch.

Museum of Folk Culture: frequently asked questions