Cross the Japanese Covered Bridge heading west and the two-storey timber house on your right is Phung Hung. It is the largest of the four ancient houses open to visitors in Hoi An, and the only one with a real balcony — but the thing worth walking in for is not the furniture. It is a square hatch cut through the upstairs floor, and the pencil marks on the columns below it.

Phung Hung Ancient House: what you are walking into

Four houses in the Old Town are open as ticketed sites: Tan Ky, Quan Thang, Duc An and this one. They were all merchant houses — shop at the front, storage above, family behind — and structurally they are cousins. What makes Phung Hung Ancient House the odd one out is height and width. It is two full storeys with a wide frontage and a timber balcony running the length of the upper floor, which is why it feels like a building rather than a corridor.

It was listed as a national historic-cultural monument in 1993, six years before the Old Town as a whole went onto the UNESCO World Heritage list, and it is one of the twenty-one sites your Old Town ticket admits you to. The family who own it still live in the back while the front is open to visitors — which means somebody in the room usually knows the answer if you ask.

Walking there from the bridge

Address 4 Nguyen Thi Minh Khai, immediately at the western end of the Japanese Covered Bridge. From our shop at 84 Phan Chau Trinh it is 200 m, about 3 minutes on foot, measured on Google Maps: along Tran Phu, over the bridge, house on your right as you step off it.

• Ticket gate warning. If you approach from Tran Phu you cross the bridge, and there is a ticket check at the bridge end. Coming around the lane by the creek instead avoids it — worth knowing if you have already spent your stubs and only want to look at the outside.
• You walk. This is deep inside the pedestrian core, closed to motorbikes 9:00–11:00 and 15:00–21:30. See our guide to the Old Town vehicle-free hours, or just leave the bike with us for free and walk in.
• Parking: the western end of Nguyen Thi Minh Khai has paid parking outside the zone.

Ticket, hours and how long to stay

There is no separate admission. Hoi An sells one Old Town ticket good for three of the twenty-one ticketed sites, and a family member tears one stub at the door here, usually with a short explanation in Vietnamese or English thrown in.

How the whole system works is in our guide to the Hoi An entrance ticket, and the machines that have replaced some of the booths in the smart ticket kiosks.

1780, eight generations, and a name that means prosper

The house went up in 1780, when Hoi An was still the busiest port in central Vietnam. The first owner was a Vietnamese merchant dealing in cinnamon, pepper, salt, silk and ceramics — exactly the cargo that Japanese, Chinese and Portuguese ships came here to buy. The building did three jobs at once: shopfront downstairs, warehouse on the upper floor, family quarters at the back.

Phung Hung translates roughly as prosper or flourish, which is what the merchant was asking for when he named it. Whether or not the name did the work, the family is still here eight generations later, having sat out two wars and several dozen serious floods in the same rooms.

A house built for two seasons: the trading season downstairs and the flood season upstairs.

Three architectures in one room

Guides describe Phung Hung Ancient House as Vietnamese, Chinese and Japanese all at once, which sounds like a brochure line until somebody shows you where to look. Here is where.

• Vietnamese — the skeleton. A post-and-beam frame of 80 ironwood columns, each standing on its own stone base to keep damp and termites out of the timber. The roof is yin-yang tiling, laid in alternating cupped and covering courses so heavy rain drains off fast. This is the local building system, unchanged for centuries.
• Chinese — the face. The timber shopfront, the turned balcony rail, and the pair of round door eyes carved above the main entrance with bagua and chrysanthemum motifs. Those eyes are on almost every old house in Hoi An and they come from Chinese house-protection belief.
• Japanese — the top. The wide four-sided upper roof and the galleried loft running round the interior belong to the Japanese building tradition that was in town when the Japanese quarter stood on the other side of the bridge.
• What is missing: metal. The frame is timber, tile, brick and lime, joined by carpentry rather than fasteners.

Stand in the middle of the front room and look up. You get all three at once — the local frame carrying a Japanese roof over a Chinese shopfront — and that single view is a better summary of what Hoi An was than any museum panel in town.

The trapdoor, the pulley and the flood marks

This is the part almost every visitor walks under without noticing. The house sits beside the creek that runs into the Thu Bon, which makes it one of the first buildings in the Old Town to take water when the river rises. The people who built it in 1780 knew that, and they designed for it.

Cut into the upstairs floor is a square trapdoor opening directly over the front room. When the flood came, the family hauled stock, furniture and eventually themselves up through that hatch on a pulley, then lived on the upper floor for as long as the water stayed. Not an emergency measure — a routine, repeated most autumns for two and a half centuries.

Look at the columns and the walls while you are down there and you will find pencil and paint marks recording the flood levels of particular years. Ask whoever is at the door and they will point out 1964 and 1999, the two that everybody in Hoi An still measures against. The 1999 mark in particular is higher than most visitors expect, and it changes how the whole street looks on the walk back.

Once you have seen the hatch here, you start noticing that nearly every old house in Hoi An has a timber loft. They were not built as bedrooms. They were built as the place you go when the water arrives — which is also why the town’s furniture is lighter than it looks and why nothing valuable was ever kept on the ground.

What to see, in order

• The door eyes, before you go in. Two carved discs above the main door. Look at them from the street; inside you cannot.
• The front room. The former shop floor, now furnished with old tables, an altar cabinet and household pieces. Look up for the roof frame and the trapdoor; look down for the stone column bases.
• The stairs. Steep, narrow and original. Take them slowly, and give way to people coming down — there is no passing space.
• The ancestral loft. Upstairs is the family altar and a shrine to Thien Hau Thanh Mau, the sea goddess — the merchant’s insurance policy on cargo that had to cross open water. Hats off, voices down.
• The balcony. The reason to come. It looks straight down onto the Japanese Covered Bridge and along Nguyen Thi Minh Khai, and it is the only legal elevated view of the bridge in town.
• The embroidery counter. The family sell embroidery and small lanterns near the exit, and on some days somebody is working a frame. No pressure to buy.

Best hour, manners and the balcony shot

• Dress: ordinary clothes are fine, but the upper floor is a family altar. Hat off, and do not sit on the antique furniture.
• Photography: no flash indoors — the timber eats it and the gilding goes flat. The two shots worth taking are the balcony looking down at the bridge, and standing in the middle of the front room looking up at the frame.
• The stairs: not suitable for anyone unsteady on their feet, and there is no alternative route to the upper floor.

Four ancient houses: which one deserves a stub

If you want one house and one house only, take this one for the volume and the balcony, or Tan Ky if you would rather see objects than architecture. Doing two in a row is the classic first-timer mistake: the second one feels like a repeat because structurally it is one.

What to pair it with

• The Japanese Covered Bridge — literally outside the door, and you have just photographed it from above.
• The Cantonese Assembly Hall — two minutes back across the bridge, with the best courtyard in town.
• The Fukien Assembly Hall — seven or eight minutes east along Tran Phu, the grandest of the five halls.
• Hoi An Market — the far end of the same street, and the cheaper lunch.

Phung Hung Ancient House: frequently asked questions