Cai Be Floating Market

The sellers do not wait for morning. They take their loaded boats out onto the river the night before, and the buyers find them there in the dark. The buyers come in smaller boats and work their way between the larger ones. They buy vegetables, root crops, fruit and other farm produce. Some of it will be sold again at the markets on shore, and some goes to restaurants and kitchens nearby.

Every deal is made on the water. There are no stalls here, no signs, and no fixed address.

A buyer still has to know which boat sells what. The answer is the cây bẹo.

Each boat that is selling has a pole standing upright. At the top of it, the seller hangs whatever is on offer: a bunch of greens, a pomelo, a mango, or anything else aboard. From far off, a buyer looks at the pole and knows what the boat has. There is no need to ask and no need to call out. The cây bẹo is a way of advertising on the spot, and it is very much a feature of the floating markets of the Mekong Delta. A folk saying sums it up in a few words: as the pole, so the produce.

The Cái Bè floating market lies at a junction on the Tiền River, around Cái Bè commune in Đồng Tháp province. The Tiền River is one of the two branches of the Mekong that flow through Vietnam. Until Tiền Giang and Đồng Tháp merged into the new Đồng Tháp province in July 2025, this area belonged to Tiền Giang. It is a handy spot for water traffic. Branches of rivers and canals flow into the Tiền River here, so people naturally gathered to exchange goods. The floating market grew out of the way of life in a land of many waterways. It is both a means of earning a living and a part of local culture.

But the market today needs a more honest word. It is shrinking.

Fewer people trade here as the years go by. The boats doing wholesale business have dropped to about 100 to 150. The cause is the spread of roads. Traders can now drive straight to the orchards, buy the produce there, and carry it off in trucks, so they no longer need to come out on the river. When the road is handier than the water, people choose the road.

That fact is part of the story too.

The local authorities are looking for ways to keep the market. At the end of 2017, Cái Bè drew up a plan to preserve and develop its floating market. A stretch of water running from the mouth of the Cái Bè to Canal 28 was set aside for arranging the boats. The aim is to keep a way of life, and not only a river.

Anyone who watches the cây bẹo rise over the boats, and the traders at work on the water at first light, is looking at a piece of culture that is still trying to hold on. It has not died, but it is changing.

The Cái Bè market is more than a market. It is evidence of an old way of living on this land of rivers. People did business by water, by a call without words, by the cây bẹo, and by the faith that every early morning someone will come to buy and someone will come to sell.

Before faces are clear, mist trails low over the water. Out of it, one boat after another comes drifting quietly, each cây bẹo rising like a greeting without a sound, in the middle of a Tiền River just waking up.