Dong Hoa Hiep Village

To reach the old houses of Đông Hòa Hiệp, a visitor walks through other people's orchards. A shaded village road runs between fruit trees, and somewhere in the leaves stands a wooden house that is hundreds of years old, as still as someone keeping a secret.

The words "ancient village" call up rows of tiled roofs, or an old quarter with shop signs and lanterns. Đông Hòa Hiệp has neither. It has shaded village roads, gardens of fruit trees, and wooden houses hidden in the leaves. The local tourism portal says the old houses do not gather in clusters. They sit scattered among the fruit gardens, not lined up like an open-air museum.

The village is a national monument of architecture and art, ranked on May 24, 2017. Today it lies in Cái Bè commune, Đồng Tháp province, in the area that used to be Tiền Giang. Nearly 1,900 households are counted here, in four hamlets. They live by their orchards and their traditional trades.

What sets the village apart is not one house. It is a whole living space, with the old houses inside the gardens, never apart from the daily life of the people who live there. The old houses are said to be more than 170 years old. The gardens grow xoài cát Hòa Lộc mangoes, cam sành oranges, green-skinned pomelos, longan and star apples. These are the fruits the households live by, so reaching an old house means crossing a part of real life, not a rebuilt scene.

The house most often named is the Ông Kiệt house, in Phú Hòa hamlet. Its garden alone covers 1.8 hectares. The house has three bays and two wings, with nearly 1,000 square meters of floor and 108 columns of căm xe wood. It was built around 1838. Its nhà rường form recalls the architecture of central Vietnam. Yet the patterns, the bao lam, the garden and the feel of the whole place are very much Nam Bộ, the southern region of Vietnam.

The Agriculture and Environment newspaper records that the Ba Đức house, in An Lợi hamlet, was built in 1850, right beside the river, on grounds of just over 2 hectares. Its architecture joins East and West. Outside it has touches of a French villa. Inside it keeps the folk timber frame of the South, with couplets, wall paintings and old objects. The family there has turned its home into a community tourism site.

One more thing is worth knowing about Đông Hòa Hiệp. From February 2011 to February 2014, the Japan International Cooperation Agency supported a project there. Its aim was to strengthen the part the community plays in heritage tourism. Three places were chosen for it. One was Đường Lâm in Hanoi, and another was Phước Tích in Hue. The third was Đông Hòa Hiệp, in the Mỹ Tho area of the Mekong Delta. The project supported training, work on the village landscape, the printing of a photo book and maps, a wider road, a footbridge, a rest house and a boat landing. That is why the village is so often set beside the other two when people talk about the old villages of Vietnam.

The traditional trades are part of the same daily life. People live mainly from fruit orchards and from crafts, making cốm, spreading bánh tráng and rolling bánh phồng sữa.

The Đông Hòa Hiệp Ancient Village Festival has been on the province's list of intangible cultural heritage since April 2017. The sixth festival, in 2025, took the theme Memories of the Ancient Village. It ran from December 3 to 7 in Cái Bè commune.

Here, heritage does not stand apart. It comes with the family meal, the stories of the family line, the fruit in the garden and river water flowing past the house. The village is not grand like many places that draw visitors, yet people who have stopped here find it hard to forget.