Nhat Tan Peach Village

On an early morning in the last lunar month, mist hangs over the Red River sandbank. From the edge of the sandbank, you look into the peach gardens and see a wash of pink spread wide under the mist. It is not loud and not glaring. It is only peach blossom, slowly brightening in the cold at the end of the year.

This is the peach village of Nhật Tân, in Tây Hồ, Hanoi. It is one of the craft villages of old Thăng Long that still keep their daily rhythm today. Thăng Long is the city now called Hanoi.

According to the newspaper Nhân Dân, peach growing in Nhật Tân goes back hundreds of years. It is inseparable from how Hanoians remember spring. The village sits on riverbank land beside West Lake. As the city grew, dozens of hectares of the old gardens had to give way. The growers moved out onto the riverbank and raised the ground, so the trees could drain well and bloom in time for Tết. Tết is the Lunar New Year festival in Vietnam. After a few seasons of adapting, the new plots slowly became Hanoi's new "peach capital."

Today the village has about 80 hectares of peach trees. More than 750 households grow the trees and sell them themselves.

Nhật Tân peaches are famous because the village has several varieties of its own. Nhân Dân records four typical kinds. They are the bích cổ and the phai kép. The other two are the hạt and the Thất thốn. Each variety has its own shape of flower and its own shade of pink. The bích cổ has thick petals in a deep color. The phai kép has paler flowers, set in many layers. The Thất thốn is a rare, prized variety, with flowers that grow straight from the old trunk, like an ink-wash painting. To make a branch open exactly at Tết, every garden family watches the weather day by day. They adjust the watering, cover the trees, or use lamplight to hold the blossoms back or push them forward.

From about the 23rd day of the last lunar month, vehicles loaded with peach branches begin leaving Nhật Tân for every part of Hanoi. Some even reach the Hàng Lược flower market in the Old Quarter. Many Hanoi families return to the same familiar garden every year and choose a familiar branch. They are not so much buying as meeting again. This is how Hanoians welcome Tết.

That bond of hundreds of years has been officially recognized. On January 16, 2025, the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism announced its decision to recognize peach growing in Nhật Tân as national intangible cultural heritage. It falls under folk knowledge and traditional crafts. According to Nhân Dân, the Hanoi People's Committee had earlier recognized the Nhật Tân peach gardens as a city-level tourist area, under Decision number 5642.

Look east from inside the peach gardens, and the five towers of Nhật Tân Bridge rise on the horizon. The hundred-year-old gardens stand before a bridge that opened in 2015. People in Hanoi often mention this view when they talk about the Nhật Tân corner of the city.

The peach still blooms in Nhật Tân today because of patient people, who tend the trees through each cold winter on the Red River bank. They stay up watching the weather, shield every trunk, and adjust every lamp so the blossoms open on the morning of the first day of Tết. In the last lunar month, the pink spreads between the trees all the way to the river's edge. This is why Hanoians say that spring has not come until the peach of Nhật Tân blooms.