Phuoc Dinh Yellow Mai Village

In Phước Định, mai trees stand where a fence would be. Almost every household grows them. The trees serve as hedges and crowd right up to the entrances. In the weeks before Tết, the whole hamlet smells of damp earth and the trees blaze yellow. Tết is the Lunar New Year festival in Vietnam. The tree that flowers for it is the mai vàng.

The hamlet of Phước Định belongs to An Bình commune, in Vĩnh Long province. Many older sources give the commune as Bình Hòa Phước, in Long Hồ. That was the name before four communes on the island merged into An Bình in 2025. The land is the same. Only the administrative name has changed.

The trade in Phước Định did not begin as an economic plan. It began as a pastime, keeping a mai tree going from one Tết season to the next. Little by little it became a trade that brought in an income. In 2009, the People's Committee of Vĩnh Long province recognized Phước Định as a traditional craft village for ornamental plants and tree stock. In 2021, the Phước Định Mai Vàng Cooperative was formally founded, with 30 members.

The Nhân Dân newspaper reports that the cooperative alone has about 2.5 hectares of finished trees. They include hundreds of old trees, thousands of mai trung and tens of thousands of mai tiểu. The figures change with each year and each source. What matters more is how many years each of these trees took to get here.

How the trees are tended depends heavily on the experience of each garden owner, and on their sense of timing. From about the eighth to the tenth lunar month, people begin the care. They prune the leaves and branches and feed the trees. They also bend the branches, the work called uốn cành. All of it is meant to have each tree ready to flower exactly at Tết.

By the lunar month of Chạp, the most important job is lặt lá. This means stripping the leaves from the mai, to push the tree into new shoots and flower buds. If the timing is right, the blossoms open on the morning of the first day of Tết. If it is off by a little, the tree flowers before the holiday or after it, and the grower loses the whole season.

This is what makes Phước Định most interesting. Every tree here is a problem of timing.

In the weeks before Tết, the village looks very different. Buyers and sellers move through it, vehicles carry mai, and pots stand lined along the road. Thousands of pots gather here, together with visitors and the workers who tend the trees. For the rest of the year, the village is quieter.

Vĩnh Long's farm produce exchange sorts mai vàng into three groups by age. The youngest, mai tiểu, are under 20 years old. The middle group, mai trung, are between 20 and 50. The oldest, mai đại, are 50 years old or more.

Phước Định is not a botanical garden, and it is not an exhibition. It is a village that has lived by growing mai for decades. Each pot of mai vàng in bloom at Tết carries the work of hands in Phước Định, hands that kept the tree flowering on the right day.