Tho Ha Village

Some walls are only walls. In Thổ Hà, a wall can hold history, and that is true all over the village.

The village sits on the bank of the Cầu River. It is now a residential neighborhood in Vân Hà ward, in Bắc Ninh province. That is the new way of naming it. In the memory of many people, it is still Thổ Hà, in Vân Hà commune. That commune lay in Việt Yên, in the old Bắc Giang province. It lies about 45 kilometers from Hanoi.

The first sight after stepping off the ferry is the village gate. The Bắc Giang tourism portal says it stands in front of the communal house. A pond lies on the left and a banyan tree grows on the right. This is the classic picture of an old village of the northern plain.

Further in, one thing sets Thổ Hà apart from every other old village. The walls are built of baked brick, stoneware and pieces of pottery. They are what is left of a craft that has vanished.

The local tourism portal says the Thổ Hà pottery trade flourished from the 14th century. People rank the village with Phù Lãng and Bát Tràng as the three ancient pottery centers of the Vietnamese. The stoneware was famous for being very hard, and it let no water through. It rang like a bell, and its glaze was a distinctive reddish brown. The village made everyday household ware, among them the chum, the vại and the tiểu sành. People used them every day in farming life.

Then the pottery craft came to an end. From the 1980s, the village turned to a new trade. But the walls and the pottery lanes are still there. Walk slowly through the narrow lanes, where two people can barely pass each other, and look up. Black, shiny shards of stoneware are laid in layers on the walls. This is how the people of Thổ Hà used the waste of their craft to build the place they lived in. Nothing was thrown away.

The village center is a group of monuments: the communal house, the pagoda and the văn chỉ. All three are national monuments. The communal house was ranked in 1962. Its cửa võng, a work of fine wood carving from the 17th century, was recognized as a national treasure in 2021.

The pagoda is also known by its name in Chinese characters, Đoan Minh Tự. The văn chỉ was built in 1680, according to a stele that still survives. It honors Confucius, the Four Associates and 72 earlier worthies. This was the village's place of learning, where people showed their respect for study and for those who had served learning.

In 2026, the group of the communal house, the pagoda and the văn chỉ was raised to a Special National Monument. A small village on the Cầu River has three Special National Monuments. It also has one national treasure and two items of national intangible heritage. These numbers show how deep the culture of this place runs.

The village's new craft is bánh đa nem. More than 300 households do this work, with about 1,000 workers. The product is exported to South Korea, Japan and Europe. In 2025, the craft of making Thổ Hà bánh đa nem was added to the national list of intangible cultural heritage. Down a lane, sheets of bánh đa nem are set out to dry in the sun, and the sound of the grilling rack carries. That is part of daily life, and it is how the heritage goes on living.

The Thổ Hà festival takes place every year from the 20th to the 22nd of the first lunar month. The festival part includes rooster fighting, boat racing, wrestling, a rowing game of catching ducks, and Quan họ singing. Quan họ is call-and-response folk singing from Bắc Ninh, sung by pairs of women and pairs of men. The festival was listed as national intangible cultural heritage in 2012.

Thổ Hà is a village that knows how to keep itself. The pottery is gone, but the pottery walls remain. The old craft has passed, but the new craft has become heritage. The communal house, the pagoda and the văn chỉ from the 17th century still stand whole. And the Cầu River still flows, still has its ferry, and still joins the village to the rest of the world.