Tra Que Herb Village

On November 14, 2024, the United Nations tourism organization, known as UN Tourism, announced its list of the 55 Best Tourism Villages in the world. The announcement came in the city of Cartagena de Indias, in Colombia. Trà Quế was on that list. It was the only village in Vietnam to win that year.

Trà Quế is a traditional organic vegetable village, more than 400 years old. It is ringed by the Cổ Cò River and the Trà Quế pond, about 3 kilometers from the Old Town of Hoi An. The village has 18 hectares of vegetable land. It is home to 202 households, with 326 workers.

What set a small vegetable village apart lies in the river. Green weed floats up on the water of the Cổ Cò, and that weed is the village's golden fertilizer. Each early morning, the farmers lift it out of the river and dry it. They compost it with soil, then work it in at the base of the plants. The method is fully organic and takes the place of chemical fertilizer. It has been in use without a break for more than 400 years.

People have tried growing the Trà Quế variety of vegetables in many other places, but nowhere has the flavor come out the same. Elsewhere, a combination of four things is missing. One is the sandy alluvial soil of the Thu Bồn River islands. Another is a mild climate all year round. A third is clean groundwater. The fourth, above all, is the river weed of the Cổ Cò, and that cannot be recreated anywhere else.

The name Trà Quế has two explanations. In one, the greens here smell as sweet as tea and cinnamon, two of the most fragrant plants there are. In the other, the village lies near the Trà Quế pond, where many wild tea and cinnamon trees grow. The villagers tell both.

The village grows about 30 kinds of herbs and leafy greens, mostly fragrant herbs. Among them are húng quế and húng láng, kinh giới and tía tô. Others are ngò gai and ngò rí, hành lá and sả. Still others are bạc hà, ngổ and diếp cá.

Every restaurant in the Old Town of Hoi An orders its greens from this village. A bowl of cao lầu, the signature dish of Hoi An, needs fresh Trà Quế greens to taste right. So does a bowl of mì Quảng, a rice-noodle dish of central Vietnam. So does a bánh xèo, the pancake eaten with greens. Trà Quế helped shape the taste of Hoi An cooking.

In the beds, farmers turn the soil with wooden hoes and sow the seeds. They water the plants with a bamboo dipper, flicking the water in a characteristic rhythm. They work river weed in at the base of each plant, and they pick the greens.

Inside the village is a stone well dug in the time of Champa. Champa was an ancient kingdom on the central and southern coast of what is now Vietnam. The well is one of the few traces the Champa people left in the Hoi An area, and its water is still fresh after hundreds of years. When farmers dig the soil for their beds, they sometimes still turn up pieces of old Champa pottery. They are evidence of a deeper layer of history in this land.

The river beside the village has a history of its own. Today the Cổ Cò is only a small canal, thick with river weed. In the 17th century it was a river joining Hoi An to Da Nang, one of the most important waterways in central Vietnam. After the 18th century, the river slowly silted up. That silting left behind the thick layer of weed seen today. The paradox is that the shrinking of the river created the village's special fertilizer.

Trà Quế is small and plain, yet it holds four centuries of knowledge of soil and water. That is what the world honored. The scent of húng quế and kinh giới drifts over the green beds, beside a small canal green with river weed.