2 min readLife
Views: 0One Lunar New Year, two ways: Tết and Taiwan
Vietnam and Taiwan celebrate the same Lunar New Year with many shared roots and plenty of small differences. A side-by-side look.
#vietnam
2 min readVietnam
Views: 0Bắc Sơn: a valley of stilt houses and a sea of clouds
A green valley in the north-east, ringed by limestone hills, where Tày and Nùng villages sit among rice fields and early mornings can fill the basin with clouds.
1 min readPeople
Views: 0White áo dài, lace hats and flowing silk
A second set of áo dài portraits: white silk under a lace hat, green fabric in motion, a stone colonnade and spring flowers.
2 min readPhoto Essays
Views: 0Rice: the year of a field in Vietnam
From transplanting in water to the gold of harvest, a rice field changes colour through the season. An essay on rice as calendar, landscape and work.
2 min readLife
Views: 0Reading the seasons in two places
Northern Vietnam has four seasons you can name by smell. Southern Taiwan has heat, plum rains and typhoons. Notes on learning a new calendar of weather.
2 min readVietnam
Views: 0The rice terraces of northern Vietnam and the people who built them
Terraced fields climb the mountains of the north in curves that follow the land. They are a farming system built over generations by Hmong, Dao, Hà Nhì and other communities, and they change colour with the seasons.
2 min readTravel
Views: 0Hội An old town: practical notes
Yellow walls, the Thu Bồn river and lanterns at night. Hội An is famous for good reasons, and a few simple choices make it much more enjoyable.
1 min readVietnam
Views: 0The central coast: boats, nets and basket boats
A long, narrow coastline where fishing still shapes the day: round basket boats, nets drawn in turquoise water, and a sea that can be both generous and rough.
2 min readLife
Views: 0Tea in a Vietnamese home
In Vietnam, tea is less a drink than a gesture. Notes on green tea, lotus tea and the cup of iced tea on the pavement.
2 min readVietnam
Views: 0The Đồng Văn Karst Plateau: a geopark made of stone
On Vietnam's far northern border, a high limestone plateau records hundreds of millions of years of geological history, and the communities living on it have learned to farm between the rocks.
1 min readPeople
Views: 0Farmers in the fields of Vietnam
Transplanting rice on curved terraces, conical hats bent over green rows: the work behind Vietnam's most photographed landscapes.
2 min readVietnam
Views: 0Hội An, a trading port through the centuries
Before it was a lantern-lit old town, Hội An was a river port where Champa, Japanese, Chinese and European traders passed through. How trade built the town, and how the end of trade preserved it.
2 min readVietnam
Views: 0Hanoi: a thousand-year capital of lakes and trade streets
A city built on a bend of the Red River, shaped by lakes, guild streets and four distinct seasons. A short profile of Vietnam's capital and what gives it its particular character.
1 min readPoetry
Views: 1Let me tell you about our country
Let me tell you about our country, its shapes raised from rivers and hills.