Steve Barru Photographs

In the past, this hall and several other assembly halls served as meeting places for Chinese traders and other Chinese living in Hoi An. Completed in 1885, the Guangzhao Assembly Hall was built well after Hoi An had passed its heyday as a major trading center along the Vietnamese coast. While some of the assembly halls served Chinese from particular parts of China, this hall was open to all members of the Chinese community in Hoi An.

In this shot of Hoi An’s Japanese Bridge, the late afternoon sun is in front of me, but behind clouds near the horizon, resulting in deep shadows, muted highlights and soft colors.

The Japanese Bridge is probably the best known and definitely the most popular attraction in the Hoi An Old Town. When times are normal and the Old Town is crowded with tourists, the bridge is packed with people from morning well into the evening. Of course, these are not normal times. At 6:30 am on a recent Tuesday morning, there was not a soul in the frame when I took this shot. Though a couple of morning joggers passed through the bridge as I approached with my camera.

If one searches the Japanese Bridge in English, several travel sites provide colorful information about the site, with each site offering brief and rather different tales of the bridge’s origin and history.

I eventually found a Vietnamese language entry on the Vietnamese version of Wikipedia and made my way slowly – very slowly and with the help of Google Translate – through what it had to say. I arbitrarily decided this page written by a Vietnamese was more likely to be accurate than the fairy tales being fed to English speaking tourists. In any case, the bridge was built in the 17th century by Japanese traders. At the time, Hoi An was an important trading port on the coastal routes connecting China and Japan with SE Asia and India and the Arab Middle East beyond. The city housed resident communities of foreign merchants from several locales. One website speculates that Japanese built the bridge to facilitate contact with the Chinese merchant community on the other side of the waterway.

The bridge has been renovated or restored several times during its more than 300 year history. The Vietnamese information says that many of the original Japanese style features and decorations on the bridge have been replaced with Vietnamese and Chinese motifs.