Ancient village finds new home on Silkworm Island

      Hoang Hoa Hamlet is a living museum.
Houses more than a 100 years old, a communal well, banana plants and areca palms – the Hoang Hoa Hamlet has them all and more, in more or less pristine condition.
Enter the hamlet and you have stepped into a village typical to the southern part of central Viet Nam in the last century.
And to take this step back in time, all you have to do is visit the Tam (Silkworm) Island, just 5km off Nha Trang.
The story of how an ancient village came into being earlier this year in a new location begins with Nguyen Van Phung, a 47-year-old stone collector and rock-garden artisan.
Phung "collected ancient houses" and began to build the Hoang Hoa Hamlet on a 400sq.m plot in Phuoc Dong Commune seven years ago in the suburbs of Nha Trang.
Hoang Hoa Hamlet has five old houses built more than a century ago, one of them nearly 200 years old.
Another one of the five houses was built on 36 pillars with ancient furniture and household tools like a rice-hulling mill and a kerosene-fuelled mantle used by well-off families in the region in the early 20th century.
Antique collectors considered Hoang Hoa Hamlet a museum of old houses and household appliances from the southern part of central Viet Nam.
But Phung says his aim was to preserve the old houses so that the later generations could understand how their forefathers lived on this land.
For example, Phung says, even residents in the countryside can hardly see wooden rice pounding pestles and mortars and rice-hulling mills which were used by locals five decades ago. Haystacks which fed cattle around the year have also disappeared.
All these wooden tools have been replaced by machines, he adds.
His painstaking work attracted the attention of Doan Van Trang, president and CEO of Silkworm joint-stock Co, developer of Hon Tam Resort.
Marriage of convenience
Trang entered into an agreement with Phung to relocate Hoang Hoa Hamlet on the island in order to make the Hon Tam more attractive.
Phung says he was impressed by the Resort’s ambitious plan to preserve the country’s cultural values and that this influenced his decision to move the Hoang Hoa Hamlet from Phuoc Dong Commune to the Silkworm Island
The hamlet now boasts cultural characteristics of ethnic groups in Central Viet Nam, including brocade making and pottery production of the Cham people, and classical theatre particular to Central Viet Nam are performed here.
An overseas Vietnamese who visited Silkworm Island last week said he was fascinated by the daily activities of water rice cultivating society he found in the ancient hamlet. He said could never get to hear the melodious sound of the monochord and the cooing of spotted doves anywhere else the world.
"We’ve created a variety of tourism products that are different from other resorts in Nha Trang," says Trang.
He also plans to re-create traditional festivals, including one to honour the founder of country’s traditional medicine, Hai Thuong Lan Ong, during the Physicians’ Day.