Hội An’s port failed sometime in the 19th century. That failure is the only reason the old town’s wooden shopfronts are still standing today.

\"Giao Chi quoc mau dich do hai do\" – Chaya Shinroku, 17th century, public domain

Most people walking these streets think they're looking at four centuries of prosperity. They're actually looking at what happens when a boomtown goes broke and nobody has the money left to tear it down and build something new.

A Portuguese sailor marked this coast before there was a port to mark. In 1523, seven years after a Portuguese fleet out of Goa got blown off this shore by bad wind, the navigator Duarte Coelho Pereira put in at Cù Lao Chàm island and cut a cross into the rock, with the letters INRI, his own name, and the year — Portuguese records say so, at least. There wasn't a town here yet for him to visit.

Every ship paid a different entry fee, based only on where it had sailed from. A 1776 tariff record kept by the official Lê Quý Đôn lists the whole scale: a ship from Hainan paid 500 quan to enter, one from Fujian 2,000, one from Shanghai or Canton 3,000, one from Macao or Japan 4,000. A Western ship — European — paid the most of all, 8,000 quan in, 800 out. Every line on the table charged a tenth as much to leave as to arrive.

For four months a year, the town doubled and had two governors. An Italian Jesuit named Cristoforo Borri lived here from 1618 and described an annual fair that ran about four months, Chinese junks arriving with millions in silver, Japanese ships with fine silk. By his account the settlement got so large you could fairly call it two towns — a Chinese one and a Japanese one, each with its own quarter, its own governor, its own laws.

A Japanese captain flew a rival's flag upside down just to get past their ships. Araki Sōtarō sailed out of Nagasaki to this port under a red-seal licence between 1619 and 1632. The flag on his mast carried the Dutch East India Company's own monogram — VOC — turned upside down, hung that way, Japanese archives record, so Dutch ships along the route would let him through.

Then Japan sealed its own people out of the town they'd built. From 1633 the shogunate began cutting off departures; the licence system ended in 1635. Japanese merchants already here couldn't go home. Japanese ships stopped coming. The Japanese quarter thinned out and never really recovered.

A hundred and forty years later, an army marched straight through the middle of it. In 1775, war between the Trịnh and Nguyễn courts reached the town directly — troops passed through amid the fighting, and records describe the streets left in ruins. Around the same period the river mouth itself began silting up for good. Trade never came back. Đà Nẵng, with a harbor the French were willing to spend money on, took the port's place instead.

Nobody rebuilt Hội An into something new, because by the time anyone might have, there was no money in the town to do it with. The wooden shopfronts standing today aren't proof the port succeeded. They're what was left after it didn't.