Faifo, the Port Century

The Sea Road Came First

Trade reached this river mouth before the town had a name. Under the sand ridges around the town lie jar-burial grounds of the Sa Huỳnh culture, some two thousand years old, dug at Hậu Xá, An Bang, Thanh Chiếm and Xuân Lâm. Under Champa, in the ninth and tenth centuries, a port stood here that Vietnamese scholarship calls Lâm Ấp Phố, and traders out of Arabia, Persia and China put in at it. FaifoiTRADERS' NAME FOR HỘI ANFaifoWhat foreign merchants wrote in their logs for Hội An, commonly explained as coming from Hoài Phố (also recorded as Hải Phố). It was a name for a port of call, not for a foreign possession: the town stood under the Nguyễn lords, and the merchants lived there by their leave.“Hội An” — Wikipedia tiếng Việt was not built on an empty shore. It inherited a working address on the sea road, and the Thu BồnPLACE · RIVERThe Thu Bồn RiverSince the plain existed · to nowAbout 20 km³ of water reaches the sea down the Thu Bồn each year, more than any other river in central Vietnam, and 80 to 90 per cent of it arrives between September and December. The old town of Hội An stands on a sand ridge that the same river built., a river that already carried goods down out of the mountains.

Museum of Sa Huỳnh Culture, Hội An · photograph by Gary Todd · CC0

The firmest evidence lies underwater. Some twenty kilometres east of Cù Lao Chàm, a ship went down in the fifteenth century carrying mostly Vietnamese ceramics, the greater part of them from the Chu Đậu kilns in the Red River delta. Six seasons of survey and excavation between 1997 and 1999 raised it from seventy metres. The Forestry Institute analysed the timber and reported teak, the wood used for shipbuilding. The hull ran 29.4 metres long and 7.2 at its widest, divided into nineteen compartments. Setting sherds aside, the excavation recovered more than 240,000 objects unbroken or barely broken, along with hundreds of thousands of broken pieces. A century before there was a Japanese quarter, this was already a coast that goods left from.

National Museum of Vietnamese History, Hà Nội · photograph by Daderot · CC0

A Name Cut into Rock

Europeans reached this coast before there was a port town to reach. In 1516 the Portuguese governor in India sent a fleet out of Goa, which called at Malacca and then stood in off this shore, and which contrary winds sent back within days. Seven years later the navigator Duarte Coelho Pereira took his ship past Cửa Hàn and landed on Cù Lao Chàm. Portuguese scholarship records that he cut a cross into the island rock, with the letters INRI, his own name, and the year 1523.

Photograph 2026 · Soupybev · CC BY 4.0

The Portuguese were in no hurry after that. In 1540 a trading ship out of Patani under António de Faria made a third contact, carrying Fernão Mendes Pinto, who later wrote the voyage up in a book of his own. For the rest of the sixteenth century the place served Portuguese ships as somewhere to take on fresh water and firewood on the run from Goa to Macao. The first Europeans here were not the ones who opened the port.

A Lord With a Coast and No Plain

In 1558 Nguyễn HoàngERA · ĐÀNG TRONGThe Nguyễn Lords1558 – 1777Nine lords held the southern realm for more than two hundred years with a government that lived off the sea: a duty on every trading ship that put in, and each year seventy men in small fishing boats sent three days and three nights out to the islands to bring back what the water had given up. When the port could no longer keep it, the whole machinery fell in three years. went south to hold Thuận Hóa for the Lê court. He held a narrow country with mountains at its back and the sea in front, and no plain large enough to fund a long war against the Trịnh in the north. What he had was coastline and river mouths. By about 1570 he held Quảng Nam as well. Scholarship on Đàng Trong, the southern realm that European charts called CochinchinaiHISTORICAL EXONYMCochinchinaAn old place name that meant different parts of Việt Nam in different periods. In the 16th and 17th centuries Europeans used it for the whole of Đại Việt, or for Đàng Trong alone — the southern realm of the Nguyễn lords. Under French rule the sense narrowed again, to Nam Kỳ, the south of the country. The land it named was Vietnamese throughout; only the foreigners' word for it kept moving., reads his open door to foreign shipping the same way, as less a commercial policy than a way to hold the ground.

The village at that river mouth was named before the lords arrived. Ô châu cận lục, Dương Văn An's gazetteer of the Thuận Quảng country, already lists a village called Hoài Phố. It was a Vietnamese village, and the Japanese who came settled inside it rather than raising a foreign quarter on open land. The name Europeans would slur into Faifo began with those two plain Vietnamese syllables.

A Red Seal on a Sheet of Paper

In Japan at the opening of the seventeenth century no ship could sail abroad without a licence stamped in red by the shogunate, a shuinjō. The correspondence between the shogunate and foreign courts was gathered by an official named Kondō Morishige into the Gaiban Tsūsho, covering the papers from 1599 to 1764. Four of its volumes cover Annam.

Between 1601 and 1632 the shogunate sent 15 letters to Annam and received 19 back. That was enough, the National Archives of Japan records, to make Annam one of the courts it corresponded with most in Asia. The illustrated companion volume holds a faithful copy of a petition of 1604 from Nguyễn Hoàng to Tokugawa Ieyasu, which gives his style in full: Grand Commander of the Realm of Annam, Duke of Thụy.

The Japanese historian Iwao Seiichi counted 355 licences issued in the thirty-one years from 1604 to 1635. Of those, 280 licences went to Southeast Asian ports and 85 licences to Đàng Trong, more than went to the northern Vietnamese realm, to Siam or to Luzon. A second Vietnamese study citing the same Iwao gives 331 voyages and 86 arrivals at Hội An. This archive records both counts, because it has not opened Iwao's own volume to settle them.

Four Months of the Year

In 1618 an Italian Jesuit named Cristoforo Borri reached Đàng Trong and stayed four years. He wrote that Chinese and Japanese merchants held a fair once a year at one of the country's ports and that it ran about four months. The Chinese brought four or five million in silver aboard their junks. The Japanese brought fine silks in vessels Borri called sommes. The lord drew a large revenue from the fair in duties and imposts, and the whole country, Borri thought, gained by it.

“Giao Chỉ quốc mậu dịch độ hải đồ” · Chaya Shinroku · 17th century · public domain

The money in circulation was brass, round, pierced at the centre so the coins could be strung, and five hundred of them made an écu. People bought anything new that came from far away, from combs and sewing needles to glass bracelets and earrings. Borri told of a Portuguese who carried over a box of needles from Macao that had cost him under thirty ducats and cleared more than a thousand on it, selling at a real apiece. What they prized above everything, he wrote, was coral.

A Wedding at Nagasaki

Araki Sotarō came from Higo, settled at Nagasaki in 1588, and then went to sea in his own ships. His licences record the voyages one by one: Siam in 1606, Cochinchina in 1610, and several more crossings to Cochinchina between 1619 and 1632. The flag he flew carried the three letters V, O and C of the Dutch East India Company, worked into one monogram and then turned upside down. He hung it, the National Archives of Japan records people saying, so that Dutch ships along the way would let him pass.

Gaiban Shokan, compiled by Kondō Jūzō, completed 1818 · National Archives of Japan · public domain

In 1619 he married a woman of the Nguyễn house and brought her home to Nagasaki. The town called her Anio. Six Japanese encyclopaedias agree that she was a daughter of the lord's kinsmen rather than a daughter of the lord himself, though the story is still told as the story of a princess. The two of them lie in the Araki family plot at Daionji temple, and her bridal procession is still performed at the Nagasaki Kunchi festival aboard a red-seal ship.

17th-century Japanese painting · artist unknown · public domain

One Town That Was Two

Borri's account was printed at Rome in 1631, and it carries the sentence that every later study of this port quotes. The king of Cochinchina, he wrote, had once allowed the Japanese and the Chinese to choose a convenient place and build a town of their own for the sake of the fair. The town was called Faifo, and it was so large that one could fairly say there were two of them, one Chinese and one Japanese. Each kept its own quarter, each had its own governor, and each lived under the laws of its own country.

Japanese handscroll, early 17th century · artist unknown · public domain

Borri set down the way in as well. Two sea mouths opened on the port, one he called Pulluciambello and one Turon, three or four leagues apart. The water ran seven or eight leagues inland as two separate rivers before joining into one, so a ship entering by either mouth reached the same anchorage. He counted more than sixty landing places along a hundred leagues of coast. The same book records that the Portuguese at Macao sent a captain named Ferdinand de Costa to ask the king to shut the Dutch out. He got what he asked for, and the edict set the penalty at death.

Reproduction of a 16th–17th-century painting · uploaded by Vuvietanh6204 · CC0

The Year Japan Stopped Sailing

From 1633 the shogunate began restricting departures. The red-seal system ended in 1635, and the last of the closure edicts came in 1639. Japanese already at Faifo could not go home, and Japanese at home could not sail. The Japanese quarters across Southeast Asia thinned out, and the one here thinned with them.

Photograph 2024 · Chainwit. · CC BY 4.0

Chinese settlement filled the gap. The Qing replaced the Ming in 1644, Ming loyalists moved south in numbers, and the Nguyễn lords took them in and granted them land for villages of their own. Charles Wheeler records that the lords formally recognised the Minh HươngPLACE · QUARTERThe Chinese QuarterSixteenth century · to nowChinese merchants reached Hội An on the monsoon and meant to leave on the monsoon, which is why the town called them người Tàu, the people who came by boat. Then some of them stayed, and the state had to invent a status to put them in. village in 1679. By the end of the century the men who reported an arriving ship to the customs house were Minh Hương, and no longer Japanese.

Fifty-Seven Names

In the Canh Thìn year, 1640, a monk named Huệ Đạo Minh had a stele cut directly into the rock wall of Hoa Nghiêm cave in the Ngũ Hành Sơn hills and titled it Phổ Đà Sơn linh trung Phật. The face is rectangular, 96 centimetres high and 59 wide, with a rounded head and vine borders down both edges, and it carries 23 lines. The text concerns the founding of a temple. After it comes a list of everyone who gave money or metal towards the work.

The list runs to 57 individuals and households: 41 Vietnamese, 13 Japanese and 3 Chinese. The Japanese gave their address as Nhật Bản dinh or Tùng Bản dinh, which means they lived there. Three merchants gave theirs as Nhật Bản quốc, the country of Japan, which the scholars who read the stone take to mean men who came and went with the season rather than settling. What those three gave was 570 catties of copper. All three Chinese donors gave their home as Đại Minh quốc, the Ming empire. No address in the town yet carried their name.

The most striking thing on the stone is the wives' names standing beside their husbands'. Đỗ Thị Mặn. Nguyễn Thị Nụ. Phạm Thị Nước. Nguyễn Thị Nở. All of them written in the vernacular script, which is to say Vietnamese women, married to Japanese men, giving jointly with them to a temple. The Japanese quarter at Faifo was not a men's lodging house.

Written Down as People Said It

In 1651 at Rome, Alexandre de Rhodes printed his Vietnamese–Portuguese–Latin dictionary. Under the letter H stands the entry Hoăi Phố, glossed in a single line as a village in Cochinchina where the Japanese live, and which they call Faifo.iIN THE VIETNAMESEMột làng trong xứ Cô Sinh mà người Nhật ở và gọi là FaifoAlexandre de Rhodes, Từ điển Việt – Bồ – La, Roma 1651 — bản dịch NXB Khoa học Xã hội, 1991 That line closes a long argument about where the name came from. Faifo was not a name given to the town from outside. It was what people in the town said, written down in European letters.

Map from the 1651 Lyon edition of “Histoire du royaume de Tunquin” · public domain

Two years later, in a book of his travels printed at Paris, de Rhodes described his own return to Đàng Trong in 1640. The lord had expelled him and he did not dare show himself, so he hid in what the French text calls a bourg nommé Faifo. The man who brought him in to see the lord was the Japanese headman of the quarter. The circulating Vietnamese translation by Hồng Nhuệ turns the place into a province called Hội An, and loses both things the original says, that this was a town quarter and that the man who ran it was Japanese.

Three or Four Li of Street

Two men reached Đàng Trong in 1695 and both wrote it down. The first was Thích Đại Sán, a Chan monk from Guangdong who came at the invitation of the lord Nguyễn Phúc ChuPERSON · NGUYỄN LORDNguyễn Phúc Chu1675 – 1725 · R. 1691 – 1725He held Đàng Trong for thirty-four years. He brought a Chinese monk over for half a year and then had the man's counsel cut into a board and hung at his gate. He asked the Qing court for a title and did not get it. His own hand survives on a bell, a stele, the preface to a book, and three characters on a bridge at Hội An.. Hội An, he wrote, was the anchorage where foreign goods gatherediIN THE VIETNAMESEHội An la nơi bến tàu tập họp hàng hóa ngoại quốcThích Đại Sán, Hải ngoại kỷ sự, 1695 — bản dịch Viện Đại học Huế, 1963. One long street ran straight along the river bank for three or four li, with houses packed shoulder to shoulder on both sides. The Japanese Bridge and Cẩm Phô stood at the far end, and on the river lay Trà Nhiêu, where the foreign merchant ships rode at anchor.

From the handscroll “Chaya Shinroku Kōchi tokō zukan”, Jōmyō-ji, Nagoya · public domain

The second was Thomas Bowyear, sent by the English East India Company from Fort St George to ask for a factory. His journal records 20 August 1695. The ship put its colours out to invite the fishermen aboard, saw many boats in sight and none that would come near, and by afternoon he had sent the purser ashore to tell the islanders they were bound in. Next morning two boats came off with 2 minor officers of the island, and 10 more boats with them, all fishermen, to help the ship in. Charles Wheeler notes that the Nguyễn court assigned the towing to particular fishing villages and remitted their tax in exchange.

The lord said something to Đại Sán worth keeping. In earlier years, he said, 6 or 7 foreign ships came to trade in a year, and this year 16 or 17 had come. That same year Đại Sán himself recommended a Chinese named Lưu Thanh to the lord. The lord made him superintendent over foreign goods, a post that by the standing rule owed the treasury 100,000 in silver within 10 days. He went out and squeezed it from the district. Merchants and shipmasters complained, and Đại Sán petitioned to have the man he had just recommended removed at once. Over 170 men held customs duties at the port by then.

The Tariff and Three Catties of Tea

In 1776 Lê Quý Đôn came to Thuận Hóa as an official of the Trịnh and copied out the Nguyễn administration's papers while they were still in his hands. Phủ biên tạp lục preserves the whole tariff on merchant shipping, assessed by where a ship had come from. A Hainan ship paid 500 quan on arrival. A Fujian ship 2,000 quan. A Shanghai or Guangdong ship 3,000 quan. A Macao or Japanese ship 4,000 quan. A Western ship paid 8,000 quan to enter and 800 quan to leaveiIN THE VIETNAMESETầu Tây-dương thuế vào cửa 8.000 quan, thuế ra bể 800 quan.Lê Quý Đôn, Phủ biên tạp lục, 1776 — bản dịch Ngô Lập Chí, 1959, the heaviest line in the table. On every line the outbound duty ran to a tenth of the inbound.

Duty was not the whole of it. A shipmaster who came alongside owed the lord 3 catties of tea, a catty to each of the four great ministers, half a catty to the officials below them, and then brocade, silk and curiosities worth about 500 quan. The staff who collected all this ran to a superintendent of shipping, a recorder, harbour clerks, secretaries, six duty officers, thirty runners and 50 revenue soldiers. Of the money taken, 6 parts in ten went into the lord's treasury. The remaining four went to officials, clerks, soldiers and commoners.

The same ledger keeps the testimony of a Guangdong trader named Trần Dung. From Guangzhou with a fair wind, he said, it was 6 days to the Đại Chiêm mouth. In the northern country he could buy only dye tubers, in Thuận Hóa only pepper, but in Quảng Nam nothing was wanting. The prices stand beside his words: areca at 3 quan the hundredweight, pepper at 12, eaglewood at 120 quan the catty. There was so much of it, he said, that a hundred large ships could not carry it away.

The same ledger records the ending. In the year Tân Mão, 16 merchant ships entered the Hội An mouth and the duty came to 30,000 quan. In Nhâm Thìn, 12 ships and 14,300 quan. In Quý Tỵ, 8 ships and 3,200 quan. The ledger adds one clause those figures do not carry: in those same years of Nhâm Thìn and Quý Tỵ the court cut the entry and clearance duties, by amounts running from 1,000 quan down to 100 quan. The shortfall was therefore both fewer ships and a lighter tariff.

The Englishman Who Came Late

Early in 1775 Trịnh troops entered Phú Xuân and the Nguyễn lord fled south into Quảng Nam. In the fourth month the Trịnh crossed the Hải Vân pass and met the Tây Sơn at Cẩm Sa. The port town lay directly between them. Vietnamese scholarship records that the Trịnh came through it, that houses and streets stood in ruins afterwards, and that everything the port did stopped.

Chart drawn for Charles Chapman’s voyage, c. 1779 · public domain

In 1778 Charles Chapman was sent by the Governor-General of Bengal to open a trade. He arrived three years too late. Of what he found he wrote that little remained of this great city's regular streets of brick houses and paved roads, only a scene of desolation, and that those buildings now survived in memory alone. The chart drawn for his voyage labels the place Fai-fo, at the moment when the town of that name had ceased to exist.

That was not the end of it. After the Trịnh withdrew to the north, the Tây Sơn set about repairing the damage of the war, and the port revived, though never to what it had been.

The Port Died Into a Town

The port never came back. From the end of the nineteenth century the Đại Chiêm mouth narrowed and the Cổ Cò river silted up, and large ships could no longer put in. The Nguyễn court's closed-port policy, the rise of Đà Nẵng and French money spent on that harbour did the rest, and Hội An lost its standing. Scholars of Hội An read the survival of the old streets the same way, as a consequence of that loss, because there was no longer money to pull them down and build again.

Photograph 2015 · P. Hughes · CC BY 4.0

What survives of Faifo lies mostly under the ground and on a rock face. Survey and excavation from 1990 onwards have turned up a great deal of seventeenth-century Japanese Hizen porcelain in the soil of the old town, and the sites at Trảng Sỏi and Thanh Chiếm outside it have yielded the same layer. The stele of 1640 with its 57 names has not moved. In 2022 the regional committee of UNESCO's Memory of the World programme entered the 78 cliff-face steles of Ngũ Hành Sơn on its register for Asia and the Pacific.

Nothing of the Japanese quarter stands above ground. When Vietnamese and Chinese residents rebuilt the town out of the rubble they built in their own manner. The one thing still standing from the other side is the bridge at the end of the street that Đại Sán called the Japanese Bridge, now the Chùa CầuPLACE · ANCIENT TOWNThe Japanese Covered BridgeJapanese merchants paid for it, Vietnamese carpenters built it, a Chinese village kept it, and a Nguyễn lord gave it a name. After eight dismantlings, the part of the four-hundred-year-old bridge that is close to intact is the foundation..