Thổ Hà

Thổ Hà sits on a bend of the Cầu river, facing Bắc Ninh across the water. For centuries it was a potters’ village, making stoneware jars, urns and vats that went down the river by boat to the markets of the delta. Its prosperity shows in its buildings: a carved seventeenth-century communal house, an old village gate, brick lanes and houses close-packed inside the river bend. The pottery of Thổ Hà was mostly plain stoneware, made for storage and burial rather than for display.

During the twentieth century demand for the old stoneware fell, and by the 1990s the kilns had largely gone cold. The village turned to rice: rice paper for spring rolls, rice crackers, and rice wine made from the same grain. In good weather the open spaces and roadsides are lined with bamboo racks of drying rice paper. A few people have tried to revive pottery in small ways, and broken shards still turn up in walls and paths. Rice-paper making begins well before dawn, and on a fine day a single family may turn out thousands of sheets.

Good rice paper from Thổ Hà is thin, evenly round and slightly translucent, with the fine cross-hatched print of the bamboo rack on its surface. It should be flexible once moistened and crisp when fried, without tearing. The village’s older stoneware, when you find it, is heavy, brown and unglazed or thinly glazed, much like that of other river kilns. Rice wine from the village is clear and strong, distilled from glutinous rice, and is sold from the house.