Museum of Trade Ceramics

Every piece of pottery in this museum crossed an ocean. Let that sink in for a moment. The ceramics you are about to see traveled thousands of kilometers across the South China Sea, the Indian Ocean, and beyond, packed carefully into the holds of wooden sailing ships that navigated by stars and currents. They survived storms, pirates, and the simple passage of centuries. And they ended up here, in Hoi An, because this small coastal town was once one of the most important trading ports in all of Asia. The Museum of Trade Ceramics opened in 1995 inside a beautifully restored timber house at 80 Tran Phu Street.

The building itself was a traditional Hoi An merchant house, and the restoration was carried out with Japanese financial and technical assistance as part of a broader effort to preserve the Ancient Town's architectural heritage. Walking through the wooden rooms, you are experiencing both the museum's collection and its container — a building that is itself a historical artifact. The collection spans an extraordinary time range, from the eighth century to the eighteenth century, roughly a thousand years of trade history captured in clay and glaze. You will see ceramics from China, Japan, India, Thailand, the Philippines, and the Middle East, each piece a physical record of a commercial relationship that connected Hoi An to the wider world. Chinese ceramics dominate the collection, which makes sense given that Chinese merchants were the largest foreign community in Hoi An for centuries. Look for the blue-and-white porcelain from the Ming and Qing dynasties.

These pieces were luxury goods, highly prized across Southeast Asia, and Hoi An was one of the key distribution points through which they flowed southward and westward. But the Japanese ceramics are equally fascinating. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the Japanese trading community in Hoi An was at its peak, Japanese pottery arrived here in significant quantities. Some of...