Traditional craft villages are a longstanding convention in Vietnam as a means of supplementing income from farming – nearly always rice cultivation.

Over time, the members of individual villages developed special skills and combined their efforts, either working as single units making a common product, or working on a particular element of a more complex article, such as inlaid furniture, where the production process could be broken into stages – an early forerunner of the ‘assembly line’.

Hanoi’s craft villages
The heartland of craft villages is the Red River Delta, and particularly around Hanoi. Ha Tay Province, adjacent to Hanoi to the south, has hundreds of them specialising in products as diverse as fine silk, bamboo bird cages, knives and woodcarving. On the outskirts of Hanoi, Bat Trang village has become famous for its ceramics and attracts thousands of visitors each year.

Economies to scale
The craft village concept has its roots in the Vietnamese family structure and the availability of local raw materials. Non-competitiveness meant that labour could be pooled, costs shared, and products delivered in large consignments to wholesalers in the city, therefore cutting down on time lost in transportation.

In an environment where innovation hardly ever occurred, the market was stable and production levels could be controlled to fit in with the peaks and troughs of rice production.

The Old Quarter in Hanoi was the destination for most of the products produced in craft villages. The areas were divided into specialist streets, each selling a specific product range. From there, the merchants would retail direct, or sell the products on for retailing elsewhere or for export