Vessel: AmaWaterways AmaDara
Location: Tân Châu, Vietnam
Shore excursions in Vietnam's Mekong Delta invariably yield discoveries, and today is no different. We witnessed the labour-intensive hand-woven silk in Phnom Penh, but here at Tân Châu it is more of an industry, albeit with methods dating back well into the last century.
Silk weaving has been part of life in Vietnam’s upper Mekong Delta for more than a century, but nowhere is the tradition more celebrated than in Tân Châu, an old river town in An Giang province near the Cambodian border.
By the 1920s, much of the nearby Long Hưng village was devoted to mulberry cultivation, silkworm rearing, and weaving. Tân Châu became the Mekong Delta’s largest silk centre during the 1940s, its workshops supplying fabric across southern Vietnam and, later, markets in Cambodia, Laos and Thailand. At its peak, the town supported around 60 weaving workshops and 120 silkworm nurseries.
The town’s signature fabric is Lãnh Mỹ A, an exceptionally smooth, lustrous black silk once favoured by the wealthy families of southern Vietnam. Its remarkable colour comes not from a synthetic dye but from the green fruit of the mặc nưa tree. The fruit is crushed into a resinous liquid in which the silk is repeatedly soaked, dried in strong sunlight, washed and beaten. A single length may be dipped as many as 100 times, and the entire process can take more than a month.
The industry declined sharply during the 1970s as inexpensive synthetic fabrics displaced handmade silk and mặc nưa orchards disappeared. Production almost vanished before being revived in the 1990s, although only a handful of traditional workshops survive today.
Among them is Hồng Ngọc Silk, a third-generation family business preserving Tân Châu’s weaving and dyeing traditions. Visiting its modest premises feels less like entering a showroom than stepping into a piece of living industrial history. Vintage wooden 'Jacquard' looms fill the workshop, their shuttles darting back and forth with a rhythmic clatter as fine threads slowly become shimmering cloth. Curiously, the machines are "programmed" by a punch-card system reminiscent of 1960s computers.
There is little theatrical polish. Artisans work amid timber frames, spools of brightly coloured thread and machinery burnished by decades of use. We watch the weaving at close quarters, handle finished fabrics and learn why genuine Lãnh Mỹ A commands such a high price. Proprietor Lê Thị Kiều Hạnh also explains the increasing difficulty of obtaining mặc nưa fruit, now one of the greatest threats to the craft.
The experience is intimate, slightly noisy and utterly absorbing. In a delta changing at extraordinary speed, Hồng Ngọc offers something increasingly rare: the sound, texture and human patience of an old Mekong tradition still at work.
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| A silk 'ao dai' design worn by Miss Opal Suchata at Miss World 2026 drew mixed reactions. Photo: Organisers |
Reservations can be made through a preferred travel advisor or directly with AmaWaterways on 1800 867 126 (AU) or 0800 005 636 (NZ), or by visiting amawaterways.com/au or amawaterways.com/nz.
Expedition Cruising editor and publisher, Roderick Eime, is travelling as a guest of AmaWaterways
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