BaLe Well

This guide to BaLe Well in Hoi An opens with the water carriers who hauled its buckets for a living, one man for sixty years, and with the eighty ancient wells hidden beneath the old town. It follows Ba Le, a widow with no title, who paid a hundred French Indochina piastres to rebuild a well already a thousand years old after it fell into disrepair in the early nineteen hundreds. The narration traces the Cham stonemasons who first cut the shaft, and the mineral edge in the water that one noodle family swore by for generations. Stand at the rim, where cooks now fold rice paper around shrimp and pork right at your table.