Museum of Folk Culture
Timber merchant house turned exhibit hall for costumes, crafts, and the singing card game bai choi.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to the Museum of Folk Culture in Hoi An centers on bai choi, the singing card game the old timber house was built to hold long before it became a museum. You'll hear how farmers guarding crops turned a bored night watch into verse and teasing, how the game traveled into the market towns of Quang Nam, and how a nineteenth-century Chinese shophouse called Hoang Hiep ended up housing it alongside silk looms and lantern frames. The guide follows the caller, or anh hieu, who draws each card from a drum and turns it into a joke about someone's love life rather than simply naming it. Listen for how the room reacts before the round even ends.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
Hoi An Traditional Art Performance House
Riverside stage and mask gallery hosting nightly folk theater, singing and traditional dance.
Diep Dong Nguyen House
Chinese medicine dispensary turned merchant house, still home to five generations of one family.
Museum of Traditional Medicine
Recreated apothecary of wooden drawers, pulse-reading corner and drying yard across six rooms.
Quan Thang Ancient House
Ironwood merchant house whose carvings, made by Vietnamese craftsmen, still shelter the same family after three centuries.
Old House of Tan Ky
Two-century-old timber merchant house joining Vietnamese, Chinese and Japanese design without a single nail.
Museum of Trade Ceramics
Restored merchant house displaying trade ceramics salvaged from a fifteenth-century shipwreck.