Thanh Ha Pottery Village, Hoi An

This guide to Thanh Ha Pottery Village in Hoi An traces a five-hundred-year craft's near collapse: by the early 1990s, plastic and aluminum had gutted the market for household pots and only seven households kept a wheel turning. You'll hear how the city sent tourists down this lane instead of subsidies in 2001, starting with just a few hundred dollars from the first year's visitors, and meet a woman named Hoa who still works the wheel her father once did. Watch her shape a bowl from river clay pulled straight out of the Thu Bon.