If you only have one morning in Ha Giang, spend it at a market. Nowhere else does the whole region lay itself out in front of you in three hours the way it does here.
A market is not about buying and selling
More precisely: buying and selling is the pretext. People set off at two or three in the morning and walk fifteen kilometres of mountain track to sell a few chickens and buy a kilo of salt. Nobody walks that far for that.
They come because the market is where you meet. Men sit all morning around a cauldron of thang co, drinking maize spirit and talking about the season. Women wear their best skirt — the one that took a year to make. Young people stand at the edges, and there the khen means something quite different from what it means at a funeral.
For you, that means four or five peoples standing in one square, each with their own dress, their own headcloth, their own language. No museum can arrange that.
Markets on a fixed day of the week
- Dong Van market — Sunday morning, beside the old quarter. The largest and the easiest to fit into an itinerary.
- Meo Vac market — Sunday morning, busier and rawer than Dong Van, with its own livestock section for buffalo, cattle and horses.
- Quan Ba market (Tam Son town) — Saturday morning.
There are also the markets at Son Vi, Sung Trai, Pho Cao, Coc Pai, Vinh Quang — each district has its own network.
The “backward markets” — something particular to this region
Some markets on the karst plateau do not run on a seven-day week but on a six-day cycle. The consequence is easy to see: if the market falls on a Sunday this week, next week it falls on Saturday, the week after on Friday, moving back one day every week. People call them cho lui, backward markets.
Pho Bang, Sa Phin and Lung Phin are the best known. The six-day cycle is not an accident — it keeps the markets of one area from falling on the same day, so that traders and buyers can work their way round from one to the next.
It also means no fixed timetable stays correct. Any website that tells you “Lung Phin market is on Tuesday” is right for one particular week only. Once you fix your travel dates, we recalculate the cycle and build the route so that at least one market day falls on your itinerary.
The Khau Vai love market
Held once a year, on the 27th day of the third lunar month, at Khau Vai in Meo Vac district. This is not a market in the ordinary sense.
By old custom it is the day when people who once loved each other but could not marry meet again — one night in the year, and their husbands and wives accept it. The market today draws crowds and has taken on something of a staged quality, but the custom underneath it is still there, and it still gives you something to think about.
What to eat
- Thang co — cooked in a large cauldron from horse or beef meat and offal with a range of mountain spices. This is market food in the truest sense: low stools around the pot, a shared bowl, maize spirit. The flavour is strong and it is not for everyone — but skipping it means skipping the centre of the morning.
- Men men — steamed maize flour, the everyday food of the H’Mong. Eaten with broth or with thang co.
- Buckwheat cake, pho chua (sour noodle salad), chao au tau (aconite root porridge) — each area has its own.
- Maize spirit, distilled in the villages and sold by the jerrycan. Remember you still have to ride.
A few things worth knowing before you walk in
- Go early. The market is at its fullest between about six and nine. By eleven it has all but dispersed.
- Ask before you photograph, particularly older women and small children. A long lens pointed at someone’s face from a distance is what people mind most.
- Buy from the person who made it. Hemp cloth, forged knives, indigo dye — a light haggle is fine, grinding the price down is not.
- The livestock section is the most interesting part and also the most crowded. Watch from the edge; do not walk into the middle of a herd.
- Do not hand out sweets or money to children. At a few markets this has already started to create begging.