Hoi An Ancient Town: The Ticket System and What It Actually Buys

Hoi An runs a heritage ticket, and it confuses almost every first-time visitor because of what it is not.

It is not an entry fee for the town. You can walk the streets, cross the bridges, eat, shop and photograph without one. What the ticket buys is admission to a fixed number of the protected buildings: old merchant houses, assembly halls, the museums and the Japanese Covered Bridge.

You choose which of them to use your entries on, and the money goes to maintaining the buildings, which is genuinely why the town still looks like this.

Most visitors use two or three entries and then stop, which is a reasonable way to do it. The houses are similar to one another and the fourth is much less interesting than the first.

Tan Ky house is the one most people pick first and deserves it: a merchant family home in continuous use for generations, with Japanese, Chinese and Vietnamese carpentry in the same room and flood marks on the wall.

The Fujian Assembly Hall is the most visually striking of the halls, built by a Chinese merchant community and still functioning as a temple.

The Japanese Covered Bridge is the symbol of the town and is small; see it, but do not expect it to occupy you.

The folk-culture and trade museums are for people who want the background rather than the buildings, and are a better use of a hot afternoon than a morning.

The old town is small and it fills. Between about ten in the morning and four in the afternoon the central lanes carry more people than they were built for, and in high season the bridge has a queue.

Before eight it is almost empty, the light is low and warm, and the market is at its most working rather than most photographed. That hour is the single best thing in Hoi An and it costs nothing.

After five the lanterns come on, the day groups leave, and the town looks like the photographs again. Aim to be out for both and to spend the middle of the day at the beach or in a tailor's.