Thuận An

Lai Thieu kilns and mangosteen gardens in an afternoon

Thuan An works as a half-day trip from Ho Chi Minh City, under an hour north on National Route 13. Spend the afternoon in the pottery shops of Lai Thieu, add a riverside orchard if it is mangosteen season, roughly May to July, and leave before 4:30pm to beat the evening rush.

Leave around 1pm, after lunch in the city, and start in Lai Thieu itself, where shops along the main roads sell the town's glazed ceramics: blue-and-white bowls and plates, garden pots and, above all, the rice bowls painted with a rooster, a design that once sat on almost every family table in the south. Take your time picking through the stacks; prices are by the piece and nobody hurries you.

Around 3pm, when the worst of the heat is over, head down the lanes towards the Saigon River to an orchard. In the harvest season, roughly May to July, gardens open to visitors who pay to wander and eat fruit picked from the trees. Mangosteen is the local pride, with its thick purple rind and white, sweet-sour segments, and many gardens also grow durian and rambutan. Sit in the shade, eat slowly and expect a short storm in the late afternoon, typical of the early rainy season.

Leave before about 4:30pm to get back to Saigon ahead of the evening rush. Outside the harvest months, skip the orchards and treat the trip as a short pottery outing.

Rooster bowls and the Mangosteen harvest

Lai Thieu is known for glazed pottery, above all the rooster rice bowl once found on almost every southern family table, and for mangosteen from the old orchards by the Saigon River. Most kilns have closed or moved away, so today you buy from shops, and the fruit is picked from about May to July.

Lai Thieu pottery grew up beside the Saigon River, where clay, wood for the kilns and boat transport were all close at hand, and it was largely the work of families of Chinese descent. The everyday wares, glazed bowls, jars and plates, were sold right across the south, and the rooster bowl became so familiar that it now stands for old-fashioned southern home cooking. Many of the old kilns have closed or moved further from the city as land prices rose, so what you see today is mainly retail shops, but the designs are the same.

The orchards have a similar story. Lai Thieu was once known across the region for its fruit gardens, laid out on raised beds between small canals fed by the river. Urban growth has eaten into them, yet the surviving gardens still produce some of the most prized mangosteen in the south. It ripens at the start of the rainy season and is best eaten the day it is picked. Look for fruit with a dark purple rind that gives slightly under the thumb. Buy a bag from a roadside stall for the trip back to Saigon, and check that the stalk end is still green, a sign of freshness.