Hội An museums: what each one shows, as the heritage centre describes them

The museums Hội An's heritage centre runs

Hội An's museums are not one building but a system of small themed museums on Trần Phú, Nguyễn Thái Học and Trần Hưng Đạo, several of them in old houses, run by the town's heritage conservation centre. The system's own website lists six museums, a memorial house and a display at a former prison: the Hội An Museum, the Sa Huỳnh Culture Museum, the Museum of Trade Ceramics, the Folk Culture Museum, the Traditional Medicine Museum and a Thổ sản (local products) museum; the Cao Hồng Lãnh memorial house; and the display at the Hội An prison relic.[1] A 2025 article on the same site counts differently again, seven museums and four relics on the visiting route, with 2,789 objects on display.[10]

The centre's older website, in an overview dated 2013, counted six museums, the memorial house among them: the same Sa Huỳnh, ceramics, folk culture and memorial-house units, plus a Museum of History and Culture and a separate Revolutionary Tradition Room.[11] The two lists are not in conflict so much as years apart. The traditional-medicine museum opened in 2019, and the history and revolutionary rooms now sit together as the Hội An Museum, so XTOUR's reading is that the newer site is the current list.[2][6]

The old-town ticket includes a museum. The centre's English ticket page describes it as "one of museums within the museum system".[16] The old-town ticket guide covers how that choice works and where the centre's pages disagree.

Hội An Museum: the town's history, currently closed

The Hội An Museum at 10B Trần Hưng Đạo is the one museum that covers the town's whole story. Its page on the museum system's site, dated 7 September 2026, describes about 400 m² showing 712 documents and objects in two rooms: a history and culture room of 335 items across three periods (prehistory and protohistory, Champa, and Đại Việt to Đại Nam), and a revolutionary-tradition room of 377 items on the two wars of resistance. The same page says the museum is temporarily closed for professional work until a reopening is announced.[2]

The history room has a longer past. The centre's 2013 overview says the Museum of History and Culture was set up in 1989 at 7 Nguyễn Huệ and moved to its present address in August 2015.[11] A separate 2013 page on that museum describes the old building as a 17th-century pagoda of the Minh Hương village, dedicated to Quan Âm. It lists jar burials found at Hậu Xá in 1990, Champa statues of a dancer and of the god Kubera, and old maps that name the port Faifo. That 2013 page already gives the 10B Trần Hưng Đạo address, two years before the move its sister page dates; XTOUR's reading is that the centre's older pages were edited after they were first posted.[11][12]

Sa Huỳnh Culture Museum: the town before the port

The Sa Huỳnh Culture Museum at 149 Trần Phú is about the people who lived here about 2,000 years ago and whom the museum's page calls the founders of Hội An's early port.[3] It shows their burial customs, their ideas about life and death, and their contacts with Southeast Asia, southern India and China, according to the centre's 2013 overview. That overview also mentions finds from the Bãi Ông site on Cù Lao Chàm, which the centre dates to more than 3,000 years ago.[11] The centre's longer page on the museum describes Bãi Ông and the An Bang cemetery, where 18 burial jars were found.[13]

The centre's pages do not agree on the basics. The current museum page says the museum was founded in 1995 and shows more than 1,000 objects.[3] The 2013 overview says it was established by a decision of 8 June 1994.[11] A 2015 page on the older site gives 1994 and two counts in the same text, 946 objects in its opening line and 971 in the paragraph below.[13] XTOUR does not choose between them.

Museum of Trade Ceramics: Hội An as a port

The Museum of Trade Ceramics at 80 Trần Phú was formed in 1995 with help from Japanese experts, and the building is itself part of the display: a two-storey house with a wooden balcony, built around the 19th century, in three parts (front house, back house and a connecting section) with an open courtyard between front and back. Its collection is ceramics dated from the 9th-10th to the 19th century found at archaeological sites in Hội An, which the museum presents as evidence of the sea route that brought ships from East and West. The current page counts 361 objects; the centre's 2015 page counts 368.[14][4] The 2015 page also says the display is in four parts, opening with an overview of the old town and of Vietnam's trade ceramics.[14]

Folk Culture Museum: crafts and performance

The Folk Culture Museum at 33 Nguyễn Thái Học has been open since 24 March 2005 in an old house 57 m long and 9 m wide that runs through to Bạch Đằng street. Its page says it shows intangible heritage through images, original objects and demonstrations.[5] The centre's 2013 overview is more specific: 490 objects on the upper floor in four themes (folk visual art, folk performance, traditional crafts and everyday folk life), with demonstrations on the ground floor.[11]

Traditional Medicine Museum

The newest museum opened on 15 March 2019 at 46 Nguyễn Thái Học, in a traditional Hội An shophouse.[6] It shows more than 200 objects and documents. On the ground floor it recreates a traditional herbal-medicine shop, with medicine cabinets, the place where the pulse was taken, a courtyard for drying medicines and a room where they were prepared. Upstairs it covers medicine in Vietnam, in Quảng Nam and in Hội An.[6]

Thổ sản museum: aromatics and local products

The Thổ sản museum at 57 Trần Phú is about the aromatics and local products of Hội An and Quảng Nam, and Hội An's role as a place where they were traded. Its page, which sits at an address on the site named for the medicine museum, describes one of the old town's houses with about 240 m² of display: 130 images, documents and diagrams and 151 objects. The ground floor covers how these products were gathered, processed and traded, with a space for present-day products and hands-on activities; the upper floor shows products such as cinnamon, agarwood, pepper, areca, tea and swiftlet nests.[7]

The memorial house and the prison relic

The Cao Hồng Lãnh memorial house at 129 Trần Phú is the Đức An house, a long tube house of two buildings joined by a courtyard. Its page says that in October 1927 the Hội An branch of the Hội Việt Nam Cách mạng Thanh niên was founded in this house, and the rooms show the life of Cao Hồng Lãnh.[8]

The Hội An prison relic on Lý Thường Kiệt is a prison built from 1960, known as "Nhà Lao Xóm Mới" or the "Trung tâm cải huấn Quảng Nam". Its page describes it as the place where, from 1960 to 1975, thousands of revolutionary cadres, soldiers and civilians from Quảng Nam and other provinces were imprisoned and tortured. Its page says Quảng Nam's People's Committee recognised it as a provincial relic in 2007, that restoration began in 2012, and that a display room shows 62 objects and 3,390 prisoner records. The same page gives two house numbers, 242/12 and 240/12, and describes entry as "tham quan tự do" (free to visit), closed at weekends.[9]

What is in store rather than on show

The museum system's 2025 article on conservation says its store holds nearly 7,000 objects, nearly 5,000 of them ceramics from the Cù Lao Chàm shipwreck.[10] The centre's page on the islands describes that wreck as a teak ship built in Thailand in the first half of the 15th century and found 15 km north of Cù Lao Chàm. It says the ship carried ceramics from Chu Đậu and Mỹ Xá, and that excavations from 1996 to 2000 recovered 240,000 objects.[15] The Cù Lao Chàm guide covers the islands.

What XTOUR does not know

XTOUR does not know whether the Hội An Museum has reopened since its page was dated 7 September 2026, which museums the ticket's museum choice covers today, or whether the closing days on the current pages, which differ from the ones the centre gave in 2013, are still in force.[11] The museum pages give opening times; XTOUR does not republish them as fact. It has no information on accessibility in these old houses. For the town, see the Hội An destination page; for the country, Vietnam.