Forty-five kilometers north of Hanoi. On a clear day in Tho Ha village, every narrow lane fills with bamboo drying racks and the whole village turns into a pure-white tunnel. Spread across each rack is rice paper (Vietnamese: banh da nem) freshly made at 5 that morning. It makes for an extraordinary photo, but for the villagers it is life itself. Within a half-day's reach of a Hanoi resident, there aren't many working scenes this picturesque.<\/p>\n
What put this village back on the map is a photo report by Kit Humphrey that Saigoneer published on July 17, 2026. It quietly documents a village that stirs before dawn \u2014 women toasting rice crackers over fire in the street, men laying out thousands of \"phen\" (bamboo panels for drying rice paper) along the alleys. There's no flashy staging. It's just that the sight of white paper blanketing the village is so striking that it's easy to see why it spread on social media as a photo spot. What the report conveys is that this white scene isn't something arranged for tourists but a byproduct of work repeated every morning. That's exactly why going doesn't guarantee you'll meet the same sight. Only when the weather and time of day align do the alleys turn pure white.<\/p>\n
Tho Ha is an old village in Van Ha commune, Viet Yen district, Bac Giang Province, and it was not originally a rice-paper village. In the 14th century it flourished as one of the Red River Delta's leading pottery centers, and traces of that remain on the village walls today. Walls built without mortar, stacked from broken jars and shards, create a look found only here. The tale that vessels fired as funerary urns were repurposed as building material also speaks to its history as a pottery village.<\/p>\n
Since the 1990s, when river-sand depletion and other pressures shrank the pottery trade, the village switched its livelihood to making rice paper and rice crackers. More than 600 households now do this work, each making 250 to 300 kilograms a day. Tho Ha rice paper circulates nationwide as an essential wrapper for fresh spring rolls, and is exported to Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, and Europe. Using no additives and drying the sheets in a thin mist in the air is what sets the quality\u2014a technique handed down in the village. Its thickness and elasticity, which keep it from tearing the moment it's soaked, are also why it's prized as a spring-roll wrapper.<\/p>\n
The charm of this village is that the memory of pottery and the present of rice paper overlap in the same alley. At your feet, walls of pottery shards; overhead, white drying racks. Even as the trades have changed, the layout of a settlement opened to the river and the old village gate remain, layer upon layer of eras folded together. From start to finish, you never lose the sense of walking through a place where life still goes on, not a village polished for tourists.<\/p>\n