FISH BASKETS HANOI, VIETNAM

Fish basket making in Vietnam is a two-century-old craft, handed down through families who have kept the tradition alive. Today, only two small communities southeast of Hanoi still produce these distinctive spheroid fish traps, known as Đó. Each one is made from bamboo and the supple wood of the calamus palm, split by hand into fine, even strips with remarkable precision. The next step is to smoke the strips over rice straw to make them durable and termite resistant.

The long, tapered baskets are then woven to curve inward toward a funnel-shaped interior with two openings of different sizes—an ingenious design that keeps fish, crabs, and eels from slipping back out. When complete, the baskets are then tied to a bicycle and transported to the market. Locals then set them in shallow streams and rice paddies, where they quietly do their work.

A skilled artisan can weave a basket in about an hour, not counting the labor of cutting, smoking, and drying the bamboo. I only wished I had space in my suitcase; the family we visited was selling them for just a dollar or two.