Chợ Dương Đông — Trần Phú

The market wakes before the town

Chợ Dương Đông sits on the riverbank, right where the Dương Đông river flows out to sea. That is why the seafood here goes straight from boat to stall. At about four in the morning, while the town is still dark, fishermen are already bringing in their catch to sell.

Longtime shoppers pass on the same advice: if you want good crabs, come early, because by seven or eight only the small ones are left. Mackerel is the market's most famous fish. The sellers fillet the herring clean of bones, so you can make gỏi, a raw fish salad, as soon as you get it home. Alongside are squid, barracuda, cá diễn, sea urchins, sea snails and shrimp.

The market has two parts. Outside is the fresh produce, at its liveliest just as the boats come in. Indoors are dried goods, souvenirs and clothes. This is the largest market on the island, in the heart of Dương Đông, and for the people of Phú Quốc it is a market for doing the shopping before it is a place for sightseeing.

A market that once outgrew its street

In 2006, Tuổi Trẻ newspaper described Chợ Dương Đông as overloaded: traders had run out of space and were spilling out into the street. Not far away, the Dương Đông fishing port, built for more than VND 7 billion and in use since 2003, sat empty because boats could not get in. The town authorities asked several times to turn that port into a market, and were refused.

That story shows just how busy this market is: people needed more room for the market before they needed more room for boats.

A bottle of fish sauce and more than two hundred years

What visitors carry home from the market most is fish sauce. Fish sauce making on Phú Quốc goes back more than two hundred years. In 2013, Phú Quốc fish sauce became the first Vietnamese product to receive Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) certification from the European Union. In 2021, the craft of making Phú Quốc fish sauce was recognised as national intangible cultural heritage.

Behind every bottle are the nhà thùng, the barrel houses. The Phú Quốc Fish Sauce Association has fifty members, all of them barrel-house owners, concentrated in Dương Đông and An Thới. Together they have more than 7,000 barrels of bời lời wood, each holding 12 to 15 tonnes of fish, fermented for 12 to 15 months. Every year the island produces 20 to 30 million litres.

The island's gift basket

Phú Quốc pepper has been grown on the island for hundreds of years. The island has more than 400 ha of pepper, mostly in Cửa Dương and Cửa Cạn, yielding more than 1,200 tonnes a year. Since 2011, "Hồ tiêu Phú Quốc" (Phú Quốc Pepper) has been a collective trademark. At the market you will find three kinds: black pepper, red pepper and white pepper.

Sim wine has a story of its own. In 1990, after retiring, Mr Mạc Văn Nghiêm spent three months experimenting before he produced his first batch of wine from wild sim (rose myrtle) berries, then founded the Bảy Gáo brand. The wine is light, under fifteen per cent alcohol.

As for dried goods, there are more than you can list: squid dried for a single day in the sun (mực một nắng), dried shrimp, and dried cá thiều, cá chét, mackerel and anchovies. Add bánh khéo and bánh tét cakes for the people back home.