The dough is cold before it is anything else. A fist-sized lump, dyed the deep red of gấc, a bright-fleshed local gourd used for centuries as a natural dye, pressed between a thumb and forefinger that have done this motion so many thousand times it no longer looks like sculpting — it looks like breathing. There is no workshop door to knock on here, no sign, no kiln. Just a low stool, a folding table, and a wheeled wooden chest parked at the edge of a road in Phượng Dực commune, on Hanoi’s southern edge, where a version of this craft has been made for something like three hundred years, or closer to five hundred, depending on which elder in the village is asked. No one can point to a founding date. In a craft passed hand to hand rather than written down, the years float.
The artisan doesn’t look up while working. A stem of dried reed is already threaded through the base of a half-formed bird — its purpose not yet visible — while a seam of red bleeding into pink, where two colors of dough meet, is smoothed flat before it can fully show. A child a few paces down the row is already holding out coins for something that hasn’t taken shape yet.
I had expected the wooden chest to be a compromise — something artisans made do with because a fixed shopfront in Xuân La sat too far from where customers actually gathered. It would take the rest of the afternoon, and a fair amount of watching, to understand that the assumption ran backward.
Tò he from Xuân La isn’t sold from a shopfront anywhere. It’s carried — set up fresh at a different market, school gate, or Mid-Autumn crowd almost every week, by the artisans of the only village left in Vietnam still making it this way, from dough instead of plastic or resin.
No Fixed Address
The trunk itself — what artisans call a hòm nghề, or trade chest — is unremarkable: drawers of dough in a dozen colors, a jar of water, a handful of reed stems, a few molds for eyes and wings kept for when hands need to move faster than they can shape by feel alone. It sits on a folding stand or a bicycle rack, and it travels. For most of this craft’s history, that has been the entire business model: not a shop that customers walk into, but a craftsperson who walks to where the customers already are — a rural market on its scheduled day, a school gate at dismissal, a temple festival, a stretch of pavement during the weeks around Mid-Autumn.
Xuân La is not one craft village among several. By the account of the artisans who work there, and the records that back them up, it is the only village left in the country that still makes tò he. The village itself used to sit inside the boundary of Phú Xuyên district; since July 2025, when Vietnam eliminated the district tier of local government, the district itself stopped existing, and Xuân La’s home commune — Phượng Dực, now merged from several smaller communes — reports directly to the city of Hà Nội. The craft didn’t move. The map around it did.
Estimates of how many households still work the trade shift depending on the year and the source — somewhere between four and five hundred families, employing over a thousand people in season — which fits a craft that has never really been counted the way a factory gets counted.
Five Minutes
Steamed glutinous rice flour, worked with sugar until it turns elastic and faintly translucent, is still — even after the color goes in — soft enough to eat, which is exactly what it was made for centuries ago, under a different name: bánh chim cò, bird-and-stork cakes, offered at ritual occasions before they were ever handed to children as toys. The palette comes from the kitchen and the hedgerow rather than a paint box: red from gấc pulp, sometimes star fruit; yellow from turmeric or gardenia flower; green from galangal or indigo leaves; a deep black or purple from burnt bamboo ash or black turmeric root; white left as plain, untouched rice flour.
A reed stem, split and dried, goes in through the base before the shape is finished — and gets blown through once it is, producing a thin, reedy note. That sound, rendered in children’s mouths, is where the toy’s everyday name comes from: tò he, gradually replacing the older, heavier name it carried as a votive cake.
I had read the dough’s fragility as an unfinished part of the craft — a folk toy that hadn’t yet found the durable material that would let it become something more permanent, the way lacquerware or bronze casting had. Watching an artisan remake the same crane three times in under an hour, handing off each finished bird whole to a different child before it could be photographed, that reading came apart. Bronze, stone, hardwood — the materials that carry most Vietnamese crafts toward permanence — all commit an object to a single audience and a single moment of taste, frozen there. Rice dough commits to nothing. It softens, dries, cracks within days if no one buys it, and an artisan working a market stall decades ago had no more reason to keep making only birds and storks than one working today has to keep off Doraemon, Pikachu, or a five-armed lân for Mid-Autumn. The material that couldn’t last is the reason the shapes could keep changing.
The Apprentices
Chu Tiến Công has been doing this for more than sixty of his seventy-three years — long enough that when journalists want confirmation that Xuân La really is the last village of its kind, he’s the one they ask, and the one who answers plainly: yes, the only one. He is not alone in the trade, and importantly, not its end. Younger residents of the village pick up the craft alongside school, earning a few million đồng a month on the side, enough to help cover tuition. Đặng Văn Hậu, among the most visible of that younger generation, has pushed the same rice-dough technique toward something closer to sculpture — often with a synthetic binder worked into the base, the same trade-off the craft makes now for anything meant to outlast a week — work made to be kept, rather than played into ruin within the week. The village’s tò he has been awarded a four-star OCOP rating, Vietnam’s One Commune, One Product certification — a recognition that sits a little strangely next to a craft that, by design, was never meant to survive long enough to be rated.
New Roads
Some of what fed this trade for centuries is thinning. The circuit of rural markets, temple festivals, and school gates that once carried artisans across the north on a weekly rhythm is smaller than it used to be, and against plastic toys and a phone screen, a rice-dough bird shaped in three minutes has a harder case to make for a child’s attention than it once did. The natural pigments are thinning too, in places — some artisans now reach for synthetic dye and a plastic-based binder when a figure is destined to sit on a shelf as a souvenir rather than get eaten or crushed within the week, because a tourist wants a keepsake that survives the flight home, not one that cracks in transit.
In the space the old circuit is leaving, a different one has opened. Hanoi Museum runs regular demonstrations; workshops fill the Old Quarter during the weeks around Mid-Autumn; product photographs of tò he figures now sit on e-commerce listings beside their prices, a framework the founders of this trade had no way to imagine. I want to read this as a clean trade — one audience swapped for another, one venue for a better one — and it mostly isn’t. A museum case and a listing page both ask the dough to survive longer than it was built to, which is its own kind of loss even inside what looks, from a distance, like a rescue.
Getting There
Xuân La sits roughly forty kilometers south of central Hà Nội, along the road that used to define the old Phú Xuyên district before the boundary lines changed. A finished figure takes an artisan somewhere between three and five minutes from first pinch to reed whistle — faster for a simple bird, longer for a dragon or a five-fruit offering tray. Outside the village itself, the surest place to watch the process without chasing a market schedule is Hanoi Museum, where demonstrations run regularly, or the Old Quarter during the weeks around Mid-Autumn, when several artisans set up within walking distance of each other. Whatever gets bought that day won’t last as decoration — figures made from the traditional dough hold their shape for three to five days before drying out and cracking, since nothing in the recipe is built to resist that.
On a pavement near the museum gate, an artisan I hadn’t spoken to all afternoon works a small crowd of children down to one. He’s making a rooster for a girl who has already decided, out loud, that it should be blue instead of the traditional red and gold, and he doesn’t correct her — just reaches for a different drawer. The reed whistle goes in last, angled so the tail won’t crack when it’s blown. She takes the rooster before the color has fully set, holding it flat across both palms the way you’d carry something that might not make it home.
September 2026
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