Lương Nhữ Học Street of Lanterns

The lanterns on Lương Nhữ Học Street create the impression that a family workshop lies behind every stall. In fact, the merchants here mainly sell finished goods. For several weeks before the full moon of the eighth lunar month, they turn ordinary shops into a seasonal market, then return to other work after the festival.

This market arose here because, from the early twentieth century, Chinese families in Cholon had sold holiday goods on this street: red New Year cards, decorations, and drums for lion dances. They already had suppliers, warehouses, and customers from different districts and provinces. Lanterns entered the same trading network.

One of the first to open a seasonal stall at the beginning of the street was a seller named Sau. She earned money from the brief holiday demand: every year, she gathered her relatives, laid out the goods, and closed the stall after the Mid-Autumn Festival. By twenty eighteen, her stall was more than twenty years old. Other families did the same. The seller Phung, for instance, sold rice rolls in the mornings, then went to help her relatives with lanterns. One festival was not enough to feed a family for the whole year.

Traditional lanterns for these stalls were made mainly in the Phu Binh neighborhood, several kilometers from here. In nineteen fifty-four, migrants from Ha Nam Province, Nam Dinh Province, and Ninh Binh Province brought their family craft there. They bent bamboo strips, tied the frames together, and covered them with colored translucent paper. Merchants from Lương Nhữ Học Street collected the finished batches and distributed them farther on. That is why the largest lantern street was not where they were made, but where people knew how to sell them wholesale.

In the late nineteen nineties, customers began choosing cheap collapsible and plastic battery-powered lanterns. The decision was made right at the stalls here: what goods to order and how much space to give them. In twenty ten, Mrs. Binh, the owner of one of the shops, bought three hundred to four hundred boxes of Chinese lanterns for the festival. From Phu Binh, she took only a few samples to hang among the goods.

For the craftswomen, this meant months of work without certainty that their products would sell. Mrs. Xuan, who had made lanterns for more than thirty years, began stocking up on materials at the start of the year and involved her whole family before the festival. Her household had once sold fifteen to twenty thousand items a season; by twenty ten, she feared she would not be able to sell even a hundred of each type. Some families left the craft, and owners converted the rooms where frames and paper had once been stored into living quarters and kiosks.

Customer preferences later changed again. By twenty eighteen, the merchant Lam said that wholesalers were increasingly asking for lanterns made of bamboo and translucent paper. In the twenty twenty-five season, stars, butterflies, and goldfish from Phu Binh once again took up a noticeable place on the stalls. Plastic battery-powered models remained beside them: sellers keep both types because their entire seasonal income depends on a few holiday weeks.

Above the rows of lanterns hangs a sign with another craft history. The street was named in nineteen fifty-five after Lương Như Hộc, a fifteenth-century official and ambassador. His real name was written differently in Vietnamese: two syllables in the street name have long been fixed in an incorrect form.

During a journey to the court of the Chinese Ming dynasty in fourteen forty-three, Lương Như Hộc studied the carving of printing blocks. On his return, he trained the first craftspeople, and after a second embassy in fourteen fifty-nine, he passed improved techniques on to the residents of several villages. Printing had existed in Vietnam earlier, but Lương Như Hộc’s students created a major center of block carvers, so the craft tradition honors him as its founder.

He is connected with Cholon and the lantern trade only through the street name. The sign bears the distorted name of the print-block craftsman; beneath it, the heirs of Sau’s seasonal merchants sell products by Phu Binh craftspeople alongside plastic battery-powered lanterns.