Qualla: Hà Tiên Islands

Hà Tiên Islands: Introduction

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Đỗ Doãn Hoàng, CC BY-SA 3.0. Hải Tặc means pirates, and nobody has ever bothered to soften it. On paper this archipelago is Tiên Hải commune, a scatter of low green islands belonging to Hà Tiên in Vietnam's An Giang province. In practice everyone calls it Quần đảo Hải Tặc, the Pirate Islands, and mid-twentieth-century maps of the Gulf of Thailand printed the same idea in French: Îles des Pirates. The name is not tourist-board whimsy grafted on after the fact. It is a description of what actually happened out here for the better part of two centuries.

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Image: Đỗ Doãn Hoàng | CC BY-SA 3.0

Hà Tiên Islands: Sixteen, or Possibly Fourteen

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Trương Thành Ý, CC BY-SA 4.0. Count the islands and you get sixteen. Some sources insist on fourteen, and the argument turns on how generous you feel about what qualifies as an island rather than a rock with ambitions. None of them rises higher than 100 metres. Together they amount to roughly 11 square kilome...

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Image: Trương Thành Ý | CC BY-SA 4.0

Hà Tiên Islands: The Vacuum That Made Them Famous

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Army Map Service, Public domain. In the eighteenth century Hà Tiên was the finest port in the Gulf of Siam, a Chinese-founded principality that had thrown in its lot with the Nguyễn lords. Mạc Thiên Tứ governed it from 1735 into what historians still call its golden age - fortifications, a bureaucracy, a market ...

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Image: Army Map Service | Public domain

Hà Tiên Islands: A Stone Facing West

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stefan from Dresden, Germany, CC BY 2.0. The islands kept the pirate name straight through the twentieth century, including on the maps of South Vietnam, which is a rare instance of a government declining to rebrand. On 28 July 1958 a military mission from the Army of the Republic of Vietnam came ashore, and a sovereign...

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Image: Stefan from Dresden, Germany | CC BY 2.0

Hà Tiên Islands: Twenty-Two Thousand Tons

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit ntt, CC BY-SA 3.0. Only six or seven of the islands are inhabited at all. When the Vietnamese government formally established the town of Hà Tiên in 1998, it counted 1,055 people out here; by early 2012 that had grown to nearly 1,800 across more than 420 households. Almost all of them fish. In 2011...

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Image: ntt | CC BY-SA 3.0

Hà Tiên Islands: What the Name Is Worth Now

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Đỗ Doãn Hoàng, CC BY-SA 3.0. There is a particular pleasure in a place that never bothered to clean up its reputation. Vietnamese newspapers have been writing buried-treasure stories about the archipelago for years - one 2011 feature called it simply the island that hides gold - and the legend keeps the boat...

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Image: Đỗ Doãn Hoàng | CC BY-SA 3.0