The Mekong Delta is a machine for making flat land, and Hà Tiên is where the machine finally stops. West of here the coastline turns into the Gulf of Thailand and the border into Cambodia; there is nowhere further to go. The town holds roughly a hundred thousand people — 100,560 at the 2019 census — across about a hundred square kilometres, which sounds like a city and feels like nothing of the kind. The centre is small enough to walk. Trần Hầu, the main commercial street, runs along the seafront between Cầu Tô Châu, the road bridge, and the spot where a pontoon footbridge called Cầu Phao used to cross until it was pulled out in early 2007. Behind the town lies Đầm Đông Hồ, a broad tidal lagoon that the best hotel rooms look out over, catching the light long after the streets have gone dim.

Follow Mạc Cửu Street to its end and the hill takes over: a sprawling terraced slope of family tombs belonging to the man who founded this place. Mạc Cửu was a merchant from Guangdong who would not live under the new Qing dynasty, drifted south into Cambodian territory, and built a port here that outlasted him by centuries. He died in 1735. His descendants ran Hà Tiên for another hundred years, and they are all up on that hillside. The town's temples are scattered rather than concentrated — Chùa Tam Bảo is generally reckoned the finest, with Chùa Giải Thoát and Tịnh Xá Ngọc Hồ close behind — but the real pleasure is the small Chinese shrines tucked down back streets, unannounced, smelling of incense and old wood. Local tourist maps mark the cave temples in the limestone hills outside town.

Mũi Nai is a cape with a modest beach, and the entrance fee is two thousand dong — a sum so small it functions more as a gesture than a charge. The classic day out is a bicycle loop: ride to Mũi Nai, then swing inland and follow the Cambodian border road back into town. Somewhere along the way you pass a barrel-shaped hill with a temple built inside it, another two thousand dong. A rented bicycle costs a couple of dollars a day, a motorbike about six. Moto drivers wait at fixed corners around town and will take you anywhere in Hà Tiên for twenty thousand dong, or out to the border for forty or fifty.

Most travellers who pass through Hà Tiên are really going somewhere else, and that somewhere is usually Phú Quốc. Along with Rạch Giá, this is one of only two mainland ports serving the island. Superdong and Phú Quốc Express run around six fast ferries a day, an hour and a quarter to an hour and a half across to Bãi Vòng, where free electric buses carry passengers on to Dương Đông. A slower car ferry costs less and berths at the island's northeastern corner. In the other direction, coaches grind eight hours up to Ho Chi Minh City's Miền Tây terminal. Twenty-two kilometres south, at Kiên Lương, a cement works begun in 1961 chews into the same limestone that gives the coast its strange, abrupt karst hills.

In June 2025 Vietnam's National Assembly abolished an entire tier of local government and folded Kiên Giang province into a much larger An Giang. Hà Tiên, a provincial city until then, stopped being a city at all. It was cut into two wards — Hà Tiên and Tô Châu — inside the new province, its name surviving as a neighbourhood label rather than a municipality. For a town that has been a Cambodian trading post, a Chinese-run principality, a Vietnamese protectorate, a French colonial district and the capital of a province that no longer exists, this is less an upheaval than a routine. The maps change. The night market opens anyway.