Kim Bồng's craftsmen first gained wide renown in the 18th century, when the village's artisans were called north to contribute to construction at Huế — then the seat of the Nguyễn lords and later the Nguyễn dynasty emperors. The detail work they produced in those imperial buildings still stands. More recently, the same hands have shaped timber for Ho Chi Minh's mausoleum in Hanoi. That a village of a few hundred families has left its mark on both the imperial past and the revolutionary present says something about the depth of the craft here. The techniques have been refined and passed down through generations, not preserved under glass but used every day: mortise-and-tenon joinery without nails, wood selected and seasoned to outlast its makers.

When the old town of Hội An was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1999, the question of who would restore its 200-year-old shop-houses and assembly halls had a ready answer. Kim Bồng craftsmen had been the builders; Kim Bồng craftsmen would be the restorers. Some of the buildings they now work on had not been touched, structurally, in centuries — which means the repair requires not just skill but historical detective work, reading grain patterns and joinery methods to understand what the original builders intended. Restoration projects have also taken Kim Bồng artisans to Da Nang and as far as Quảng Ninh Province in the north, spreading a tradition rooted in this small river-bend commune across the country.

For all its renown, the trade nearly died out in the 1990s. Woodworking offered hard work for modest returns — around VND 1.5 million (roughly US$85) a month on average — and young people left for factory jobs or city work. By the time the UNESCO designation revived interest in the old town's heritage, few master carvers remained in Kim Bồng. To stop the skill from vanishing entirely, Cẩm Kim commune built a program offering free training to young residents, including a monthly stipend of VND 150,000 and a set of tools. It was a small intervention, but it slowed the erosion. The master carver Huynh Ri became one of the faces of that survival, his workshop a place where technique was shared rather than hoarded.

Kim Bồng was never only about decorative carving. The village built boats — fishing vessels and river craft suited to the Thu Bon's shifting channels — alongside the cabinet-making and architectural joinery for which it is best known. Shipbuilding has declined as fiberglass hulls replaced wooden ones, but the tradition of working at multiple scales, from the curve of a prow to the inlay on a cabinet door, shaped a versatility that still defines the village's craftsmen. Today visitors can watch carvers at work in open-fronted studios, and workshops sell furniture and decorative pieces. The commercial side is real, but it sits alongside work that is genuinely ancient: the proportions, the joinery, the choice of timber all carry the fingerprints of centuries.