Nothing about this junction is natural. The Mekong Delta's waterways were reorganised wholesale under French rule by steam dredges that cut geometrically straight channels across the floodplain - the same programme that in 1908 opened a 33 km canal linking Sóc Trăng to Phụng Hiệp. Where several of those cuts happened to intersect, engineering produced something no river would have: seven navigable channels radiating from a single point. Cái Côn, Lái Hiếu, Mang Cá and Xẻo Môn are among the arms; sources differ on how the remaining three should be named, which is its own comment on how much this waterscape has been redrawn. From the air the pattern looks almost heraldic. From a sampan at water level it looks like seven different ways to leave, which is precisely what made the town's fortune.

The market formed in 1915, once the canals were finished, and it became the largest waterway trading hub in southern Vietnam. On a good morning more than three hundred boats gathered at the junction, hulls nudging hulls, wholesalers and retailers working from the decks. Delta traders advertise by the cây bẹo, a tall bamboo pole raised above the deck with a sample of the cargo lashed to it - a pumpkin, a string of onions, a bundle of cassava - so a buyer can read a whole market from a distance without a word spoken. Delta fruit moved out from here into the rest of the country and beyond. The scene generated its own folklore: songs and poems about vendors calling from the water, an image that came to stand for the delta itself in the Vietnamese imagination.

In 2002 the authorities relocated it. The stated reasons were congestion and pollution, both genuine problems at a junction handling that much traffic, and the market was shifted about three kilometres away to Ba Ngàn. It did not take. Traders lost the customers who had known where to find them, tourists lost the seven-canal setting that was the entire point, and the new site never developed the character of the old one. Disappointment was widespread and vocal. By late 2006 - the same season the town won back its name - the market had returned to its original water. It has never fully recovered its former scale, and regional authorities have since run a series of initiatives to revive it as a heritage and tourism landmark.

Ngã Bảy grew into the largest city in Hậu Giang province, with a population of 101,192 at the 2019 count - bigger than Vị Thanh, the provincial capital it answered to. The geography explains the imbalance. Vị Thanh is about 40 km away in a straight line but more than 70 km by road, while Ngã Bảy sits directly on National Road 1A, thirty kilometres from Cần Thơ in one direction and thirty from Sóc Trăng in the other. A town that spent its first century oriented toward water spent its second oriented toward asphalt, and it happens to be well placed on both.

On 12 June 2025, Resolution 202/2025/QH15 merged Hậu Giang and Sóc Trăng provinces into Cần Thơ municipality and abolished Vietnam's entire district tier. Ngã Bảy ceased to be a provincial city; its four wards and two communes were reorganised as wards of Cần Thơ. The canals, needless to say, took no notice. The junction still braids seven channels together, boats still work the water at first light, and the name that residents fought for in 2006 is now attached to a ward rather than a city - which, in a place that has been renamed and reorganised as often as this one, counts as continuity.