Dong Chau Mudflats

At low tide the watch-huts appear like a forest of stilts — slender bamboo platforms standing in ranks across a grey shore that runs to the horizon, each one marking a family's clam ground. At dawn they cast long shadows down the mud. At high tide they stand to their platforms in open sea.

The Dong Chau tidal flats stretch along Thai Binh Province's Red River Delta coast, one of Vietnam's productive clam-farming shores. Stilted watch-huts guard the shellfish grounds in ranks across the mud, and the tide runs the whole economy — low water exposes a moonscape of working ground, high water turns the same coast to open sea. This is a working shore rather than a resort one: the reward is the dawn hour at its edge, when photographers come for the hut lines and the sunrise over the clam fields, on a coast that feeds itself. Con Vanh's sandbar beach lies a few kilometres along the same shoreline.