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| Clay whistle from Hoi An in Central Vietnam |
This little clay whistle was discovered by my friend Patricia on her trip to Vietnam. She brought it back so I could add a Vietnamese miniature instrument to my collection! What a friend.
She told me that she was walking with her boyfriend along the streets of a town in Central Vietnam called Hoi An when she heard the sound of the whistle. "I stopped dead in my tracks," she wrote me. "What was that?" she asked her boyfriend. Patricia set out to find where the sound was coming from.
"I heard it again, but it came from a different direction," her email to me read. "It was dark, so we couldn't see very well. At a certain point, I felt like a cat chasing a quickly moving fly trying to catch this melodic sound. It ended up that there were several merchants tucked away on stairways and corners selling these whistles. The only way you could find them in the night was to follow their call."
The whistles are shaped as animals, and Patricia chose the tiger for me. Here's a short video she found on YouTube that shows a Vietnamese woman making a whistle out of fresh clay: Clay Whistles in Vietnam
I did some research to find out more about these Vietnamese whistles. According to Nick Ray's e-book, Vietnam, Hoi An was popular for its pottery during imperial times, and craftsmen would make items for the royal court at Hue. Today, the whistles are a way for locals to earn a living. The clay is collected from nearby fields and hand-crafted into whistles, pots and jars, and are mostly sold to tourists visiting Hoi An.
If you happen to know more about these clay whistles from Vietnam, please share it in a comment.
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Question: Do you play a whistle, or know someone who does? If so, what kind of whistle is it? Share your whistle story in a comment!
