54 Traditions

Mark Rapoport, a former New York pediatrician, and his wife moved to Hanoi in the early 2000s and immediately started collecting the cultural antiques of the ethnic tribes. Their gallery, 54 Traditions, is now the only one in Vietnam devoted to the arts and crafts of the country’s fifty-four ethnic groups. Visiting their multi-storey shop, co-owned with Nguyen Thi Nhung, is like shopping in an Ali Baba’s cave of treasures, except that this one comes with an incredibly knowledgeable and passionate collector guide who will tell you the story and pedigree of each object and provide a detailed fact sheet to go with it. (He will also package, ship or mount your object and have it delivered to your hotel or the airport.) Many of their original finds are now in museums including the Metropolitan and American Museum of Natural History in New York, Musée Branly in Paris and the Ethnology Museum in Hanoi. Among their specialties: tribal textiles and costumes, Buddhist statues, tribal jewelry, power swords, ritual scrolls and ceramic boxes salvaged from shipwrecks that are more than 500 years old. Be sure to look out for the Chimera jewelry, which incorporates ancient beads. Prices range from under $25 to many thousands and pieces are marked with colored dots to indicate the ranges. Just be sure to give yourself plenty of time here as Mark is true to his motto of offering “an education not just an object.”

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