Gom But Bat Trang Partnership: Shaping Clay Into a Living Story

Gom But Bat Trang Partnership | Some heritage is fired in a kiln before it is ever written down. In Bat Trang, a village that has been shaping earth into vessels for more than seven hundred years, one young ceramic artist decided that clay could still carry new stories, if someone was willing to sit at the wheel long enough to find them.

Hanoi Free Private Tour Guide is proud to announce a new partnership with Gốm Bụt, the Bát Tràng ceramic studio founded by artist Nguyễn Trường Sơn, formalized through a memorandum of cooperation signed on August 2, 2026, at the studio’s creative space in Bát Tràng. The agreement was signed by Lê Văn Tài, Chairman of Hanoi Free Private Tour Guide, and Nguyễn Trường Sơn, Chairman of the Members’ Council and founder of Gốm Bụt, and witnessed by a crowd of HFPTG members who had spent the day with their hands in the clay themselves. Like our other collaborations, this one is not a transaction. It is a meeting between two groups who believe a craft only stays alive when it is shared, generously, patiently, and with the people who will carry it forward

A Village Built on Fire and Clay

Bát Tràng has been making ceramics on the banks of the Red River since roughly the fifteenth century, and the rhythms of the village, the smell of wet clay, the heat rolling off the kilns, the potter’s wheel turning in every workshop courtyard, have barely changed in all that time. What has changed is who is doing the shaping.

Nguyễn Trường Sơn grew up inside that rhythm. As a child in a Bát Tràng family workshop, he learned to help with the smaller tasks of the trade long before he ever threw a piece of his own. Years later, after a long walk across Vietnam that he took deliberately to slow down and step outside his usual work, he came home with something he couldn’t unlearn: a conviction that ceramics could hold more than form and glaze. It could hold memory, culture, even philosophy.

In December 2021, that conviction became Gốm Bụt. The name draws on “Bụt”, an old Vietnamese word for Buddha, and the studio’s pieces are built around a belief borrowed from Buddhist thought, that everything in the natural world carries its own quiet spirit. Instead of the moulded, mass-produced pieces that dominate the market, Gốm Bụt works almost entirely by hand, favoring a traditional coiling technique known as be chạch, once common in the village and now rarely used because it is slow and yields far less than a production line. Every vase, bowl, and figure that leaves the studio is one of a kind, shaped in a single sitting, and meant to be read as much as looked at. Sơn’s goal has never been modest: to help Bát Tràng ceramics, and Gốm Bụt with it, become a recognizable symbol of Vietnamese culture itself.

Two Missions, One Belief

At the signing, Lê Văn Tài spoke about what Hanoi Free Private Tour Guide is actually trying to do, which has never been only about leading free tours for visitors. Every stop on a tour, he said, is meant to work like an open classroom, a place where members learn to observe, to listen, and to tell Vietnam’s stories in English. That idea sits at the center of EFIS English, the language program behind Hanoi Free Private Tour Guide: learn a language by living inside real experiences, not by memorizing it in a room.

Nguyễn Trường Sơn described a parallel hope for Gốm Bụt: to bring Bát Tràng’s traditional craft closer to a younger generation and to visitors from abroad, so the studio becomes not just a place to watch pottery being made, but a space where people feel the creativity, patience, and inherited care that the village’s artisans have carried across generations.

Put those two missions side by side and the partnership stops looking like an unusual pairing. A tour guide organization that teaches English through real cultural encounters, and a ceramic studio that teaches culture through real craftsmanship, are, in the end, doing versions of the same work.

What This Partnership Means in Practice

The memorandum lays out a working relationship the two organizations plan to build over time, not a one-off event:

HFPTG will bring international travelers to Gốm Bụt as part of its guided journeys through Bát Tràng, connecting visitors directly with the studio rather than the village’s more commercial souvenir stalls.
Both organizations will work together to introduce Gốm Bụt and Bát Tràng’s craft heritage to the international student community and travelers passing through Hanoi.
The two sides will co-host workshops, cultural exchange days, and community events centered on ceramics and craft.
HFPTG and Gốm Bụt will support each other’s presence on digital platforms, with the shared goal of building a sustainable, long-term relationship rather than a short campaign.

For our volunteer guides, this means something concrete: the ability to bring a visitor to Bát Tràng not just to buy a souvenir bowl, but to sit at a wheel in a studio whose founder can explain, in the kind of depth only insiders have, why coiling by hand still matters when a machine could do it faster.

A Day Already Lived Before the Ink Dried

The signing itself happened at the end of a longer day. As part of a club program called “Chạm 2: Hành trình Đất & Lửa” Touch 2: A Journey of Earth and Fire, Hanoi Free Priavte Tour Guide members had already spent hours at Gốm Bụt before the memorandum was ever signed: listening to the story of the village, sitting at the wheel, and shaping their own first pieces of clay. By the time Lê Văn Tài and Nguyễn Trường Sơn sat down to formalize the partnership, the members in the room had already lived a small version of what the agreement was meant to make possible for future visitors.

A Craft Told in Every Language

Bát Tràng’s clay has survived war, industrialization, and the slow pull of mass production, mostly because someone in every generation has decided it was worth the extra hours it takes to do it the old way. Gốm Bụt is one expression of that choice; the rubber sandals workshops of Vua Dép Lốp, the craft villages behind Tinh Hoa Nghề Việt, and the volunteer guides who stand in front of international visitors every day and offer to explain their city, in a language that isn’t their first, are others.

We’re glad to count Gốm Bụt among the partners who share that instinct, and glad that Nguyễn Trường Sơn is willing to let a new generation of HFPTG storytellers help carry Bát Tràng’s clay tradition beyond the village.