Mrs. Nguyen Thu Tuoc pushes a loaded bicycle carrying more than 60 ceramic pieces to market. Nguyen Anh Ngoc / Vietnam Museum of Ethnology

Exchanges of goods map human encounters, from face-to-face bargaining in a village market to business on a global scale. The doors to international trade that swung wide open in the late 1980s released a stream of Vietnamese goods to the rest of Asia, Europe and beyond. The doors swung inward, too, admitting international tourists curious about an unfamiliar culture.

Today’s journeys of people and goods are transforming Vietnam. The kilns of an historic ceramics industry continue to fire pots, and now more than ever the customers are scattered around the globe. A quiet hill town on the China border becomes a mecca for international travelers, but the region’s traditional embroidered textiles—the symbol of a culture—become made-to-order tourist goods. And the highland forests, for millennia a source of food, clothing and livelihood, are threatened by regional and global demands for wood and exotic animals.