Manners in Vietnam: what matters and what is forgiven

Most pagodas in Vietnam are Mahayana Buddhist, often mixed with ancestor worship and local spirits, and they are working buildings rather than monuments. People come in on the way to work, light incense, bow three times and leave. You are welcome to walk in; you are a guest in someone else’s prayer.

• Take your shoes off where you see others doing it, usually at the step into the main hall. Courtyards are almost always fine in shoes.
• Do not point your feet at an altar or a Buddha image when you sit, and do not climb on statues or railings for a photograph.
• Walk around people who are praying rather than between them and the altar, and keep your voice at conversation level.
• Lighting incense is fine if you are invited to; nobody expects a donation, although the box by the door is there if you want to use it.
• In Cambodia and Laos, where the Buddhism is Theravada and monks are more numerous, women should not touch a monk or hand him something directly — place it down, or pass it through a man.

The Cao Dai Holy See at Tay Ninh, which many of our Cu Chi days combine, has its own rules: shoes off inside, no walking through the central nave, and during the noon service visitors watch from the upper gallery. The guide will show you where to stand.

If you are invited into a home — a delta homestay family, a guide’s relatives at Tet, a cooking class in a private kitchen — a few habits make the visit easier for everyone.

• Shoes off at the door, always. Look for the pile of sandals.
• Bring something small: fruit, biscuits or tea. Give and receive with both hands.
• Wait for the eldest person at the table to start eating, and let your host put food into your bowl; it is hospitality, not a hint.
• Do not leave chopsticks standing upright in rice. It looks like the incense on a funeral altar.
• If there is drinking, the toast comes round many times. You can hold up a glass of water or tea and nobody will mind.
• The family altar is the most important object in the house. Do not put things on it, lean against it or photograph it without asking.

The first is public anger. Raising your voice at a driver, a waiter or a receptionist makes them lose face in front of their colleagues, and it almost never gets the problem solved; it usually makes the person you are shouting at less able to help. Ask quietly, then ask the guide or call our line. Problems get fixed faster that way, every time.

The second is disrespect towards the dead. Altars, graves in rice fields, war cemeteries and memorials are treated seriously across the whole country. Sitting on a tomb for a photograph, joking at a memorial or treating an ancestral altar as a prop will offend people who would forgive you anything else.