in Vietnam are usually described in the language of .
The villages themselves describe the same situation in the language of orders and prices.
A craft survives while somebody buys the object, and it becomes a museum when they stop.
Several villages that produce for a domestic market have grown rather than declined.
Those producing for tourists are more fragile, because a single change in travel patterns removes the customer.
Villages that sell to face a different risk, which is the loss of the design.
A buyer who supplies the pattern and the owns the product in every sense that matters commercially.
The village becomes a workshop, and its knowledge stops developing because nobody there decides anything.
Skills disappear in a predictable order that has been documented in several crafts.
Design goes first, then the preparation of materials, and the final stays longest because it is hardest to move.
Interventions that funded equipment produced very little.
Interventions that funded a designer working inside the village for two years produced measurable changes in price.
Younger people stay when the work pays and leave when it does not, and no cultural argument reverses that.
A village that has its young people has usually a decision, not a technique.
Heritage policy that funds festivals rather than markets has that relationship exactly backwards.