hanoi old quarters Archives

Long Tuyen reflects on change and tradition in Vietnam’s cities.

Long ago, each street in Vietnam’s capital, Hanoi, specialized in a specific trade, as artisans from villages in the Red River Delta settled in the capital to supply wares to the royal citadel of Thang Long.

Most Vietnamese people are familiar with this verse:

Let’s travel around Thang Long Citadel,
All around its 36 streets,
Hang Bo, Hang Bac, Hang Gai
Hang Buom, Hang Thiec, Hang Bai,
Hang Khay…

Today, Hanoi is much bigger than it was in the past, when the Old Quarter contained 36 specialized guild streets. In many streets, the mossy, tiled-roof houses have been replaced by tall, modern buildings, while the skyline is full of signs and billboards. Nonetheless, the city’s ancient spirit lingers.

The spirit of ‘Thang Long can still be found in Hanoi’s quiet pagodas, down narrow alleys, and on the stone steles that list the achievements of tutelary gods in communal houses on Hang Bac, Hoe Nhai, and Kim Lien streets. The spirit of old Hanoi also lingers in the behaviour and attitudes of families who have lived in Hanoi for generations.

Hanoians still refer to the Old Quarter as the “36 Streets”. This area extends from the fountain on the north side of Hoan Kiem Lake, along Hang Dao and Hang Ngang Streets, and around streets like Hang Buom, Luong Van Can, Luong Ngoc Quyen, and Ma May to end at Hang Dau Park.

No.87 Ma May street

In the past, Hang Dao Street specialized in selling silk, while Hang Duong Street sold sweets. Hang Buom sold coarse cloth and hemp fibres. Today, everything has changed. The turbaned Indians selling Bombay silk on Hang Dao and Hang Ngang Streets are long gone. These streets now sell ready-made clothes, watches, jewellery and luxury goods.

The street fronts are flashy but step down the narrow alleys that run off of the main streets and you will find a different world. The interiors are dim and gloomy. Large, extended families live in tiny spaces with ancient amenities. Nothing has been renovated in decades.

Crossing the street, Lan Ong Road smells of Chinese medicinal herbs, just as it has for centuries. Here, shops sell everything from cheap herbal flu remedies to imported traditional medicines made from rare ingredients. Hang Thiec (Tin Shop) Street is always noisy with the sounds of people hammering metal. While some streets have retained their traditional focus, Thuoc Bac (Chinese Herb) Street is now devoted to selling metal wares.

On Hang Dong (Bronze Shop) Street, visitors are happy to find altar objects, incense burners and ceremonial items cast by bronze-workers whose families have made these items for generations. Hang Chieu (Mat Shop) Street remains loyal to selling rush mats, wooden-bead mats and bamboo mats imported from China.

And Hang Ma Street is still festooned with all manner of colourful paper votive objects, from ghost money to paper houses, cars and even airplanes that grieving relatives can burn for their departed loved-ones.

>> read more: Hanoi’s longstanding coffee shops

In the old days, clusters of residential quarters formed around citadels, especially in capital cities. Vietnamese people gradually left the farms and came to the towns, where they settled near people from their native village. Over time, these groups of village communities became a city.

In places like Lang Son, Lao Cai and Cao Bang groups of traders formed cities. The royal court and the French colonial government were behind the creation of cities in places like Nam Dinh, Hung Yen, Hai Phong, Son Tay, and Thai Binh. Trade along waterways led to the formation of cities like Da Nang, Hoi An, Bien Hoa and Can Tho. Living in cities tends to have a civilizing influence. Around the world, cities birth to great personalities and intellectual the city, talented people are freed from ancient rituals and customs, which leads to innovation.

Looking at Central Vietnam, the ancient city of Hoi An has been lovingly preserved. Thanks to its original architecture and its charming, lantern-lit streets, this riverside town draws thousands of tourists. Its success as a tourist destination has led to its growth, so it is a city. Of course, if it loses its old-fashioned, small-town charm, the tourists will stop coming, so city officials must find a way to balance economic development with preservation. On festival nights, locals still gather to sing bài chòi near the Hoai River, read poetry and play chess.

Hoi An ancient town – Photo: Xuan Tran

Meanwhile, in the ancient royal capital of Hue, there are fewer schools and peaceful gardens than there once were. Nonetheless, the city’s treed streets have a peaceful air, especially in the area adjacent to the ancient Imperial City, where rules dictated that no house could be higher than the king’s palanquin.

The memoirs of French colonial officers give us insight into Vietnam in the 19th century. Arriving in Thang Long, they describe streets that look very strange, with rows of dilapidated shacks made of bamboo. Each street was like a simple fortress, with a gate that was firmly bolted at night.

In 1835, King Minh Mang ordered the razing of Bat Quai to build Gia Dinh Citadel, which was later destroyed by the French. King Minh Mang could not have imagined the thriving city of 10 million – Ho Chi Minh City – that now stands on the ruins of his citadel.

While the streets of Saigon are not full of legends and history like those in Hanoi, they ring with energy and optimism. Bustling and vibrant, Saigon’s streets look towards the future. In all of Vietnam’s towns and cities, the streets have their own spirit, revealing people’s ambitions and their pride in their traditions.

Cho Lon – Sai Gon city

Source: Heritage – Vietnam Airlines

In Vietnam, there is a say: “Hanoi has thirty-six streets and guilds – Jam Street, Sugar Street, Salt Street, …” Inside a modern and dynamic city, Hanoi’s Old Quarter appears as an antique quarter, represented eternal soul of the city. Nowadays, most Vietnamese and Westerners are familiar with the phrase “Hanoi – 36 Old Streets”, the top special historical vestige and sight-seeing of the capital, luring international visitors thanks to their mostly original states.

Walk north from Hoan Kiem Lake (Sword lake), across Cau Go St. and suddenly you are in the tumultuous streets of the Old Quarter. Hanoi is the only city in Vietnam to retain its ancient, merchants’ quarter, a congested square kilometer, which was closed behind massive ramparts and heavy wooden gates until well into the nineteenth century. Apart from one gate, at the east end of Hang Chieu St., the walls has been dismantled but a glance at the map reveals the quarter’s jigsaw of narrow streets with evocative names like Hang Trong St for drum skin, Hang Bo St for bamboo baskets, Hang Buom for Sails, Hang Ma for paper votive objects and so on.

There are few individual sights in the quarter, the best approach is simply to dive into the back lanes, fascinating at any time of day but taking on a special atmosphere as the evening traffic dies down, when the stalls blaze with color and everyone come out to relax and gossip under dim street lights. Everything spills out onto pavements which double as workshops for stone-carvers, furniture-makers and tinsmiths and as display space for merchandise ranging from pungent therapeutic herbs and fluttering prayer flags to ranks of Remy Martin and shiny wrapped chocolates.

With so much to attract you attention at ground level, it will be easy to miss the architecture, which reveals fascinating glimpses of the quarter’s history, staring with the fifteenth-century merchants’ houses otherwise found only in Hoi An. Hanoi’s aptly named tube-house evolved from market stalls into narrow single-storey shops, windows no higher than a passing royal palanquin, under gently curving, red-titled roofs.

Some are just two meters wide, the result of taxes levied on street frontages and of subdivision for inheritance, while behind stretches a succession of storerooms and living quarters up to 60m in length, interspersed with open courtyards to give them light and air, to get a better idea of the layout, pop into the beautifully restored example at 87 Ma May (daily 8am – 5pm).

Nowadays, the majority of facades bear distinctly European touches – fade wooden shutters, sagging balconies and rain-streaked molding – dating from the early 1900s when the streets were widened for pavements. Certain occupants were too wealthy or influential to be shifted and you can find their houses still standing out of line along Hang Bac, Ma May and Hang Buom St., three of the Old Quarter’s most interesting and attractive streets. Ma May also retains its own “đình” (communal house), which traditionally served as both meeting hall and shrine to the neighborhood’s particular patron spirit, in this case a fourteenth century mandarin and ambassador to the Chinese court.

Hang Buom St and Bach Ma Temple

Walking north along Ma May St and onto Hang Buom St., you pass a wealth of interesting detail typical of the quarter’s patchwork architecture: simple one-storey shophouses, some still sporting traditional red-titled roofs, elaborate plaster-work and Art Deco styling from colonial day; and Soviet chic of the 1960s and 1970s – each superimposed on the basic tube house design. Hang Buom is also home to the quarter’s oldest and most revered place of worship, Bach Ma Temple (daily 7.30 – 11.30am, 1.30 – 6pm).

The temple was founded in the ninth century and later dedicated to the White House (Bach Ma), the guardian spirit of Thang Long who posed as an ethereal site foreman and helped King Ly Thai To overcome a few problems with his citadel’s collapsing walls. The present structure dates largely from the eighteenth century and its most unusual features are a pair of charismatic, pot-bellied guardian in front of the altar who flaunt an impressive array of lacquered gold teeth. In front stands an antique palanquin, used each year to celebrate the temple’s foundation on the twelfth day of the second lunar month.

The Guiding Light Mosque

As you explore the quarter you will come across a great many other scared sites like temples, pagodas, dinh and venerable banyan trees – hidden among the houses. One of the more surprising is the Guiding Light Mosque at no. 12 Hang Luoc, which was built in the 1890s by an Indian Islamic community of traders and civil servants, and now serves Muslims from Hanoi’s diplomatic community as the only mosque in northern Vietnam.

Dong Xuan Market and Long Bien Bridge

East of the mosque, the city’s largest covered market, Dong Xuan, occupies a whole block behind its original, 1889 facade. Its three storeys are dedicated to clothes and household goods, while fresh foodstuffs spill out into a bustling street market stacked with multicolored mounds of vegetables. Head one block east again and you find two ramps taking bicycles and pedestrians up onto Long Bien Bridge, a road and rail bridge completed in 1902 and originally named after the then governor-general of Indochina, Paul Doumer. Until Chuong Duong Bridge was built in 1980s, Long Bien Bridge was the Red River’s only bridge and therefore of immense strategic significance. During the American bombs never managed to knock out completely. If you have time, take a bicycle ride across the 1700-metre span of iron lattice work, but spare a thought for the maintenance staff: in the 1960s, perhaps the last time it was done, it took a hundred workers five years to repaint the bridge.