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.

Recommended tours:

Discover the beauty of the North Vietnam: http://www.activetravel.asia/discover-beauty-of-north-vietnam-t335.html

Vietnam Northern Highlights: http://www.activetravel.asia/northern-highlights-t196.html

Walking and Cyclo Hanoi: http://vietnamtour.com/walking_and_cyclo_tour_hanoi_t214.html