Hanoi: The City of the Rising Dragon

Look out toward the northern part of the lake. You can see a small island connected to the shore by the Thê Húc Bridge — the Bridge of the Rising Sun — painted a deep vermillion red. On that island stands the Ngọc Sơn Temple, the Jade Mountain Temple, dedicated primarily to General Trần Hưng Đạo, the military commander who repelled three successive Mongol invasions in the thirteenth century. The Mongols under Kublai Khan conquered China, Korea, Persia, and Poland. They failed three times to take Vietnam. Trần Hưng Đạo is regarded as one of the greatest military commanders in history, and his spirit is said to protect the lake and the city.

For decades, a large softshell turtle — Rafetus swinhoei, one of the rarest freshwater turtles on earth — lived in this lake. Hanoians called it Cụ Rùa, the Sacred Turtle, and widely believed it to be the living descendant, or even the reincarnation, of the divine tortoise of the legend. Scientists and government officials debated whether it was one individual or several. The last confirmed individual died in January two thousand and sixteen. Its preserved body is now displayed inside the Ngọc Sơn Temple. The city mourned publicly.

In the evenings, the promenade around this lake fills with every layer of Hanoi society at once. Elderly men and women in matching tracksuits perform tai chi and line dancing to music playing from portable speakers. Teenagers on motorbikes circle slowly, looking at each other and at their phones. Street vendors sell sugarcane juice pressed through metal rollers, and bags of lotus seeds and candied fruit. Families sit on the low stone walls at the water's edge. The surface of the lake reflects the red bridge, the temple, and the towers of the surrounding city. In the French colonial era, this promenade was reserved for Europeans. The Vietnamese were not permitted to walk here. They walk here now, every single evening, without thinking about it.

Step inside if the gate is open. The main hall contains a white horse sculpture, flanked by incense burners and offerings of fruit. In the courtyard are two ancient stele mounted on the backs of carved stone tortoises — the tortoise-and-stele combination is the standard form of Vietnamese monumental inscription, and the two tortoises here are among the oldest in Hanoi. The smell inside is dense with sandalwood and the sweet char of joss sticks. The roof beams are carved and gilded, darkened with centuries of smoke.

Bạch Mã Temple is one of the four guardian temples of Hanoi — the thần bốn phương, the spirits of the four directions — positioned at the cardinal compass points around the ancient citadel. The four temples form an invisible protective boundary around the historic city. Bạch Mã guards the east. The other three are Kim Liên Temple to the south, Voi Phục Temple to the west, and Quán Thánh Temple to the north, on the shore of West Lake. The four together are the spiritual architecture of the city — its immune system, built into the urban form at the moment of founding.

The Old Quarter street you are standing on gives you a sense of the urban texture that surrounds this temple. The buildings are two and three storeys, leaning slightly over the narrow road. Motorbikes move through gaps that seem impossibly small. A woman sells bánh mì from a cart; the smell of warm bread and pickled vegetables competes with the incense from the temple gate. Street vendors, residents, tourists, delivery drivers, and schoolchildren all share this single lane without apparent conflict. This is the characteristic rhythm of the Old Quarter — ancient sacred space and daily commercial life in continuous, unapologetic proximity.

Each street was a guild community. The craftsmen on Hàng Bạc were not simply neighbours — they were members of the same guild, sharing techniques, suppliers, and trade secrets, worshipping the same guild patron deity at the guild's communal house. The guild system provided quality control, training, dispute resolution, and collective bargaining against the royal administration. It was a sophisticated form of commercial self-governance that operated for centuries before being disrupted by French colonialism and then abolished under the socialist government after nineteen fifty-four.

The architectural form of the Old Quarter is the tube house — nhà ống — a long, narrow building, typically three to five metres wide but fifteen to fifty metres deep, sometimes extending a hundred metres into the block with internal courtyards at intervals to bring in light and air. The extreme narrowness is the direct result of the guild system's property tax: tax was assessed on street frontage, not floor area. So every merchant family minimised their frontage and maximised their depth. The result is a street of faces — narrow shopfronts, each two or three bays wide, stacked vertically two or three storeys — that creates one of the most varied and human-scaled streetscapes in Asia.

The ground floor is the workshop and shop. The first floor is the family's living quarters and storage. Higher floors may be sublet or used for production. In the original configuration, the building was entirely permeable: the front opened completely for business during the day. The family lived, cooked, and slept behind and above the commerce. This spatial logic — public facing street, private retreating into depth — is still legible in the Old Quarter today, even where the trades have changed. The street life around you is its direct inheritance: the open shopfronts, the goods displayed on the pavement, the vendors squatting beside their stoves, the absolute integration of commercial and domestic life.

The streets immediately around Đồng Xuân are the most densely commercial in all of Hanoi, and each has its own distinct character. Hàng Chiếu, a short walk south, is still the bamboo street — woven mats, baskets, sieves, storage containers, all made from rattan and bamboo, stacked in the narrow shopfronts in towers that reach the ceiling. Hàng Mã, meaning Paper Goods Street, is one of the most visually extraordinary streets in the city. It sells votive paper goods — the paper objects that are burned at funerals and ancestral commemoration ceremonies to send material goods to the dead in the afterlife. The Buddhist-Taoist tradition of burning paper offerings is ancient in Vietnam; what is striking is the contemporary range of the goods on offer. Alongside traditional paper money and paper houses, you can buy paper models of motorcycles, luxury cars, smartphones, Louis Vuitton handbags, laptop computers, and bottles of Johnnie Walker Black. The dead, it seems, are expected to maintain the same tastes in the afterlife as they had in this one.

On Friday, Saturday, and Sunday evenings, the streets around Đồng Xuân — Hàng Đào, Hàng Ngang, and the square in front of the market — are closed to traffic and become the Đồng Xuân Night Market. Hundreds of stalls sell clothing, handicrafts, street food, and tourist goods. The night market is genuinely one of the best in Vietnam — less tourist-oriented than the markets of Hội An or Hạ Long, more the real commercial expression of a city that never fully stops selling. The street food section alone justifies the visit: bún chả (grilled pork with noodles and broth), bánh cuốn (steamed rice rolls with minced pork and wood ear mushroom), phở gà (chicken noodle soup), chè (sweet dessert soups), and dozens of preparations that have no direct translation because they exist only in the context of this city and this climate and this particular hour of the evening.

The bridge was one of the most strategically critical targets of the American air war against North Vietnam. Between nineteen sixty-five and nineteen seventy-two, it was bombed eleven times. Each time, it was repaired. The repairs were performed by Vietnamese construction workers who welded replacement sections in place while bombing continued around them — sometimes at night, sometimes in the immediate aftermath of a raid. The psychological and political significance of keeping the bridge operational was as important as the practical military significance. When the bridge was bombed, its repair became a statement: you cannot break this.

The evidence of those repairs is visible in the bridge's structure today. If you look along the span, you can see where the original ornate ironwork — the decorative latticework of the French design — gives way to sections of plain welded steel plate. These are the patches, the scars, the practical improvised repairs made under fire. The bridge wears its history on its body.

Today Long Biên Bridge carries two railway tracks in the centre, with narrow lanes for motorbikes and pedestrians on either side. Trains cross it slowly and with great noise. Walking across takes about twenty minutes and is worth doing: the view from the centre of the river is one of the best in Hanoi. Below and to the north you can see the bãi giữa — the river islands, long low strips of silt and vegetation in the middle of the Red River. Hanoians have farmed these islands since the city was founded. They grow vegetables, flowers, and herbs on the rich alluvial soil that the Red River deposits on the islands each monsoon season. The farmers cycle across the bridge at dawn with their produce and cycle back at dusk with empty baskets. The cycle has been running for a thousand years.

The conditions documented by former prisoners are methodical in their cruelty. Prisoners were shackled to iron bars with their feet in stocks; they could not stand or lie down fully. Disease — dysentery, tuberculosis, beriberi — killed systematically. Prisoners were beaten, subjected to water torture, deprived of food as punishment. The prison held many of the founders of the Vietnamese Communist Party, including Trường Chinh and Lê Duẩn, men who would later govern a unified Vietnam. The experience of imprisonment by French colonialism shaped the entire generation of Vietnamese leadership that fought the American war.

American pilots began arriving at Hỏa Lò in nineteen sixty-four, after the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and the start of sustained American bombing of North Vietnam. Over the following nine years, several hundred American military personnel were held here and at other prisoner of war camps in the Hanoi area. Senator John McCain, then a Navy lieutenant commander, was shot down over Hanoi in October nineteen sixty-seven, seriously injured, and brought to Hỏa Lò. He was offered early release because his father was a senior American admiral; he refused on the grounds that it would be used for propaganda and would be unfair to prisoners held longer than him. He was held here until nineteen seventy-three.

Most of the prison was demolished in the nineteen nineties to make way for the Hanoi Towers office and hotel complex — the gleaming tower you can see rising directly behind the remaining prison section. The corner that survives is a museum. The framing of the museum is worth attending to carefully. The French colonial section documents conditions with great specificity: photographs of the stocks, the torture instruments, the cells, the death records. The section covering American prisoners takes a markedly different tone: photographs of prisoners playing chess, celebrating Christmas, receiving Red Cross packages, smiling for the camera. The museum's argument — that the Vietnamese treated American prisoners humanely — is a political position, not a historical account. The truth of the American prisoners' experience at Hỏa Lò is contested and complicated. What is not contested is that the same walls held Vietnamese independence fighters under conditions of deliberate, systematic brutality fifty years before.

The Opera House served as the seat of the French-installed Vietnamese legislative assembly — the Chambre des représentants de l'Indochine — during the colonial period. The building was a statement of cultural authority: this is what civilisation looks like, and we have brought it to you.

On August nineteenth, nineteen forty-five, that authority collapsed completely. Japan had surrendered four days earlier, ending the Japanese occupation that had superseded French control from nineteen forty to nineteen forty-five. The French colonial administration had been imprisoned by the Japanese and not yet returned. In the revolutionary vacuum, the Việt Minh — the independence movement led by Hồ Chí Minh — moved to take power. On that morning, a mass rally was held on the steps of this building. Tens of thousands of people gathered in the boulevard. The red flag with a gold star — the flag of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam — was raised here for the first time. The August Revolution was nearly bloodless; it took ten days. The French Opera House, the symbol of colonial cultural dominance, became the stage for the announcement of its end.

Today the Opera House is Hanoi's premier performance venue. The Vietnamese National Symphony Orchestra plays here. Visiting international ensembles perform here. The building has been carefully restored, and the interior — which you can visit on a tour — retains its original gilded boxes, its painted ceiling, its parquet floors and red velvet. The building has survived colonialism, revolution, war, and modernisation. Its persistence is its own kind of political statement.

The design is attributed to the Diocese of Paris and is closely modelled on Notre-Dame de Paris at approximately one-third scale — the same two square towers, the same pointed-arch windows, the same organisation of nave, choir, and side aisles. The interior is dark and high, with stained glass windows imported from France, altars of carved and gilded wood, and the characteristic smell of Catholic churches everywhere: candlewax, incense, old stone, and fresh flowers.

Vietnam has one of the largest Catholic populations in Asia — approximately eight million people, roughly nine percent of the population. This is the legacy of three centuries of French and Portuguese missionary activity beginning in the seventeenth century, when the Jesuit priest Alexandre de Rhodes developed the quốc ngữ romanisation system for the Vietnamese language — arguably the most consequential cultural act of the colonial period, since it gave Vietnam a phonetic alphabet that made literacy faster to acquire than the traditional Chinese character system. The relationship between Vietnamese Catholicism and Vietnamese nationalism is complex and contested: Catholic Vietnamese often received preferential treatment under French colonial rule, and the Catholic community was disproportionately represented among the Vietnamese who sided with the South in the civil war.

St. Joseph's Cathedral remains one of the most active Catholic churches in Vietnam. Sunday Mass draws very large congregations; the church is often standing-room only. The square in front of the cathedral is also the centre of Hanoi's egg coffee neighbourhood. Cà phê trứng — egg coffee — was invented in Hanoi in the nineteen forties by a bartender at the Sofitel Legend Metropole Hotel who used egg yolk whipped with sugar and condensed milk as a substitute for scarce fresh milk. The result — a strong Vietnamese robusta coffee topped with a thick, sweet, custard-like foam — is one of the distinctive tastes of this city. The cafes on the streets around the cathedral are among the best places to try it.

The third courtyard contains the most important historical monuments in Hanoi: the eighty-two stone tortoise steles. These are large stone slabs mounted on the backs of carved stone tortoises — the tortoise representing longevity, scholarship, and the stability of knowledge — each bearing an inscription recording the names, birthplaces, and examination results of the doctoral graduates of the Vietnamese royal examinations. The steles were erected between fourteen eighty-four and one thousand eight hundred and seventeen, covering examinations from fourteen forty-two to seventeen seventy-nine. They record over a thousand names in total — the intellectual elite of Vietnam across three and a half centuries.

The royal examination system in Vietnam was modelled on the Chinese imperial examination system and operated on a similar principle: it provided a meritocratic route to government service that was theoretically open to any man of sufficient learning, regardless of birth. In practice, access to the years of study required for examination success was heavily conditioned by class and geography. But the principle — that the state should be governed by scholars selected on the basis of demonstrated learning rather than hereditary rank — had profound cultural consequences. Vietnamese national identity has long been articulated in terms of scholarly culture rather than warrior culture. The great heroes of Vietnamese history — Trần Hưng Đạo, Nguyễn Trãi, Hồ Chí Minh — are as celebrated for their writing and thinking as for their military achievements.

Vietnamese university students come to this temple before major examinations to rub the heads of the stone tortoises for good luck. You will see the tortoise heads worn smooth by generations of hands. The practice is partly religious, partly superstitious, and partly an expression of continuity with a tradition of learning that stretches back nine hundred and fifty years. The steles that record the names of the doctoral graduates are now a UNESCO Memory of the World heritage listing. The names inscribed on them — men born in villages throughout northern Vietnam who studied for decades and passed the most demanding examinations their civilization could devise — are not famous. They are the record of ordinary extraordinary effort.

He died in September nineteen sixty-nine, in the middle of the war, at the age of seventy-nine. He did not live to see the country unified. He had been explicit about his wishes for after his death: he wanted to be cremated, and he wanted his ashes scattered over three hills, one in the north, one in the centre, and one in the south of Vietnam — a final gesture of national unity. The political leadership of the Vietnamese Communist Party overrode this wish. His body was embalmed by a team of Soviet specialists — the same specialists who had maintained Lenin's body in Moscow since nineteen twenty-four — and interred in this mausoleum, which opened in August nineteen seventy-five, four months after the fall of Saigon and the end of the war he had started.

The body is sent to Russia every year, typically in the autumn, for maintenance and preservation work. When the mausoleum is closed for these periods, a sign informs visitors that Uncle Hồ is on vacation.

The mausoleum is open to visitors on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday mornings. The queue moves slowly and in complete silence. Visitors are required to dress conservatively, surrender bags and cameras, and walk in single file through the refrigerated chamber where the body lies. Photography is strictly forbidden. The experience is unlike anything else in Vietnam — a confrontation with the way a state chooses to preserve and display its founding figure, and with the gap between the simple wooden stilt house where Hồ Chí Minh actually chose to live — visible just behind the mausoleum, beside the carp pond he kept — and the imperial monumentalism with which his party chose to commemorate him. The stilt house is worth seeing. The contrast between the two structures — the modest, purposeful dwelling and the granite colossus — is the most honest account of Hồ Chí Minh that this complex provides.