What goes on behind the bland-looking shops in Hanoi’s Old Quarter? To find out, you need to sign up for a tour with Hidden Hanoi.
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| The Old Quarter |
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| The passages are so narrow, shoulders touch both walls. |
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| Some alleyways lead to rich temples. — MARTIN SPICE |
The Old Quarter of Hanoi, Vietnam, is every tourist’s destination. The narrow streets offer a slight refuge from the throbbing traffic of the city’s main thoroughfares but the main attractions are the craft shops that line the sides of every lane.
Here you can find the city’s oldest goldsmiths and silversmiths, and traces of other crafts that have almost died out now. Nowadays, there is little call for the work of traditional ironmongers, and the sugar trade largely takes place elsewhere. Instead there are small shops selling beautiful paper, bamboo bowls, posters from the Vietnam war and elegant lacquerware.
There are also workshops that will copy for you, with immense skill, almost any work of art — Picassos, Warhols and a dozen versions of the Mona Lisa (one with Jennifer Aniston’s face) jump out at you from small courtyards and the long narrow shops that characterise the Quarter. Provide these artists with a photograph or picture, and they will copy it for you for the price of a few dollars.
The Old Quarter is the heart of Hanoi, bustling, noisy and endlessly fascinating, its picturesque buildings containing treasure troves of handicrafts and providing chic little cafés to rest limbs weary from too much sightseeing. It is the oldest, continuously developed area of Vietnam, with some estimating settlement here to date two thousand years back.
But even if that is a little optimistic, there is no disputing that the Old Quarter celebrated its 1,000 year anniversary in 2010. When King Ly Thai To moved his capital to the area, he wrote in a royal proclamation, “The land here is spacious and flat, such a fresh spot and a hub of commerce for the whole country.”
I doubt that he would describe it as a “fresh spot” today but as with most successful commercial areas of the time, it was trade that made the city thrive and its inhabitants rich. But to find this richness, you have to go behind the scenes.
It’s difficult to exaggerate the change that occurs when you get behind the shopfronts on the busy main streets and start to explore the alleyways behind them. The shop fronts themselves are narrow because storekeepers were taxed according to the width of their storefront. The financially astute solution, therefore, was to have buildings that were narrow but went back a long way.
Alongside them are alleyways to gain access to the rooms that lie furthest back from the road. Often the entrances to these are so tiny that you will find your shoulders touching the walls on either side. Some are poor, almost derelict; others contain surprising richness. Almost all take you past tiny cramped dwellings, often single rooms, and under the strings of washing that festoon the tiny courtyards.
Many of the families of the Old Quarter live around these tiny courtyards and in these tiny rooms, which is odd when you consider that property prices here are extremely high. Prices, I was told, are as high here as in Tokyo and New York. This is seriously expensive real estate.
So why the apparent overcrowding and poverty?
The answer lies in the politics of succession. Over generations, these properties have been handed down, and each time they have been passed on, they have been divided between more and more people. Each person’s share has got smaller and smaller. But no-one wants to give up their share or to leave. So the density of population gets higher and there is less and less to go round.
Your chances of finding the world behind the shopfronts is small if you leave it to chance, but there are now small businesses that are in love with their heritage and culture that will take you to sights that you would never find on your own.
Our tour with Hidden Hanoi started inauspiciously outside a very ordinary-looking shop selling small tourist items. But down the side of the shop was a very tight alleyway, and within a few steps we were in an entirely different world.
After walking the not-inconsiderable length of the building, we went under an arch and through a fine wooden doorway to emerge in a brightly painted yellow courtyard, at the end of which was a flight of steps. Up the steps we climbed, only to find ourselves in a chic little rooftop café with stunning views over the Old Quarter. From the street outside, there was no indication that this little jewel even existed.
This was truly refreshment for those in the know. On the way back down the same steps, we stopped to look at the family’s chapel, full of intricate sculptures and treasures handed down from heaven knows how many years ago. Despite the inheritance divisions, this was clearly an affluent family home.
Over the next hour, the pattern was repeated. We would turn off the main streets into little alleyways and find ourselves in labyrinths of tiny lanes leading to who knew what?
We found more resplendent chapels but also stumbled across an old woman living in a sparsely furnished single room, betel juice seared like a red scar across her face. These lanes were nothing if not varied.
Our tour finished with a traditional cyclo ride around the main streets of the Old Quarter, but my appetite had been whetted for the scenes and the life that lay tantalisingly behind the bland shopfronts.
The next day, we tried to retrace our steps but much of what we had earlier discovered now eluded us. Hidden Hanoi had clearly decided to live up to its name.