Hang Bo Street

Behind a glass window, small boxes of beads give off a faint shine. Rolls of white lace and rolls of black lace sit beside spools of colored embroidery thread, stacked in long rows on the shelves. This is Hàng Bồ Street, one of the shortest in the Old Quarter of Hanoi, and one of the streets most deeply marked by its trades.

A Hanoi newspaper gives the length of the street as 272 meters and its width as 6 meters. In the east, it begins at the crossing of Hàng Đào and Hàng Ngang. In the middle, it passes the crossing of Hàng Cân and Lương Văn Can. It ends at a junction with Hàng Thiếc and Thuốc Bắc. Bát Đàn meets the street at the same junction. The street lies in the core of the Old Quarter.

The same paper adds that the street originally lay on the land of two old wards. Xuân Hoa lay in the eastern half and Nhân Nội in the western half. These were two of the many wards of merchants and craftsmen who, for centuries, had laid the foundation of livelihood for the area around Hoan Kiem Lake.

The name of the street states its first trade directly. The paper says this was once a place of shops selling bồ woven from strips of bamboo. A bồ is a round, tubular container made by hand, used to hold rice, crops and farm produce. Every farming household needed one. People from the weaving villages of the northern delta carried their goods here and gathered to sell them. The French period gave the street a name from the same trade: rue des Paniers, the street of baskets.

The first stretch, toward Hàng Đào and Hàng Ngang, had a history of its own. According to the paper, it was once called Hàng Dép Street, where shops sold clogs and sandals. So this short street held two trades along a single line. The first half sold clogs and sandals, and the second half sold bamboo bồ.

Both trades slowly drifted away. A Hanoi publication writes that the weaving of bồ from bamboo faded with time, and only a few households still sell it. In its place, Hàng Bồ turned to goods for sewing and tailoring: needles, thread, buttons and other fittings for the clothing trade. It is a familiar change in the Old Quarter. The name keeps the memory of the old craft, while the shopfronts carry new goods.

Today, small shops along the street stand packed tight with thousands of kinds of sewing supplies. There are embroidery threads in every color, plastic and glass beads in many sizes, and lace trim to sew onto áo dài and other traditional clothing. There are cloth-covered buttons, zippers and countless other fittings. Tailors who make áo dài, hand embroiderers, and home sewers all know to come here when they need fine materials.

Hàng Bồ shows an unbroken line of trade, from bamboo bồ to clogs and sandals, then to sewing supplies. The street changed its goods but not its rhythm. Walking past its small shops, a visitor crosses several trades at once, all laid on the same pavement of the Old Quarter.