Hang Bong Street

White, fluffy, and light in the hand, cotton wadding was once the whole business of Hàng Bông Street. The word bông means cotton. In the old days, when the Old Quarter was divided street by street into crafts and trades, this was the place that sold it, along with quilts and bedding stuffed with it. People from Hanoi and from nearby regions came to buy. They filled their pillows and mattresses with it and sewed quilts for the cold winters of the northern delta. There were no foam mattresses or factory-made quilts yet, so cotton was a basic need in every household.

The street runs west from Hàng Gai to Cửa Nam, the city's South Gate. It is one of the long streets among the 36 streets of the Old Quarter. The number 36 is a round figure, a conventional way of naming the old trading quarter, and not an exact count. The length of Hàng Bông says something about its trade. This was not a small lane for one narrow specialty. It was a whole route of business, stretching from the central trading area out to the southern gate.

Its place beside Hàng Gai was no accident. Hàng Gai sold silk, gai fiber, and rope. Hàng Bông sold cotton and bedding. Each answered a different need in the homes of old Hanoi, and together the two streets formed one unbroken belt of textile trades, running from the shore of Hoan Kiem Lake deep into the Old Quarter. Hàng Vải, Hàng Điếu and other streets lay close by. Together they made up the Old Quarter's trade in cloth and fiber, and Hàng Bông was one link in it.

Over many decades, the trade in cotton and stuffed bedding shrank. Factory-made quilts, foam mattresses, and spring mattresses slowly replaced handmade goods.

On Hàng Bông today, the shops that still sell bedding and cloth stand among small hotels, eateries, and services for travelers from Vietnam and abroad. The street is still crowded. But the crowd now comes from the flow of visitors passing through, and not entirely from people buying cotton.

The street has two layers. The outer layer is the daily rhythm of present-day tourism: signboards, hotel desks, food stalls, and coffee shops. The inner layer is made of the shops that sell blankets, pillows, and cloth and still open their doors steadily. They hold on to the trace of a trade that has been tied to the name of this street for hundreds of years.

On their shelves a bolt of white cloth lies folded neatly, and behind a glass cabinet a cotton pillow waits. Each is a piece of the Old Quarter's memory that has not faded. A street that has lived through a century of change still goes by its true name.