Hang Ca Street

At dawn in the Old Quarter, dew still clings to the tile roofs. At a small crossing between Hàng Cá Street and Chả Cá Street, bicycles squeeze past people buying and selling. The two names, fresh fish and prepared fish, sit side by side like two pages of the same old book.

Thăng Long named its streets after trades, so every Hàng street is a page about one trade. Thăng Long is the city now called Hanoi. A Hanoi newspaper, quoting local records, notes that the Hàng names go back to the time when craft guilds and markets grew up around the capital. The goods a street sold became its name. Hàng Bạc sold silver and Hàng Gai sold gai fiber. Hàng Mã sold paper goods. Hàng Cá sold fish.

Hàng Cá crosses the neighboring Chả Cá Street. That street is famous for a fish dish called chả cá Lã Vọng. The Nhân Dân newspaper reports the crossing. Both streets lie in the Old Quarter, close to where the Tô Lịch River once ran. The same Hanoi newspaper says the Tô Lịch flowed along the western edge of the Hàng streets. The river had a boat landing where goods, and fresh fish from the fishing villages along the river, were carried up to be sold. Hàng Cá lay inside that landing district. So did Hàng Cân and Chả Cá. There, fish sellers and fish cooks gathered until the area became a street of trades.

When the French planned Hanoi in the late 19th century, the stretch of the Tô Lịch through the Old Quarter was gradually filled in. The boat landing was gone. Fresh fish no longer arrived by the river. The fish trade on Hàng Cá slowly faded with it. The name stayed while the trade left, a pattern repeated on many other Hàng streets over a century of city growth.

Nhân Dân also notes that Hanoi still has about 50 streets whose names begin with Hàng, and many of them have lost their first trade. Hàng Gạo is now Đồng Xuân. Hàng Sơn is now Chả Cá, renamed for a newer trade. Hàng Cá kept its old name, but little trace of the old trade remains.

Today Hàng Cá is short and quiet, much more so than the streets around it. Walking through, you will see tube houses with narrow fronts, a kind of house typical of the Old Quarter since the French period, each one a thin slice set against the next. On Chả Cá Street next door, a few long-established restaurants still serve chả cá, a reminder of the old link between the two streets.

Hàng Cá matters because of its name. It proves that old Thăng Long was a lively city on a river, where each kind of goods had its own street and each trade its own address. To read a street name is to read a page of the economy of a capital a millennium old.

At the crossing of Hàng Cá and Chả Cá, the two street names stand side by side. No signboard is needed, and no guide. Those two names already tell the story of a Thăng Long that lived by the river, and named every shoulder-pole load of goods on every corner.