Hang Chieu Street

Motorbikes and the voices of nearby Đồng Xuân Market carry down Hàng Chiếu Street. At its head, an old brick arch stands over the road, and the wind off the Red River runs along the pavement beneath it. This is a doorway into the Old Quarter. The street's name still holds the memory of a trade that once fed a whole neighborhood.

The name Hàng Chiếu goes back to the days of the trade streets of Thăng Long. Thăng Long is the city now called Hanoi. The Hanoi Department of Culture and Sports explains that, like many of the 36 old streets, Hàng Chiếu took its name from the one kind of goods it sold: chiếu cói, sedge mats. Craftsmen and merchants came from the mat village of Nga Sơn in Thanh Hóa. Others came from mat-making villages in Thái Bình. They carried their wares up to the capital and gathered on this street to trade.

A sedge mat was no luxury. It was something found in every home. People needed mats to sleep on and to sit on. They spread them for offerings, laid them on the floor for family death anniversaries and for Tết, and put them down beneath the ancestral altar. Tết is the Lunar New Year festival in Vietnam.

A craftsman in Nga Sơn or Thái Bình split the sedge, wove it, dyed it, and dried it in the sun until the mat lay flat and fragrant. Then a shipment went from the lowlands up to the capital, and the calls inviting buyers rang out along Hàng Chiếu. That was the rhythm of everyday life in old Thăng Long.

The street's position is special too. It begins at the foot of Ô Quan Chưởng, the only surviving city gate of old Thăng Long. The Nhân Dân newspaper reports that the gate was built in 1749 under the Lê dynasty, and that the head of Hàng Chiếu is the inner face of the gate. Goods were carried in on shoulder poles from the river wharf, through the gate, into the capital. Hàng Chiếu was the first street the porters stepped onto. For a mat, the way ran straight from a boat on the river, through the gate, and down this street.

On the gate's wall facing Hàng Chiếu, a tablet called "Lệnh cấm trừ tệ" still stands. Governor Hoàng Diệu had it set up in 1881. According to Nhân Dân, it records an order forbidding the guards to harass ordinary people passing through. The mat traders, with their goods going in and out of the gate every day, were exactly the people the tablet protected.

Walking along Hàng Chiếu today, you find a street of general goods and household wares. Sedge mats hardly line the sidewalk anymore. Ways of living changed, and so did what people needed. Many traditional trades of the 36 streets slowly left as cheaper, handier factory goods flooded in.

But the name has not changed. Hàng Chiếu is still Hàng Chiếu. And Ô Quan Chưởng still stands at the head of the street, in dark brown brick, after more than two centuries. The street name is a map of the trades of old Thăng Long, down to every mat and every strand of sedge.