Hang Cot Street

In front of every house on this street, a person sits with a thin strip of bamboo in hand. It is the early 20th century in Hanoi, and the street stretches about 400 meters. The strips bend, slip past one another and weave together, one by one. The slats click. The smell of fresh bamboo hangs in the air. Against the house walls, rectangular mats are stacked a little higher with each passing hour.

This is the trade that gave the street its name: weaving cót.

Cót is a thin woven mat of bamboo slats, a familiar material from the days before concrete. People laid it over floors, made temporary walls from it, and lined the crates of goods that traveled by river. It was light, flexible and cheap. It served everywhere, from country homes to warehouses at the docks.

According to the Hanoi Historical and Cultural Sites record, Hàng Cót Street was built on the land of two villages, Tân Lập and Tân Khai. They belonged to Tiền Túc canton, in Thọ Xương district. A stone stele stands at Thái Cam Pagoda, at number 16 on the neighboring street, Hàng Gà. It records that the village of Tân Khai was founded in the third year of the reign of Emperor Minh Mạng. That year was 1822. It is an exact date, and a rare one among the streets of this part of the city.

Under French rule, the street was renamed Rue Takou. The name held for decades, until 1945, when Hanoi took back Vietnamese names for its streets. Since then Hàng Cót has carried its original name again.

But the weaving itself is gone.

In the early 20th century, the same record says, the people of Hàng Cót mostly made and sold cót right on the sidewalk. It sold well, because the city still had many warehouses and yards that needed it. Then concrete and factory materials took its place. Demand for cót fell, and the trade left the street.

The newspaper Nhân Dân once wrote about the Hàng streets of Hanoi. It noted that Hàng Cót is one of the streets whose name has become nothing but memory. No one sells cót anymore on the street named for it.

Today Hàng Cót is one of the longest streets in the northwest part of the Old Quarter. It starts in the area of Hàng Mã and Hàng Lược. It ends near Hàng Gà. The street lies in Hàng Mã ward, in Hoàn Kiếm. It does a busy trade in household goods, decorations and handmade crafts. No physical trace of the cót trade is left on it.

All that remains is the name.

And the name still matters. It tells of a time when people lived by bamboo slats and skilled hands on this ground. City growth changed the face of the street, and it also wiped out a whole way of making things and of earning a living.

At Thái Cam Pagoda, next door on Hàng Gà, the stone stele is still there. It records the founding of Tân Khai village in 1822. It is the only physical evidence left from the time when this ground first had people living on it and setting up their trades. The stele says nothing about cót, about bamboo, about the clicking of slats in the morning. Yet that silence says something too. A way of life once existed here, and it left quietly, with nothing behind it but a name.