Hang Dao Street

In the 15th century, Nguyễn Trãi wrote a book of geography called Dư địa chí. He was a scholar and statesman of that century. In his book he noted a ward of the capital whose trade was dyeing silk red. Its dyers turned the silk red, pink, and the soft color of peach blossom. Several hundred years later, the ground of that dyers' ward is a street in the heart of Hanoi. It is Hàng Đào Street.

The street is short, only about 260 meters long. It is 8 meters wide. One end meets Hàng Ngang Street. The other reaches the head of Cầu Gỗ Street and Hàng Gai Street. That corner sits beside Đông Kinh Nghĩa Thục Square, near Hoan Kiem Lake. Yet the dyers' red leads this short street back to the distant days of the old royal capital.

Most of the people who made that red came from the village of Đan Loan, in the old land of Hải Dương. Around the 14th and 15th centuries, they came to the capital, built their houses, and founded the ward of Đại Lợi. Their craft of dyeing silk went back to the time of the Trần and the Hồ. The Trần dynasty ruled Vietnam from 1225 to 1400. Later, under the Lê, the craft flourished. Next to Đại Lợi lay the ward of Đồng Lạc. Both belonged to the old district of Thọ Xương.

In Vietnamese, đào means peach. From the peach-blossom color on that silk, the name Hàng Đào settled on the street. It held fast, the way dye soaks into a thread and never washes out.

In those days the street looked nothing like it does now. Behind the row of odd-numbered houses lay a wide stretch of water. It was called Thái Cực Lake, and sometimes Hàng Đào Lake. A narrow channel linked it to Hoan Kiem Lake, right where Cầu Gỗ Street runs today. A wooden bridge crossed that channel, and Cầu Gỗ Street takes its name from it: cầu gỗ means wooden bridge. Hàng Đào then stood on a strip of land between the two sheets of water. Then, around the middle of the 19th century, the lake was filled in to make land for houses.

The people of Đan Loan had come a long way, but they did not forget home. They built a communal house to honor the guardian spirits of their village, who were also the founders of the dyeing craft. They were Triệu Xương and his wife, Phương Dung. It is Hoa Lộc communal house, at number 90A Hàng Đào Street. Inside, a stone stele still records the year it was built, 1706. Along the street stand other places of worship too. A shrine and a communal house both carry the name Đồng Lạc. There is also Bạch Bố Temple, which honors the god Bạch Mã.

But red silk never traveled alone. Long ago the Hàng Tơ market met right on the street, six times a month. On market days, weavers and dyers from the villages around the capital streamed in. Fine gauze came from La Cả and La Khê. Plain silk and rough silk came from Đại Mỗ. Brocade came from Vạn Phúc, and smooth, glossy silk from the village of Bưởi. The people of Chợ Dầu and Hàng Bông Nhuộm dyed rough silk a deep, dark shade. So did the people along the shores of West Lake. The people of Cầu Gỗ and Bưởi dyed their silk in colors, or bleached it white.

By the early 20th century, about 100 shops lined the road, which had no sidewalks yet. They displayed brocade, patterned silk and gauze. Buyers and sellers haggled loudly and cheerfully. Among so many shops that looked alike, an old woman up from the countryside needed some way to find her usual one again. The people of Hàng Đào seem to have found a clever answer. Each Vietnamese silk shop hung the figure of an animal in front of its door. It was cut from sheet metal or made of painted wood. A buyer who remembered the animal remembered the shop. No wonder an old folk verse goes: Guavas from Quảng Bá, fish from West Lake, and the silks of Hàng Đào that win every heart.

Under French rule, the street carried a French name, rue de la Soie, which means Silk Street. In the early 20th century, the dyeing trade left Hàng Đào for places such as Cầu Gỗ Street. In 1917, the first shop selling needles and thread appeared. After the First World War, Indian merchants opened shops that sold cotton cloth. By the 1930s, the cloth shops also sold perfume, makeup, hats and neckties brought over from Paris. The red silk now had to share the shelves with all sorts of new and unfamiliar goods.

This street of silk was also a street of people worth remembering. House number 4 belonged to the family of the scholar Lương Văn Can. He was one of the founders of the Đông Kinh Nghĩa Thục school. The school itself opened on Hàng Đào Street in March 1907, and it ran for less than a year. At house number 25, a woman known as Bà Cả Mọc started a society that looked after the children of poor families. It let their parents go to work without worry, and it charged nothing. It is considered the first nursery in Hanoi. In the middle of a busy trading street, one roof was kept just for children.

In 1945, the street took back the name Hàng Đào, and it has kept that name ever since. From the middle of the 1980s, it came alive again with watch shops, sewing-supply shops and shops selling ready-made clothes. Today, clothing and fabric shops stand shoulder to shoulder on both sides. People in Hanoi still count Hàng Đào among the main streets of the Old Quarter, and among its most famous.

On weekend evenings, the street puts on a different set of clothes. Hàng Đào runs into Hàng Ngang, then into Hàng Đường. Together they carry on to Đồng Xuân market and become a night market route for people on foot. Strollers wander slowly down the middle of the road, stopping at stalls of handicrafts and local specialties. Few in that crowd know that Thái Cực Lake once lay behind the odd-numbered houses. Nor do many know that the Hàng Tơ market once met in the middle of the street.

The dyers left the street long ago, and the lake has long since turned into houses. Yet in some shop along the street, a seller may still be folding a length of red cloth and placing it in a buyer's hands. That red seems to have traveled a very long way. It began in the dyers' ward that Nguyễn Trãi once wrote into his book. It passed through the hands of the Đan Loan dyers and the market days of Hàng Tơ, and came at last to this hand.