Hang Dong Street

On the family altar in many Vietnamese homes, a polished bronze incense burner stands at the center. People wipe it clean every Tết, the Lunar New Year festival in Vietnam. On the morning of each full moon, they add glowing coals to it. Very likely, a burner like that came from one small street in Hanoi called Hàng Đồng.

A national government web portal explains how the street began. The old Hàng Chén Street was split into two parts. One part covered the land of the former Yên Phú village. That part became Hàng Đồng. Local tradition says people from Cầu Nôm village came here to open shops selling bronze, but no formal work of history has confirmed it. Under French rule, the street's official name was Rue du Cuivre. That is Copper Street in French.

The name is no idle label. According to a government website, everything sold here was bronze in one form or another. Shops offered trays, pots and basins for the kitchen. They also offered incense burners, urns, standing cranes for the altar, carved flower vases, candlesticks and ritual vessels. No well-off family could do without these things on its altar. In those days, bronze ware belonged to people of means, and with care it could last through generations.

Here is the interesting part. No casting furnace stood on the street itself. It was a place to sell and to buy, the outlet for foundries set up elsewhere. A website on Hanoi's historic sites names Ngũ Xã village, on the shore of Trúc Bạch Lake, as one of the main suppliers. The Nhân Dân newspaper passes on an old saying that ranks four crafts above all others in the old capital. The silk of Yên Thái. The pottery of Bát Tràng. The goldsmiths of Định Công. The bronze workers of Ngũ Xã. The finest bronze of Thăng Long came from Ngũ Xã. Thăng Long is the city now called Hanoi. Hàng Đồng was where that bronze was set out before the eyes of buyers.

Hàng Đồng was also where the scrap-metal trade began. Shopkeepers gathered old and broken bronze to recycle it or to trade it for new goods. In an age when bronze was still a precious metal, a person could bring a leaking pot or a cracked bell and leave with a burner in one piece. That cycle of material made the street a center for old goods as well as new.

Today the bronze casting of Ngũ Xã has shrunk a great deal. Yet traces remain on Hàng Đồng. Some shops for altar goods and bronze ware are still open. Among the goods on show are sets of incense burners, urns and pairs of altar cranes carved with dragons. The street's name is still there, and the chain from the Ngũ Xã foundries to the altar of each family has not quite broken.

Look at the burners behind the glass and think of a caster from many centuries back, one who tapped each carved line into the bronze so that the flame on an altar would always have somewhere to rest.