Hang Ga Street

At the northern end of Hàng Gà Street, there once stood some very unusual houses. This is where the street meets Hàng Cót, at the crossroads with Hàng Mã. A visitor who stepped through the door found a small poultry market. It was not on a farm but in the heart of the Old Quarter of Hanoi.

The poultry dealers here did not set their goods out on the street. They sold from inside their homes, keeping the birds in large cages. Each cage held about 50 or 60 birds. There were chickens and ducks, Muscovy ducks and geese, and even turkeys and pigeons. The clucking, the quacking, the honking and the cooing of the pigeons must have mingled behind those front doors.

Regular customers came straight to the houses to choose their birds. Some households carried their chickens and ducks to the market at Cửa Đông, close by. Others hawked them through the streets, to the homes and eating houses that were regular buyers. The name Hàng Gà, Chicken Street, grew out of these houses full of the noise of poultry.

On paper, though, the street was not first called Hàng Gà at all. The land here once belonged to the hamlets of Tân Lập and Tân Khai. They lay in the old canton of Tiền Túc, in the old district of Thọ Xương. The hamlet of Tân Khai was founded in 1822, the third year of the reign of Emperor Minh Mạng. It was set on a stretch of empty land beside the eastern wall of the old citadel from the Lê dynasty. The road crossed the hamlet's land, linking the area around Cửa Bắc with the Đông Thành market. So the official records called it Tân Khai Street early in the Nguyễn dynasty, Vietnam's last royal dynasty. The street carried the name of a village, not yet the name of a trade.

Now walk south along the street. Hàng Gà is only a little over 200 meters long. On both sides stand old tube houses, narrow at the front, with low roofs. Some have a single floor, and some squeeze in a mezzanine or two. Past the corner where it meets Lò Rèn Street, the street crosses Hàng Vải. Then it reaches a junction with Hàng Phèn and Nhà Hỏa. Cửa Đông Street meets it there too.

From here on, the street seems to switch to another trade. The stretch from Nhà Hỏa down to Bát Đàn Street once had many houses selling medicine. It was thuốc Nam, a name meaning Southern medicine, Vietnam's own herbal medicine. The shops were very simple. Right by the door stood round baskets holding remedies made in Vietnam. Among them were a few herbs brought in from China that had not yet been prepared.

Customers from distant provinces brought prescriptions for the sellers to fill. The seller took each one to Hàng Buồm or Phúc Kiến Street, weighed out the ingredients, and brought them back. The street also had shops of traditional Eastern medicine, where healers felt the pulse and made up remedies. So people gave a name of its own to the lower stretch, near Bát Đàn and Cửa Đông. They called it Thuốc Nam Street. The upper stretch, joining Hàng Cót, stayed Hàng Gà Street. One road, two names in everyday speech, and one more on paper.

Near Hàng Vải, a side gate leads into Tân Khai Pagoda. The main gate of the pagoda opens onto Hàng Vải Street. It shares an entrance with Tân Khai communal house. Above the gate are four Chinese characters in relief, Tân Khai linh tự. They mean the sacred pagoda of Tân Khai.

The pagoda was built in the very year the hamlet was founded. But for a long time, people on the street have known it by another name, Thái Cam Pagoda. That name comes from an old well with very fragrant, very sweet water, called the Thái Cam well. The water was so good that it gave its name to the whole pagoda.

Fire swept through the pagoda in 1828, and again in 1837. Its present form comes from the restoration of 1954. The pagoda honors the Buddha and the Mother Goddess. It also honors Hưng Đạo Đại Vương, the title of Trần Quốc Tuấn. He was a military strategist who defeated two Mongol invasions. In 1990, the pagoda was ranked as a monument of architecture and art.

Then the name takes a surprising turn. Under French rule, Hàng Gà and Thuốc Nam were joined under one Western name, Rue de Tien Tsin. Tien Tsin was an old spelling of Thiên Tân, the city of Tianjin on the coast of northern China. The name recalled the Treaty of Tianjin, which France signed with the Qing in 1885. The Qing was the dynasty then ruling China. The people of Hanoi said it their own way, as Thiên Tân Street. Sometimes they even called it Tiên Sinh Street, a name that sounds like a respectful word for a teacher. So a street full of chickens and ducks carried a name fit for an old village scholar.

However the name on paper changed, the people of Hanoi kept calling it Hàng Gà Cửa Đông. That was because many people still brought their chickens and ducks to sell in front of Cửa Đông. It also kept the street from being confused with Dốc Hàng Gà, the Chicken Slope by the Hôm market. That spot is now the top of Hue Street. So Hanoi once had two places named for chickens. In 1945, the everyday name finally became official, and it has stayed ever since.

In truth, the chicken cages had already begun to disappear before then. After 1920, the trade in thuốc Nam faded away. The poultry trade stopped spreading out along the street and moved into the markets. For several decades, a tram line ran along this narrow street. It went up to Hàng Cót and turned toward Quán Thánh. From there it ran on to Thụy Khuê and the Bưởi market. In the 1960s, the Hanoi Confectionery Workshop even stood on the premises of an old shop on the street.

The trams no longer run. But Hàng Gà is still one of a few important north-south routes, and it is always full of people coming and going.

The baskets of thuốc Nam set out by the doors at the lower end, toward Bát Đàn, are gone. The chicken cages of the old days have vanished too. Only Thái Cam Pagoda is still there, behind its side gate, quietly keeping the name of the hamlet that founded it. On either side of the front hall, 13 stone steles stand in silence. They hold the history of the pagoda and every time it was repaired, reaching back to the year Tân Khai was founded on empty land beside the old citadel wall.