Hang Mam Street

Hàng Mắm Street is only 188 meters long. It begins at Trần Quang Khải Street and runs west. It crosses the Hàng Muối intersection and ends near Phất Lộc Alley. On a map of the Old Quarter of Hanoi, it is a short street. Yet its name holds a whole age of busy trade, one that tied the capital to distant seas. Mắm is fish fermented with salt.

According to Hanoi's historical and cultural heritage records, the street had two parts before the French occupied the city. A city gate called Mỹ Lộc and a stretch of earthen wall divided them. Inside the gate lay the old Hàng Mắm Street. It belonged to Ưu Nghĩa village, in the canton of Hữu Túc. Outside the gate was a second stretch called Vạn Nước Mắm. Here, vạn means a trading place gathered around one trade, like the fishing communities and ferry communities along the water's edge.

Vạn Nước Mắm lay right beside the Red River. Boats came upriver from Cát Hải, outside the sea mouth at Hải Phòng. Others came from Nam Định and from the coastal regions of central Vietnam. They carried fish sauce and shrimp paste to sell to the people of the capital. Thick shrimp paste sat in clay basins and was scraped out with a buffalo rib. Thin shrimp paste came in jars. Fish sauce was kept in huge earthenware jars, as high as a person's head. These were buried in the ground and covered with lids, and the sauce was ladled into wooden buckets and sold off bit by bit. This was how Hanoi kept itself supplied with an essential food, long before trucks and refrigerators.

In 1884, a French doctor named Hocquard recorded his impressions of walking down this street. Cured ducks and dried fish hung from the ceilings of the shops. The smell of fish sauce and shrimp paste was strong along the whole row. It is one of the rare written records of how trade looked on Hàng Mắm Street at the end of the 19th century.

The French who ran the city renamed the street rue de la Saumure. In French, that means the street of salted goods. It was a roundabout way of naming it, perhaps because the French did not want to put the word mắm on an official map. Even so, the meaning stayed the same. This was the street of salty, fermented things, so typical of Vietnamese cooking.

The First World War ended in 1918, and afterward many shops on the street still sold mắm in the old way. The name Hàng Mắm was officially used again from 1945, according to the same records. From that period on, though, the trade in mắm slowly faded. The Red River drew farther away because of dikes and the growth of the city. The boats that carried jars of fish sauce no longer tied up near the street as they once did.

Today, the main goods along Hàng Mắm Street are stone tablets and carved stone lettering. These include gravestones. Granite and other natural stone are worked to order, to meet the lasting spiritual needs of Vietnamese families. It is a craft that demands careful technique. The stone is measured and cut, the letters are marked out, and each stroke is carved deep, by machine and by hand. The craftsmen work in small workshops just behind the doorways. The trade has lived alongside the life of Hanoi for several decades now.

The name of Hàng Mắm Street has not changed, even though the trade has changed completely. In the Old Quarter of Hanoi, street names often outlive their trades. They become a layer of memory held in language, one that anyone can read on the street sign.

Walk along Hàng Mắm Street today and you hear stone-cutting machines echoing from the small workshops. Slabs of granite stand in a straight row in front of the doors. And somewhere in the air of the Old Quarter, a faint salty trace seems to linger, from the jars of fish sauce that once traveled upriver from the sea, all the way to this street.