Hang Non Street

Sunlight slanted under the brims of leaf hats tipped on a bamboo rack and fell across the street in thin bright lines, fine as splints of bamboo. No hammer rang and no shuttle clacked. There were only leaves, bamboo, and the hands of a hat maker bent patiently over the work, in the middle of the Thăng Long marketplace. Thăng Long is the city now called Hanoi. Anyone walking here could have seen the same scene for centuries.

Hàng Nón Street is 216 meters long and only 6 meters wide. It begins at Hàng Quạt Street and ends at Đường Thành Street. On the way it crosses Hàng Điếu Street. It is one of the shortest streets of the Old Quarter, yet its name points straight at the trade that once fed the whole area.

Before the French came to Hanoi, this land was part of Yên Nội village. The village belonged to Thuận Mỹ canton, in Thọ Xương district. When the French drew their maps, they wrote the street down as rue des Chapeaux, which means Hat Street. In Vietnamese, a hat is a nón, so the street was Nón Street. That was how the French named it, after the trade anyone could see right on the road. In 1945, Hanoi gave most of its streets Vietnamese names. Hàng Nón was kept exactly as it was, because the name was already right and needed no translating.

The street sold hats for every class of people. There was nón lá già, the ordinary leaf hat of people who worked the fields, thin and light against rain and sun. There was nón ba tầm, with a deeper brim, familiar to women of the lowlands. There was nón Nghệ, nearly a meter across, with tassels on its cord, worn at festivals. Soldiers had hats whose crowns were capped in copper. Black feather hats and white feather hats were for officials of the court alone. A small street held a whole ladder of rank, worn on the head.

Not everything sold on the street was made there. Most of the leaf hats came in from craft villages around the capital. Among them, Chuông village was an important source. Today it is part of Phương Trung commune, in Thanh Oai, Hanoi. Chuông has made leaf hats for more than 300 years. The craft passes down through the generations of a family. Each hat goes through 16 layers of bamboo hoops, and every stitch is sewn into a buông leaf. Chuông hats have been granted a collective trademark by Vietnam's Intellectual Property Office, which recognizes the brand of the whole craft village.

The link between Hàng Nón in the heart of the Old Quarter and Chuông on the edge of the city was an economic and cultural bond that lasted for centuries. Hàng Nón was the gateway into the city, where hats came from village to street and from the street into the buyer's hands. Without this street, many craft villages around the capital would have struggled to find a market. Without villages like Chuông, Hàng Nón would have been only an empty name.

Along Hàng Nón today, there are no hats to be seen. Shops selling shoes and sandals, embroidered cloth and aluminum goods have taken their place. That is common on the old trade streets, where an old craft gives way as the needs of the city change.

The living trace of the hat trade lies about 30 kilometers to the southwest, in Chuông village. Its hat market still meets six times a month by the lunar calendar. Craftspeople lay their hats out on mats, and buyers try them on, talk it over, and carry them home. The cycle from village to street and back still turns. Only the place where it ends has changed.

Hàng Nón is a small slice of how old Hanoians organized their lives: one trade to a street, and for every street a supply of goods coming from the villages into the city. The name is still there on the street sign, tying the Old Quarter to the sound of bamboo leaves and the smell of boiling buông leaves from long ago.