Hang Thiec Street

At midday, sunlight flashes off aluminum basins and bins of sheet metal stacked along the shopfronts of a narrow Hanoi street. Under one awning, a hammer taps again and again on a flat sheet of tinplate, and the metal rings. Heat from a soldering iron rolls out across the lane.

This is Hàng Thiếc Street. A government news site and the newspaper Lao Động Thủ Đô both give its length as only about 130 meters. It begins at Hàng Bồ Street and ends at Hàng Nón Street. On the way it crosses the junction of Bát Đàn and Thuốc Bắc. The street lies in Hoàn Kiếm.

A Hanoi newspaper says the street took shape under the Lê dynasty. The land was then Yên Nội village, part of Tiên Túc canton. The canton belonged to the old Thọ Xương district, inside the capital Thăng Long, the city now called Hanoi. The street's name is older than French rule, and it was taken straight from the work people did there.

The government news site tells how the tin trade arrived. One group that brought tin casting here came from Phú Thứ village, in Hoài Đức. These people knew how to melt tin, hammer it thin and solder the pieces together. They made household goods and ritual objects for the people of Thăng Long. The same site lists the typical products as peanut-oil lamps, candlesticks, incense burners, teapots and trays for cups.

By the middle of the 20th century, demand for tin goods had slowly fallen. The government news site and Vietnamplus both record a clever change of course. The craftsmen took kerosene cans of tinplate that the French had left behind. They cut them, hammered them and soldered them into watering cans, dippers, wash basins and storm lanterns. Under French rule, the street was known as Rue des Ferblantiers, which means the street of the tinplate workers.

Vietnamplus says the trade kept moving with the times. After tinplate came goods of sheet metal, zinc and aluminum-and-glass. In recent years stainless steel has become common, for kitchen cabinets, drying racks, water tanks and rolling shutters. At the Mid-Autumn Festival, a few shops still hammer out tinplate ships that run on kerosene. For many generations of Hanoi children, that was a familiar toy.

Most of the 36 old streets have lost the sound of their trades. Hàng Thiếc has not. Hàng Bạc keeps only the faintest tapping of jewelers' hammers, and Lãn Ông only the scent of cinnamon and star anise. On Hàng Thiếc, the clang of shaping and hammering metal blends with the traffic into one long tune of work that lasts all day. It is one of the few old streets whose name still matches its trade, and whose trade can still be clearly heard from the pavement.