Hang Tre Street

A turn off Hàng Mắm Street leads into Hàng Tre. The street is 306 meters long and runs all the way to Lò Sũ Street. It is one of the old streets closest to the Red River in the Thirty-Six Streets quarter of Hanoi.

This land once belonged to the village of Trừng Thành, says the magazine The Hanoian. It lay in the Tả Túc hamlet of the old district of Thọ Xương. Before the outer dike was built around Hanoi, the ground here was a bank of sand along the Red River. It was new, low, and often flooded. Houses were few and far apart. Not many people lived here yet, but the land was put to a very practical use, storing timber and bamboo.

Logs, bamboo, and thin bamboo poles floated down the Red River from the upstream provinces and reached the Hanoi landing. They were hauled out of the water and stacked in yards along the street. Beside the timber yards stood sawmills and pens for the oxen and horses that pulled carts carrying materials into the inner city. Together they made a rough, makeshift place, but a busy one in its own way. It smelled of tree sap, rang with saws, and thudded with hooves on the dirt road.

When the French arrived and began naming the streets, they called this one Rue des Bambous, which is literally Bamboo Street. It was not a name chosen for beauty or for history. It simply described what people saw, with bamboo piled across the whole street.

But Hàng Tre held more than timber and bamboo.

After occupying Hanoi, the French chose this street for the Appeal Court of Bắc Kỳ, which sat here from 1884, the magazine reports. Bắc Kỳ was the name then used for northern Vietnam. The court was the highest judicial body of the colonial administration there, and it handled cases involving French and foreign people. Hanoians came to call it the Hàng Tre Court. That everyday name stuck to the place even after the court no longer sat here.

When the court moved to a new street, the old building was not left empty. It became the headquarters of the Public Works Department of Indochina, the colonial office in charge of infrastructure and construction. One building, two chapters of history.

The same magazine says the end of the street once had a short stretch called Hàng Cau. It gathered traders in fresh and dried areca nuts, brought by boat from the provinces. Betel is an evergreen vine, and areca is a tall, slender palm whose nut is chewed wrapped in a betel leaf. Areca nuts were in great demand in old Hanoi, for chewing with betel and for weddings. When the areca trade scattered, the name Hàng Cau went with it, and the street went back to its original name, Hàng Tre.

The newspaper Nhân Dân looks back at the Hàng streets that survive. It mentions Hàng Tre running into Hàng Sũ. Hàng Dầu cuts across the two. These three names keep the memory of three kinds of goods, from a Hanoi that once lived close to the river and the boat landings.

Today Hàng Tre lies in Lý Thái Tổ ward, and the sound of saws and the smell of sap are gone. Yet those same 306 meters are the ground where people once piled bamboo, traded areca nuts, built workshops, and held a court. It is a small street with many layers of life stacked on one another, and the simplest name is the one that has stayed the longest.