Hang Vai Street

Brown cloth lay in stacks, and the air smelled of new fabric and fresh dye. Old Hanoi shoppers always remembered those two things when they stepped onto Hàng Vải Street. The cloth was called vải thâm, a narrow brown fabric woven by hand. It waited in the shops along the street for a buyer to turn it over.

Today the street is 236 meters long. It runs from Thuốc Bắc Street to Phùng Hưng Street, in the heart of the Hoàn Kiếm area. A Hanoi newspaper reports that the cloth trade is gone, but the name still holds the memory of the old craft.

The street first stood on the land of two old villages. The village of Đông Thành lay in the eastern half, and the village of Tân Khai in the western half. Both belonged to the canton of Tiền Túc, in the district of Thọ Xương, under the old monarchy. This was never a grand street. It was one stretch of an old district for cloth and clothing goods, set deep in the Old Quarter. People came from all over the northern delta to shop.

The name Hàng Vải comes from the street's own trade, since vải means cloth. The eastern end, on the land of Đông Thành village, gathered the shops that sold vải thâm. The same newspaper explains that this brown cloth was woven on handlooms. The stretch was sometimes called Hàng Vải Thâm, to tell it apart from the neighboring stretch, which once sold white cloth. Vải thâm was the most ordinary cloth of Hanoi in earlier days. It was tough and soaked up sweat. People sewed it into long dark tunics for adults and into winter clothes for the whole family. Its deep brown was a familiar color on the crowded streets of Thăng Long, the capital. Thăng Long is the city now called Hanoi.

Hàng Vải did not stand alone in the Old Quarter's trade in cloth and fiber. It lay not far from Hàng Da to the south and Hàng Bông to the east. Together the three streets formed one chain of supply. Hàng Da had tanned leather and raw materials. Hàng Bông had cotton wadding, along with quilts and mattresses stuffed with it. Hàng Vải had brown cloth and colored cloth. A buyer could make one short loop through the Old Quarter and find everything a family needed to get through the winter.

Under French rule, the street was called rue des Etoffes, which means cloth street. The French chose the name for the trade that was really there, adding nothing and taking nothing away. Since 1945 the street has carried the Vietnamese name Hàng Vải again. Old name and new said the same thing: this was the street that sold cloth.

Over several decades, the cloth trade drew away from Hàng Vải. Factory-made cloth and mechanical weaving mills slowly took over the role the small shops had played. So did cloth markets gathered in other places. The pace of business on the street changed with each new generation of merchants.

What remains on Hàng Vải today is not cloth but two old communal houses. The Hàng Vải communal house, at number 9, honors Huyền Thiên Trấn Võ, the god who guards the north of the capital. The Tân Khai communal house, at number 44, is a trace of the old village of Tân Khai. The two houses are quiet witnesses to the whole course of the street. They saw it as village land, then through the busy years of selling brown cloth, and now in a time when the Old Quarter has found another rhythm.

At the gate of a communal house you can see a mossy tiled roof, a small cool courtyard, and the familiar scent of incense. Here you stand on the ground of the village of Tân Khai, where people once wove brown cloth and handed it to merchants who carried it to the capital. The street has changed, and the cloth trade is gone. Yet the name has stayed, like a thin dark thread joining the two ends of time.