Lo Duc Street

On a summer morning, the branches of the sao trees along Lò Đúc Street meet high overhead and close the road under one huge green roof. Egrets chatter in the leaves. Sunlight slips through the gaps and lands on the pavement in shaky patches of gold. People walk below without an umbrella or a hat.

Lò Đúc Street lies in the Hai Bà Trưng area and runs for 1,160 meters. According to a Hanoi newspaper, it starts at a five-way junction where four streets meet and goes as far as Trần Khát Chân Street. Along the way it crosses the land of five old villages. They are Hữu Vọng and Hương Thái. Two more are Đức Bác and Yên Hội. The last is Thọ Lão. Those names are no longer in use, but researchers of old Hanoi still keep them in memory.

The name Lò Đúc goes back to the 18th century, in the Later Lê period. The same newspaper records that bronze casters from the Kinh Bắc region came here and built their furnaces on the land of Đức Bác village. They cast ritual cauldrons, bells and objects for altars, the things every well-off household wanted to own. Over the generations a street took shape around these craftsmen. It was named Lò Đúc, which means casting furnace, to remember a time when furnace fires burned and hammer blows rang every day.

The clearest trace of the craft stands in lane 79. Here is Tổ Ong Pagoda, whose formal name is Linh Ứng Tự. It honors Nguyễn Minh Không, the founding master of bronze casting, as the casters revere him. Inside the pagoda stands a stone stele, 1.3 meters tall, from the reign of Emperor Tự Đức in 1857. It carries 1,300 Chinese characters about the origins of the guild of craftsmen. A slab of stone tells its story in writing, and it keeps the spirit of the men who poured hot bronze into molds hundreds of years ago.

Under French rule, the street was renamed Rue de l'Abattoire, French for Slaughterhouse Street, because the French had a slaughterhouse in the area. Later it became Armand Rousseau Boulevard, after a French colonial official. After 1945, the name Lò Đúc was given back.

The bronze trade on this street went cold long ago. But the old sao trees still stand, spreading shade along all 1,160 meters from one end to the other. The newspaper describes their leaves meeting like a vault over the road and sheltering flocks of egrets. The trees say nothing of bronze or fire. Yet they have stood here for many generations. They watched the street lose its name and win it back, watched the furnaces cool, and watched motorbikes take the place of people on foot.

Today Lò Đúc is an ordinary working street, with shops, homes and people coming and going. There is no furnace to be found and no hammer to be heard. Still, the name of the street was no accident, and what has passed still leaves its marks. One is the stele with its 1,300 Chinese characters inside Tổ Ong Pagoda. Another is the cool green vault of the sao trees overhead.