Ma May Heritage House

A narrow threshold leads into number 87, Mã Mây Street. Outside are motorbike engines and the calls of street vendors in the early afternoon. Two steps inside, a square of light falls straight down from above. This is the light well. The air smells of old wood, and of plain tea from the guest room at the back.

Number 87 is the Heritage House, one of the best preserved old tube houses in the Hanoi Old Quarter. It stands in Hàng Buồm Ward, in the Hoàn Kiếm area.

A Hanoi newspaper reports that the house was built in the late 19th century. It covers 157.6 square meters. The front is only 5 meters wide and the back 6 meters, yet the house runs 28 meters deep. From the street it looks like one small door. Behind it lies a deep world of rooms, linked one layer after another.

The frontage is narrow for a reason. In the old days, land tax was counted by the width of the house along the street, so the narrower the front, the lighter the tax. Old Hanoi families therefore built their houses deep. To keep light and air, they left open spaces between the layers of rooms, an inner courtyard and a light well.

The layout is clear. At the very front is the shop. Next comes a small inner courtyard, then the room for the family altar and the guest room, then the large light-well courtyard in the middle of the house, and last the kitchen. The second floor holds another altar room and the bedrooms. The main structure is wood, the roof is covered in traditional clay tiles, and the walls are fired brick set in lime mortar.

This is not a rebuilt model. According to local records cited by that newspaper, before 1945 a family of rice merchants lived here. After that, a family from Vietnam's Chinese community, who traded in Chinese herbal medicine, took the house over. When they moved out, the state became its manager.

In the late 1990s, a cooperation project began between Hanoi and the French city of Toulouse. The newspaper Nhân Dân records it as the first Old Quarter conservation project of such a scale with both Vietnamese and French partners. The restoration began in late 1998 and was finished on October 27, 1999. The wooden structure, the materials and the household objects were kept as they were, as far as possible. On February 16, 2004, the Ministry of Culture and Information ranked the house a National Heritage Site.

Further in, there are the very ordinary things of an old merchant's home. A wooden table and chairs for receiving guests. A stone mill. Copper pots and old bowls and plates. One corner shows the goods of the trade. These objects are not arranged to look pretty. They stand where people used them more than 100 years ago.

The Old Quarter once had many houses like this, and most were torn down or remodeled. Keeping one tube house intact, with its structure and its objects, matters because visitors today can walk in and see how the old quarter once lived. Outside the door, the street is crowded again, but the square of light falling into the light well still lingers in the mind.