Nhat Tan Bridge

On the morning of January 9, 2015, five towers stood complete above the Red River. The opening ceremony was a milestone for Hanoi's infrastructure. For the first time, the city had a modern cable-stayed bridge linking the center with the north side of the river.

The bridge crosses the Red River. It joins the Tây Hồ area on the south bank with the Đông Anh area on the north bank. The whole route is about 8,920 meters long. The stretch over the river alone is about 3,980 meters. According to the Hanoi Moi newspaper and the Nhân Dân newspaper, it was built with Japanese official development assistance funds, and contractors and engineers from the two countries worked together.

The heart of the design is the five towers. Each one reaches high, and hundreds of steel cables fan out from it to hold the span below. Seen from far off, from the riverbank or from above, the five towers draw a skyline that is slender and unusually even. Newspapers and travel writers often compare the shape to the five petals of a peach blossom from the nearby village of Nhật Tân, or to a lotus. It is a lovely comparison. But it is the way onlookers read the bridge, and not the official technical name of the design.

Nhật Tân Bridge is one part of the road from Nhật Tân to Nội Bài, which links Nội Bài International Airport with the center of the city. Before the bridge and this road, the trip from the airport into Hanoi often took more than an hour. It depended on how bad the jams were on Thăng Long Bridge or Chương Dương Bridge. After the opening, the trip came down to about 20 to 30 minutes in normal conditions. With millions of passengers arriving and leaving each year, that change could be felt from the very first trip.

The bridge takes its name from Nhật Tân, a famous peach village of Hanoi on the west shore of West Lake, right at the south end of the bridge. The village has supplied peach blossom for Tết to Hanoi for many generations. Tết is the Lunar New Year festival. Each Tết season the gardens there bloom pink, and the bridge that carries the village's name stands just behind those rows of trees. The village also offers the best view of the bridge. From the flower village, looking out toward the river, the five towers stand out against the morning sky or the sky at sunset.

For many decades, Long Biên Bridge was the only bridge over the Red River in Hanoi. Today the city has many more, and at the time of its opening, Nhật Tân was the newest of them. Each bridge over the Red River is a chapter in the story of Hanoi. Nhật Tân is the chapter of modern Hanoi, a new story beside an old river.