O Quan Chuong Gate

The shadow of a dark brown brick archway falls across Hàng Chiếu Street. Bicycles roll past the foot of an old wall. The wind from the Red River runs along the street, carrying the rhythm of nearby Đồng Xuân Market. In the Old Quarter of Hanoi, where everything keeps moving, a gate topped by a watchtower has stood for more than two centuries.

The gate is Ô Quan Chưởng, the only surviving city gate of old Thăng Long. Thăng Long is the city now called Hanoi.

The newspaper Nhân Dân reports that the gate's name in Chinese characters is Đông Hà Môn. That means the gate of the old Đông Hà ward. It opened on the east side of the capital, facing the Red River. The gate was built under the Lê dynasty, in the tenth year of the Cảnh Hưng reign, which is 1749. Under the Nguyễn dynasty, the gate had major restorations in 1785, 1804 and 1817. The Nguyễn were Vietnam's last royal dynasty. The arched shape seen today is essentially the shape given by the Nguyễn restorations.

The name Ô Quan Chưởng came later. Local accounts, quoted by the newspapers Nhân Dân and Hànộimới, tell it this way. In 1873, when the French attacked Hanoi for the first time, a military officer of the rank Chưởng cơ and about a hundred soldiers fought at this gate. They fought on until the last of them fell. People named the gate Ô Quan Chưởng in the officer's memory, and the name has stayed with it to this day.

A Nhân Dân feature page says that at the start of the 19th century, Thăng Long had 21 city gates. When the Nguyễn moved the capital to Hue, the number fell to 16. When the French took Hanoi in the late 19th century, they pulled down the gates one after another to open Western-style streets. Only this gate remained, because the people of the Hàng Chiếu and Thanh Hà areas fought hard to keep it.

Hànộimới describes a two-story gate built in the style of a watchtower. The lower story has three arched doorways. The central one is about 3 meters high and wide, and the two side ones are smaller. The upper story is a watchtower with a curved roof and a patterned balustrade. The old brick walls have turned a brownish gray in the sun and rain, and moss clings to them in patches.

A stone stele is also set on the wall facing Hàng Chiếu Street. According to Nhân Dân, it is the stele called "Lệnh cấm trừ tệ". Governor Hoàng Diệu had it set up in 1881, and it forbids the guards to harass ordinary people. One year later, the Governor himself gave his life when the French attacked the Hanoi citadel for the second time. The stele is a trace of a time when the authorities tried to keep order, even in a moment of danger.

Hànộimới reports that the gate is now ranked as a national monument of history, architecture and art. It stands at the head of Hàng Chiếu Street, in Đồng Xuân ward, in Hoàn Kiếm.

Ô Quan Chưởng is not a grand monument. It is a small gate in the middle of a street. But it is the last gate of a capital that once had more than twenty. The others were lost when the French broke down the walls. This one still stands, because the people of the street refused to give way.

The wind from the Red River still blows along the street. And the brownish gray gate stands there, quietly joining the Thăng Long of several hundred years ago to the Hanoi that moves today.