Rough Guide to Vietnam - Jan Dodd [256]
Rounding the lake’s southern tip and heading up its west shore, you might want to take a detour to St Joseph’s Cathedral (daily 5am–noon & 2–7pm) at the far end of attractive Nha Tho (“Big Church”) Street, lined with trendy restaurants, cafés and boutiques. Look out on the way for the arched entrance to Ba Da Pagoda, which houses an impressive array of Buddhas. Hanoi’s neo-Gothic cathedral was constructed in the early 1880s, partly financed by two lotteries, and though the exterior is badly weathered its high-vaulted interior is still imposing. Among the first things you notice inside are the ornate altar screen and the stained-glass windows, most of which are French originals. Over the black marble tomb of a former cardinal of Vietnam stands one of several statues commemorating martyred Vietnamese saints, in this case André Dung Lac who was executed in 1839 on the orders of the fervently anti-Christian emperor Minh Mang. The cathedral’s main door is open during services (the celebration of Mass was allowed to resume on Christmas Eve 1990 after a long hiatus); at other times walk round to the small door in the southwest corner.
Walking north from the cathedral along Ly Quoc Su brings you to Ly Quoc Su Pagoda, at no. 52, a small pagoda with a genuinely interesting collection of statues. Ly Quoc Su (sometimes also known as Minh Khong) was a Buddhist teacher, healer and royal adviser who cured the hallucinating King Ly Than Tong of believing he was a tiger. Quoc Su’s image resides alongside that of the white-bearded Tu Dao Hanh (See "Thay Pagoda (the Master’s Pagoda)") on the principal altar of this twelfth-century temple – when it later became a pagoda they simply added a few Buddhas behind. In front of the altar, two groups of statues face each other across the prayer floor: four secular, female figures sit opposite three perfectly inscrutable mandarins of the nineteenth century, clothed in rich red lacquer. From Ly Quoc Su retrace your steps to Hoan Kiem Lake and continue northwards to where Thuy Ta café offers respite from the traffic and a fine place to relax.
Hanoi and around | The City |
The Old Quarter
Walk north from Hoan Kiem Lake, across Cau Go, and suddenly you’re in the tumultuous streets of the Old Quarter, a congested square kilometre which was closed behind massive ramparts and heavy wooden gates until well into the nineteenth century. Apart from one gate, at the east end of Hang Chieu, the walls have been dismantled, and there are few individual sights in the quarter; the best approach is simply to dive into the back lanes and explore.
Everything spills out onto pavements which double as workshops for stone-carvers, furniture-makers and tinsmiths, and as display space for merchandise ranging from pungent therapeutic herbs and fluttering prayer flags to ranks of Remy Martin and shiny-wrapped chocolates. With so much to attract your attention at ground level it’s easy to miss the architecture, which reveals fascinating glimpses of the quarter’s history, starting with the fifteenth-century merchants’ houses otherwise found only in Hoi An (See "Getting there"). Hanoi’s aptly named tube-houses evolved from market stalls into narrow single-storey shops, windows no higher than a passing royal palanquin, under gently curving, red-tiled roofs. Some are just two metres wide, the result of taxes levied on street frontages and of subdivision for inheritance, while behind stretches a succession of storerooms and living quarters up to 60m in length, interspersed with open courtyards to give them light and air; to get a better