Rough Guide to Vietnam - Jan Dodd [260]
Hanoi and around | The City | The French Quarter |
Residence of the Governor of Tonkin and the Metropole
Back at the Opera House, walking two blocks north on Ly Thai To brings you to the junction with Ngo Quyen, dominated by two very different buildings. The imposing Art Deco structure with a circular portico, once the French Bank of Indochina, now houses the State Bank in its lofty halls. Diagonally opposite stands one of Hanoi’s most attractive colonial edifices, the immaculately restored Residence of the Governor of Tonkin, constructed in 1918; it’s now known as the State Guest House and used for visiting VIPs. Unfortunately you can’t get inside, but as you peer in take a closer look at the elegant, wrought-iron railings, pitted with bullet-mark souvenirs of the 1945 Revolution. More recently the building’s terraces appeared in the film Indochine(See "A different perspective").
In comparison, the bright, white Neoclassical facade of the Metropole – nowadays Sofitel Metropole hotel – just south at 15 Ngo Quyen, verges on the austere. The then Grand Metropole Palace opened in 1901, and soon became one of Southeast Asia’s great hotels. Even during the French War, Bernard Fall, a journalist killed by a landmine near Hué in 1967, described the hotel as the “last really fashionable place left in Hanoi”, where the barman “could produce a reasonable facsimile of almost any civilized drink except water”. After Independence it re-emerged as the Thong Nhat or Reunification Hotel, but otherwise stayed much the same, including en-suite rats and lethal wiring, until 1990 when Sofitel transformed it into Hanoi’s first international-class hotel. The Metropole’s illustrious visitors’ book includes Charlie Chaplin and Paulette Goddard on honeymoon in 1936 and Graham Greene, who first came here in 1952. Twenty years later Jane Fonda stayed for two weeks while making her famous broadcast to American troops.
Hanoi and around | The City | The French Quarter |
Trang Tien
Trang Tien, the main artery of the French Quarter, is still a busy shopping street where you’ll find bookshops and art galleries, as well as the Trang Tien Plaza with its flash boutiques and somewhat incongruous supermarket. South of Trang Tien you enter French Hanoi’s principal residential quarter, consisting of a grid of shaded boulevards whose distinguished villas are much sought after for restoration as embassies or offices or as desirable, expatriate residences. These houses, which like those of the Old Quarter survived largely due to lack of money for redevelopment, run the gamut of early twentieth-century European architecture from elegant Neoclassical through to 1930s Modernism and Art Deco, with an occasional Oriental flourish.
To take a swing through the area, drop down Hang Bai onto Ly Thuong Kiet and start heading west. Just round the corner, the Museum of Vietnamese Women, 36 Ly Thuong Kiet (Tues–Sun 8am–4pm; 20,000đ), puts a different perspective on national history. Once again, it’s the twentieth century that provides the most absorbing material, while the top-floor display of ethnic minority costumes is worth a quick look. Two blocks further west, you arrive at Cho 19–12 (19 Dec Market), a short covered street of stalls selling mainly fresh fruit, vegetables and meat, including the twisted carcasses of roast dog. Beyond, the Hanoi Towers complex looms over the sanitized remnants of French-built Hoa Lo Prison at 1 Hoa Lo (Tues–Sun 8.30–11.30am & 1.30–4.30pm; 5000đ), nicknamed the “Hanoi Hilton” by American prisoners of war in wry comment on its harsh conditions and often brutal treatment. The jail became famous in the 1960s when the PoWs, mostly pilots and crew members, were shown worldwide in televised broadcasts. There’s a heavy