I had been warned that ten days in Vietnam would leave me wanting more. That turned out to be accurate. The country refuses to let its history settle into the background; it is present in the street names, in the architecture, in the way a guesthouse owner in Hanoi mentioned almost in passing that her grandmother had lived through the American bombing. I came looking for history. I found it still in motion.
Hanoi
I arrived in Hanoi in the early morning and walked straight into the Old Quarter before I had any real sense of where I was going, which turned out to be the right approach. Hanoi has been the seat of Vietnamese power for more than a thousand years (the Chinese held it for centuries; the French arrived in the nineteenth century and called it the jewel of their Indochinese empire; the Americans never occupied it but bombed it) and the Old Quarter holds all of that history at street level, in a layout that has not changed much since the fifteenth century. Thirty-six streets, each named for the craft once sold there: Hang Bac for silversmiths, Hang Vai for fabric, Hang Ma for the votive paper goods still sold in abundance today. The French tried to widen them and failed. I walked them before the motorbikes multiplied and felt, for an hour or so, like I was somewhere that had simply decided to ignore the last two centuries of outside interference.
Hoan Kiem Lake stopped me in my tracks. It sits at the southern edge of the Old Quarter, and Hanoi orients itself around it the way other cities orient themselves around a cathedral. The name means Lake of the Restored Sword; the legend holds that Emperor Lê Lợi received a magical sword from a divine turtle in the lake in the fifteenth century, used it to drive the Ming Chinese out of Vietnam, and then returned it to the waters when the golden turtle surfaced to reclaim it. Inside a small tower on an island, I saw the preserved effigy of a giant turtle found in the lake in 1968, displayed under glass. The Ngoc Son Temple on a nearby island is dedicated to the scholar-general Trần Hưng Đạo, who repelled three Mongol invasions in the thirteenth century. Hanoi does not distinguish easily between history and mythology. I came to understand that this is not confusion; it is how a city survives a thousand years of occupation.
The Temple of Literature (Van Mieu) was the site I had most looked forward to, and it was the one that moved me most quietly. Founded in 1070 as Vietnam's first university, it still holds 82 stone steles mounted on stone tortoises, each one carved with the names and home villages of scholars who passed the highest royal examinations. Standing in the third courtyard reading those names (men from towns I had never heard of, from families who had sent their sons to the capital to prove themselves, across eight centuries of examination), I felt the weight of a civilisation that had been building something long before anyone from outside arrived to disrupt it.
On my second evening I followed a hand-drawn map from my guesthouse owner to Train Street: a narrow residential alley in the Old Quarter where an active railway line runs so close to the houses on either side that residents pull their potted plants and chairs flush against the walls when the train comes through. I found a plastic stool at a small table, ordered a coffee, and waited. An older man sitting beside me produced a small bottle of ruou gao (Vietnamese rice wine, clear and sharp) and poured me a cup before I had any opportunity to decline; we toasted without sharing a word of common language and watched the train fill the alley completely for about thirty seconds, close enough that I felt the displaced air on my face. When it passed, the street snapped back to normal as if nothing had happened. I stayed for two more trains. The rice wine helped. From there I walked to Bia Hoi Corner, the intersection of Luong Ngoc Quyen and Ta Hien where Hanoi empties itself onto the pavement every evening; hundreds of people on low plastic stools, the fresh-brewed draft beer cold and costing less than a dollar a glass, the noise building steadily as the night went on. I ended up in one of the small clubs just off the corner, bass coming through the walls, a crowd that had no interest in going home early. I got back to the guesthouse later than I had intended. It was worth it.
The French colonial quarter, broad and tree-lined and unmistakably Parisian in ambition, sits just south of the Old Quarter. I walked it in the afternoon and felt the dissonance acutely: beautiful boulevards, grand facades, the Opera House modelled on the Paris Opéra, all built to communicate permanence by people who did not stay. The Vietnamese relationship to this architecture is complicated, and I found my own reaction to it complicated too. The buildings are genuinely lovely. Their origins are not.
Ninh Binh
The drive south from Hanoi took about two hours, and when the limestone karst began appearing on the horizon I understood immediately why people make the comparison to Ha Long Bay. Towers of rock rise hundreds of metres straight out of flat rice paddies, their bases riddled with river caves, the whole landscape so improbable that it took me a while to accept that it was simply how the ground looked here.
Hoa Lu was the capital of Vietnam in the tenth and eleventh centuries, the seat of the first independent Vietnamese rulers after a thousand years of Chinese domination. Đinh Bộ Lĩnh unified the country's warring warlords in 968 AD and chose this valley because the limestone walls made it naturally defensible; no army could approach without being seen. I walked the site in the early afternoon when it was quiet, the seventeenth-century temples standing at the edge of a plain that was once a palace complex, the surrounding ridgeline unchanged from when emperors chose it. It is a strange experience to stand somewhere that was once a capital and find it now agricultural and still; the only signs of former importance were a few temple rooftops and some carved stone dragons at the gates. I spent the better part of an afternoon hiking the trails that climb into the limestone ridges surrounding the valley, which turned out to be more demanding than the pastoral scenery below suggested; the paths are steep and the humidity is unforgiving, but the views from the top (the patchwork of rice paddies, the river bending through the plain, the temple rooftops below) made the climb feel justified. I also followed a longer trail that wound through the forest along the base of the karst walls, passing a series of small caves that locals use as shrines, incense sticks still burning at the entrances. By the time I made it back to the valley floor my legs were tired and my clothes were soaked through, which felt like a reasonable price for seeing Hoa Lu from above rather than just passing through it.
At Trang An, I boarded a small rowboat and was taken through a sequence of river caves and open valleys over the course of two hours. My rower used her feet as well as her hands to work the oars through the low cave passages, a technique that looked effortless and clearly was not. The water went black inside the caves and reappeared lit green on the other side. Archaeological excavations in the area have found human settlement dating back 30,000 years; I kept thinking about that as we moved through the dark, about how many generations of people had moved through these same passages before tourism gave them a different purpose. Tam Coc, a few kilometres away, is a shorter and more open version of the same geography. I went there at dawn, before the tour groups arrived, and had the paddies and the rock towers largely to myself.
Ho Chi Minh City
I flew south, and landed in a city that is still figuring out what to call itself. Most people still say Saigon; the official name since 1975 is Ho Chi Minh City; the glass towers going up behind the old French facades suggest that a third city is in the process of arriving and has not been named yet. I had four days here and used all of them.
I went to the Reunification Palace on my first morning. I had seen the photograph before (the North Vietnamese tank crashing through the palace gates on April 30, 1975; the South Vietnamese government collapsing hours later) but walking through the building was different from knowing the photograph. The palace has been kept exactly as it was that day. I went down to the basement war rooms, with their maps still on the walls and their radio equipment sitting on the tables, and felt the particular stillness of a place where something irreversible happened and the clock was stopped at that moment. The helipad on the roof is still there, the one from which the last Americans evacuated. The building itself is genuinely beautiful (designed in 1966 by the Vietnamese architect Ngô Viết Thụ in a style that tried to synthesize Vietnamese and international modernism) and the dissonance between its elegant lines and what happened inside it is part of what makes it so hard to leave.
The War Remnants Museum is not an easy afternoon. The exhibits on Agent Orange, on My Lai, on the conditions in South Vietnamese prisons are documented without softening. The name the Vietnamese use for the conflict (the War of American Aggression) is displayed without apology. I am American, and I want to be honest about what it felt like to move through those rooms: uncomfortable in a way I think was necessary. There are photographs here that were taken by photographers who died taking them. The museum does not present balance; it presents consequence. I think everyone who visits Vietnam should go.
I spent my last afternoon in Saigon's French quarter, on Dong Khoi street, in front of the Notre-Dame Cathedral Basilica (built in 1880 from materials shipped entirely from France; even the red bricks were made in Marseille). The Central Post Office across the street was designed by Gustave Eiffel's firm and still operates as a working post office beneath its iron vaulted ceiling. I bought a postcard and mailed it. The French built all of this to communicate permanence. They did not stay. The buildings remain, occupied now by the country that outlasted them, used on their own terms, which strikes me as exactly the right outcome.