cầu Long Biên

This guide to Long Bien Bridge in Hanoi opens by correcting the guidebooks: Gustave Eiffel didn't build it, a rival Paris firm did, after winning an 1899 competition. You'll hear about the three thousand Vietnamese laborers who raised it, the French governor who put his name on it, and the 1954 morning French troops marched off it as Ho Chi Minh's forces marched in. It also follows the bridge through the American war, when crews kept patching what the bombers tore down.