Cầu Thê Húc

This guide to The Huc Bridge in Hanoi opens in 1887 with two schoolboys, seventeen-year-old Nguyen Van Minh and his fourteen-year-old friend, setting the wooden bridge alight to protest the French takeover of the temple ahead. It traces the bridge back further still, to the scholar who built and named it in 1865 for the morning sun it was meant to catch, and forward to a New Year's Eve decades later when a crowd of pilgrims nearly brought it down again. Notice the red railings under your hand, painted that color for luck since the very first crossing.