French Quarter

This guide to Hanoi's French Quarter opens on a French inspector in 1902, staring at a basket of rat tails and realizing something is wrong: too many rats were still in the streets, and every one was missing the exact same body part. It traces how colonial planners built the district's grand boulevards and ochre villas atop brand-new sewer tunnels that rats loved, just as plague fears were spreading from ships out of southern China. Officials had hired Vietnamese rat catchers and paid by the tail, look up from the tree-lined streets today and picture the tunnels still running beneath them.