Hanoi Opera House

This guide to the Hanoi Opera House begins on August 19, 1945, when a crowd filled the square below to watch a red flag with a gold star rise from its balcony, in a building French engineers had raised on drained swampland to project colonial power. It follows the Viet Minh's rally that day into the new National Assembly's first sessions here in 1946, and the fighting that returned to the city that December. Look up at the balcony where a citizens' committee once announced it had taken Hanoi.