Heritage House

This guide to Heritage House on Ma May Street in Hanoi's Old Quarter traces one house through two very different lives: built in the late eighteen hundreds by a rice trader and later run as a Chinese herbalist's shop, then nationalized in 1954 and split into cramped apartments for five families sharing a single kitchen and staircase. You'll hear how those families divided the courtyard, the stove and the stairs for over four decades, and how Hanoi later partnered with its sister city Toulouse to try to restore the place. It follows the house from crowded tenement toward its original shophouse form, ending at the reopening that made it a heritage site.