Nhà Thờ Cửa Bắc (Cửa Bắc Catholic Church)

This guide to Nhà Thờ Cửa Bắc in Hanoi starts across the street, at two holes still punched clean through the old citadel gate by French gunboat cannon fire on April 25, 1882, the opening shots of a war that ended nine centuries of Vietnamese self-rule. It follows architect Ernest Hébrard, handed the job of reinventing colonial Hanoi, and the deliberately unsymmetrical church he built facing that gate decades later, blending a Roman basilica plan with tiled Vietnamese rooflines. Locals never used its official name, Our Lady of the Martyrs, for the building in front of you.