Old Quarter
Maze of narrow lanes lined with centuries-old trade-guild streets and slender, deep tube houses.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Hanoi's Old Quarter explains why its houses run three meters wide but stretch six or seven stories tall and sixty meters deep, a shape traced back to a property tax under the Nguyen dynasty and the French that charged merchants by street frontage. Deep inside these tube houses, builders cut an open-air well through the roofline to drop light and rain into the center room. Each street still carries the name of the trade guild once clustered there.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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