Old Quarter

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.