Ta Hien Beer Street

This guide to Ta Hien Beer Street in Hanoi traces the lane back to French colonial Rue Geraud, home to the Quang Lac Theater, and to its 1945 renaming after Ta Quang Hien, a leader of the failed nineteenth-century Can Vuong uprising against French rule. The theater is long gone, and the guide follows what replaced it decades later, once Vietnam reopened to the world in the 1990s. Listen for the mismatch between the street's quiet act of political naming and the plastic stools you're sitting on now.