Trang Tien Plaza

This guide to Trang Tien Plaza in Hanoi begins with French colonists building the grand Maison Godard department store here at the turn of the twentieth century, selling porcelain and imported luxuries to the colonial elite. It follows the building through 1959, when newly independent Vietnam turned it into the largest state-run department store in North Vietnam, and the decades of ration coupons and shortage queues that followed. The original building came down in 2000, and you're standing where its six-story replacement opened its doors in 2001.