Antique Street

This guide to Antique Street in Ho Chi Minh City traces the lane from a French-widened alley named Reims Street around 1920, through its 1955 renaming for Le Cong Kieu, a commander from the Can Vuong resistance, to what it began trading after 1975, when families leaving Vietnam could carry only what fit in a suitcase. You'll hear how that trade grew into a market of vintage cameras, colonial coins and old letters by the 1990s, filling numbered, nameless stalls, and how a visitor in 2004 still found strangers' family photographs stacked in boxes here. Listen for what a walk down this two-hundred-meter stretch, once taken even by Hillary Clinton, turns up today.