Nguyễn Huệ

This guide to Nguyễn Huệ walking street in Ho Chi Minh City follows the canal that once ran beneath it, a stretch so foul that residents petitioned French colonial officials for eighteen years before it was filled in 1887. You'll hear how the new boulevard was named for a French admiral before it later took the name of the eighteenth-century general Nguyễn Huệ. Listen for how cars, trams and motorbikes once filled these same lanes through the decades that followed.