Hang Gai Street

Both Hàng Hòm and Hàng Mành turn into Hà Nội’s luxury shopping street, Hàng Gai, known to foreigners as Silk Street. In the fifteenth century this street sold rope and jute products, but from the nineteenth century, wood block printing came to Hàng Gai

In 1459, Lục Như Học went to China and learned woodblock printing. He came back and taught his craft to his native village (in Hải Dương Province), where a communal house was set up honouring him as the founder of woodblock printing. There is still in existence a book in demotic Vietnamese script, Truyền Kỳ Mạn Lục, printed in 1680.

When woodblock printing came to Hàng Gai in the nineteenth century, at first the books printed here were mostly traditional medical treaties and folk stories as well as a few “popular” works such as the Confucian Classics, The Tale of Kiều and A Woman Baccalaureate Phan Trần.

The Ngô Tử Hạ Printing House at No. 101 (now selling baby clothes) was a print shop extending to Hàng HànhStreet. Some thick history books required an entire room to hold the wooden engraving blocks. Houses that stored the wood blocks later became known as publishers.

Books were sold to itinerate vendors, mostly women peasants, who between harvest and planting, went around peddling farm products as well as buying up old books from families living in the countryside. These old books would be exchanged for new books in Hàng Gai Street, put into baskets dangling from shoulder poles and carried back to rural markets to sell – primitive distribution.

When the French arrived, the house at No. 80-82 (now a souvenir shop and the Green Palm Gallery) became the first French Embassy in Hà Nội. When the Nguyễn Dynasty in Huế appointed a mandarin, Nguyễn Trọng Hợp, as the Governor of the North, he set up headquarters at No. 79 and lived at No. 83 (now a jewelery shop), opposite the Residence de France. It was the French ambassador who first brought rickshaws to Hà Nội from Japan. From soldiers to mandarins, and of course, the French, everyone traveled by rickshaw, in those days pulled by a man on foot.

An old man sitting in front of the jewelery shop at No. 83 says the small temple next door under a fig tree is three hundred years old and writes its name: Đình Cổ Vũ. The “temple” was the communal house (đình) of Cổ Vũ Village at the back of which was a print shop. Slowly, more shops began to appear: stationery shops, hat shops, an optician. For a time during the Resistance against the French, they controlled the odd numbered side of the street; the Vietnamese, the even numbered side.

In the past, at the Mid-Autumn Children’s Festival, the street was a child’s delight, hung with colorful lanterns in the shape of lion heads, rabbits, toads, fish and dragons.

These days, Hàng Gai is a silk shopper’s paradise: shimmering scarves and stoles, finely tailored men’s and women’s clothes, heavily embroidered and sequined evening gowns, handbags, silk bed throws, cushion covers. Choose your silk – thick nubbly raw silk, heavy or fine – in a kaleidoscope of deep, rick colors or a wide selection of subtle shades. If it’s not hanging on a rack, it will be tailored to your personal measurements and requirements in twenty four to forty-eight hours (best to have Western tailoring copied).

From Hàng Gai, it is only a few steps along Lương Văn Can (to the right, south) to Hoàn Kiếm and a rewarding cup of tea, coffee or ice cream at Thủy Tạ, overlooking the lake.