The pavement is not for walking.

What it is

Hanoi — Hà Nội, “inside the rivers” — is the capital of Vietnam and its second-largest city, around 8.5 million people on the Red River in the north of the country. It has been the seat of Vietnamese power, on and off, since 1010, which makes it one of the older continuously governed capitals anywhere.

The shape of a visit is set by two things. The historic core — the Old Quarter, the lake and the French Quarter — is small enough to walk end to end in half an hour. And the ground floor of that core is a working city: the footpath is the shop, the kitchen and the parking, so people walk in the road, and the traffic is built on the assumption that they will.

How it got here

Lý Thái Tổ moved his capital here in 1010 and named it Thăng Long — ascending dragon — after what he said he saw over the river. The citadel he founded is still there, under later walls, under a French barracks, under a concrete war bunker; UNESCO listed the site in 2010 for exactly that stack of layers.

The dynasties that followed built the Temple of Literature and ran the country’s examinations from it for seven hundred years, and the merchant guilds north of the lake organised themselves street by street into the pattern the Old Quarter still has.

The French took the city in 1882 and made it the capital of all Indochina. They laid out the boulevards south and east of the lake, built the Opera House, the cathedral and the Long Bien Bridge, and built Hoa Lo Prison to hold the people who objected.

In September 1945 Ho Chi Minh read the declaration of independence in Ba Dinh Square. What followed was thirty years of war — first against France, then against the United States, whose aircraft bombed the bridge repeatedly between 1967 and 1972 while the north was run from a bunker inside the old citadel.

Reunification came in 1975, and the economic reforms known as Đổi Mới from 1986. Hanoi has changed enormously since — the towers, the ring roads, two metro lines — and the extraordinary thing is how little of it reached the thirty-six streets.

What it is known for

Hanoi is known for its Old Quarter and the guild streets still named after what they sold; for a lake in the middle of the city with a legend and a red bridge on it; for a colonial layer that left boulevards, a cathedral and an opera house; for phở, bún chả, egg coffee and beer brewed that morning and drunk on a corner; and for motorbike traffic that visitors photograph before they learn to walk through it.

What people remember afterwards is usually smaller: how cheap it is to eat extremely well, how early the city gets up, and the moment on about the second day when crossing the road stopped being frightening.