Every street is named after what was sold in it.

01 Hàng

That turns the map into an economic document. You can read the street index and reconstruct what the city manufactured, where, and with what specialisation. Each street was devoted to one specific kind of manufacture or trade, and the name recorded it.

02 The thirty-six that are not thirty-six

The quarter is known as "Hà Nội 36 phố phường", the thirty-six wards and streets. This is worth clearing up, because almost every guidebook gets it wrong: the number is not a count. It refers to the guilds, not to an exact quantity of streets.

The official extent was fixed by a Ministry of Construction decision in 1995. Its boundaries are Hàng Đậu street to the north, Phùng Hưng to the west and Trần Quang Khải and Trần Nhật Duật to the east, all within Hoàn Kiếm district.

The quarter took shape under the Lý and Trần dynasties, between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries, east of the imperial citadel. Which is to say: it had already been the place where things were made and bought for four centuries before any of the houses now standing went up.

03 The tube houses

The quarter's building type is the shophouse: commercial ground floor, upper floors to live in, and a sloping tiled roof. Most of those that remain were built in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Their shape is extremely elongated — hence the nickname "tube houses" — with a narrow frontage and a very deep plot. In the general Southeast Asian shophouse model, each unit is roughly 4 to 5 metres wide by around 12 deep, with an air well midway along that ventilates the interior.

The explanation that the frontages are narrow because tax was levied per metre of street frontage circulates widely. It is a story repeated everywhere, but I could not verify it in the sources I consulted, so I leave it as what it is: a very widespread and unconfirmed attribution. What is documented is the practical reason: narrow and deep fits more businesses along the same stretch of street.

04 What is left and what is not

Here it is worth being honest: the quarter is losing its original fabric. Since the end of the twentieth century the number of traditional houses has been dwindling, and what you see today is a mixture of old houses, rebuilds and new buildings that imitate the narrow proportion without keeping anything else.

Of the communal temples dedicated to the founders of each trade — there were many, one per guild — only those of Mã Mây and Kim Cổ survive. And of the city gates, one remains: Quan Chưởng. One, out of all there were.

There has been intervention: in 2010 a refurbishment project put 50 billion dong into restoring 75 streets. It is a specific figure and a specific date, and it measures the scale of the problem as much as that of the response.

05 How to walk it

Walk it reading the plates. They are blue, rectangular and on almost every corner, and once you know that hàng means "wares" the quarter becomes legible: you can follow a trade and see whether it is still practised on its own street. Sometimes it is. Sometimes silk street sells imported clothing and copper street sells screws.

Do not look for monuments. What you should be looking at here is the grain: the width of the frontages, the depth of the premises when a door is open, the way a business spills onto the pavement and the pavement turns into a workshop. That is the real heritage, and it is the one disappearing.

A note on the city's name, which also says something. It was called Long Biên, then Đại La, then Thăng Long — "ascending dragon" — from 1010, and from 1831 Hà Nội, written with the characters for "river" and "inside". Four names in a thousand years for the same bend in the Red River.

And go at the end of the day. The quarter changes function after six: the goods stalls give way to food stalls, the plastic stools come out and the street turns into a dining room. It is the same space doing another job, which is exactly what it has been doing for eight centuries.