Hanoi is one of those cities that hits all your senses at once. In the maze of the Old Quarter, motorbikes buzz in every direction, vendors balance bamboo shoulder poles loaded with fruit and flowers, smoke rises from the grills of the food stalls and the smell of coffee with condensed milk mingles with that of simmering pho. It's chaotic, noisy and overwhelming at first, but all it takes is sitting on a little plastic stool on the pavement, with a tea or a cold beer, to start understanding it and falling for it.
Behind all that bustle is a city more than a thousand years old. Hanoi was an imperial capital under the name Thang Long over a millennium ago, and it still has its Imperial Citadel, its pagodas, its Temple of Literature —Vietnam's first university— and dozens of lakes around which daily life pulses. Added to that heritage is the mark of the French colonial period, visible in the tree-lined boulevards, the Opera House and the yellow villas of the French Quarter, and that of the 20th century, shaped by the figure of Ho Chi Minh and by war.
This guide explores Hanoi with a practical, warm eye: what to see without wearing yourself out, how to handle its legendary traffic, where to eat the best pho, bun cha or egg coffee, and how to use the city as a base for the great trips of the north —Halong, Ninh Binh, Sapa, Ha Giang—. Hanoi rewards patient, curious travellers with some of the most authentic moments in all of Vietnam.
Hanoi was born on the banks of the Red River and its history goes back more than a thousand years. In 1010, Emperor Ly Thai To, founder of the Ly dynasty, moved the capital here and named it Thang Long, 'the ascending dragon', after —legend has it— spotting a dragon rising over the river. For centuries it was the seat of power of the Ly, Tran and Le dynasties, which built the Imperial Citadel, the Temple of Literature and dozens of pagodas. In 1802 the new Nguyen dynasty moved the capital to Hue, and in 1831 the city was renamed Ha Noi ('between rivers'). From 1883 Hanoi fell under French rule and became the capital of French Indochina, which left behind its layout of boulevards, the Opera House and the colonial quarter. In 1945, in Ba Dinh Square, Ho Chi Minh proclaimed Vietnam's independence; then came the Indochina War against France and the long Vietnam War, during which Hanoi was bombed by US aircraft. Capital of North Vietnam and, since reunification in 1976, capital of the whole country, Hanoi today combines its thousand-year-old soul with the energy of a metropolis in full transformation. The full story, with its dragons, dynasties and wars, is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The cradle of the Vietnamese people: the Red River Delta, the thousand-year-old capital Thang Long-Hanoi, the first imperial capitals in Ninh Binh and the ethnic-minority mountains of Sapa and Ha Giang.
Read the history of North (Hanoi and the mountains) →If you only have one day, take a guided tour on the first one: it sets up the rest of your trip and saves you a lot of walking. We look ours up on Civitatis: guided in Spanish and booked online with no fuss. They have 15 activities in Hanoi. And there are free tours here: you book without paying and tip the guide whatever you think at the end, so trying one costs you nothing. Three are below so you get the idea: tap any of them and they all open.
If you book from here we earn a commission and you pay no more. Prices and availability come from Civitatis.
No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Hanoi's story as a capital has a founding date and a founding image: the year 1010 and a dragon rising over the river. That year, Emperor Ly Thai To, founder of the Ly dynasty, decided to move his kingdom's capital from Hoa Lu, a citadel ringed by mountains in today's Ninh Binh, to the banks of the Red River, where a fortress called Dai La had once stood. According to tradition, when the emperor reached the spot he saw a golden dragon ascending into the sky, and he took the vision as an omen of prosperity. He named the new capital Thang Long, 'the ascending dragon'.
But the area already had a long past. The Red River Delta is one of the cradles of Vietnamese civilisation. The first kingdoms of ancient Vietnam rose there, and for almost a thousand years (from the 2nd century BC to the 10th century AD) it lived under Chinese rule, which left a deep cultural, administrative and religious mark: Confucianism, writing and Buddhism. In the 7th century, the Chinese Tang dynasty had fortified the site under the name Dai La. Vietnam won its lasting independence from China in the 10th century, and it was this now-sovereign Vietnam that made Thang Long its capital.
Under the Ly dynasty (1009-1225) and the Tran dynasty that followed, Thang Long flourished. The Imperial Citadel, palaces, walls and temples were built, and institutions were founded that still exist today, such as the Temple of Literature (1070) and the country's first national university, the Quoc Tu Giam (1076). The city was organised in two parts: the imperial citadel, the seat of power, and the trading and craft quarter around it, which grew into today's Old Quarter with its guild streets.
In the Middle Ages, Thang Long was the centre of a Vietnam that had to defend its independence again and again. In the 13th century, the Tran dynasty fought off three invasions by Kublai Khan's mighty Mongol Empire, which had already conquered China. General Tran Hung Dao became a national hero by defeating the Mongols, above all at the famous Battle of Bach Dang River (1288), where he sank the enemy fleet by driving iron-tipped stakes into the riverbed. He is still worshipped today in temples across the country, including Ngoc Son Temple on Hoan Kiem Lake.
In the early 15th century, after a short period of rule by China's Ming dynasty, another great figure of Vietnamese history emerged: Le Loi. He led a ten-year war of liberation, drove out the Chinese and founded the Le dynasty in 1428. He is linked to the legend behind the name of the city's most famous lake. The story goes that Le Loi received a magic sword from a divine turtle and used it to win the war. Once the war was over, as he was boating on the lake, the turtle surfaced to reclaim the sword and return it to the realm of the waters. Hence the name Hoan Kiem, 'the Returned Sword'.
The Le dynasty (15th-18th centuries) was a time of cultural splendour and of consolidation of the Confucian state, with Thang Long as its political and intellectual heart. The citadel and the institutions were expanded, famous law codes were written and the imperial examination system took firm root. The names of its doctors were carved on the stone steles of the Temple of Literature. The city lived between the power of the court and the bustle of its craft and trading quarters.
With time, the old capital lost its rank. In 1802, after decades of civil war and the Tay Son rebellion, Lord Nguyen Anh unified the country under his rule, proclaimed himself emperor as Gia Long and founded the Nguyen dynasty, Vietnam's last. Gia Long chose to set up his capital not in Thang Long but in Hue, in the centre of the country, where he built a great imperial citadel. Thang Long lost the status of capital that it had held for almost eight centuries.
In 1831, Emperor Minh Mang reorganised the country's administration and gave the city the name it still has today: Ha Noi, meaning 'between rivers' or 'the city inside the river', a reference to its position on the Red River. Though it no longer mattered politically, Hanoi remained an important commercial and cultural centre of the north, and its guild-street quarter stayed busy.
That relative calm ended when the European powers arrived. Over the 19th century, France steadily extended its influence over Indochina. In 1873, and again in 1882, French troops attacked and took Hanoi's citadel, and its defenders died in the fighting. In 1883, Vietnam became a French protectorate, and soon afterwards Hanoi was chosen as the capital of all French Indochina. That put it back at the centre of power in the region, though now under foreign rule.
For more than seven decades, Hanoi was the capital of French Indochina, the vast colony that took in today's Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. The French reshaped much of the city. To the east and south of the Old Quarter they laid out a new European-style district, with wide tree-lined boulevards, Mediterranean-style villas painted ochre yellow, government buildings, covered markets and monuments. Several landmarks date from this period: the Hanoi Opera House (1911), modelled on the one in Paris, the neo-Gothic St Joseph's Cathedral, the grand Metropole hotel and the iron Long Bien Bridge over the Red River, built by Gustave Eiffel's company. So does the street plan of what is still the elegant 'French Quarter'.
But colonial modernisation went hand in hand with exploitation and repression. The French built Hoa Lo Prison to lock up Vietnamese political prisoners and revolutionaries who opposed colonial rule. Its cells and its guillotine are now a museum. In the early 20th century, Hanoi became one of the hubs of the growing Vietnamese nationalist and independence movement. Over time the movement took shape as parties and secret societies and, in 1930, as the Indochinese Communist Party, founded under Ho Chi Minh's leadership.
The Second World War sped things up. During the Japanese occupation, a terrible famine struck northern Vietnam in 1945 and killed hundreds of thousands of people, perhaps more than a million. Amid that disaster, the Viet Minh movement led by Ho Chi Minh grew stronger. When the war ended, with Japan defeated and France still weakened, a historic opportunity opened up that would change the country's destiny.
On 2 September 1945, in Hanoi's Ba Dinh Square, Ho Chi Minh read the Declaration of Independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam to a large crowd. He even quoted the American Declaration of Independence. It marked the birth of a modern, independent Vietnamese state. But France would not accept the loss of its colony, and in 1946 the First Indochina War broke out, a conflict that dragged on until 1954. That year, the French defeat at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, in the mountainous northwest, ended the colonial presence. The Geneva Accords temporarily split the country in two along the 17th parallel: the communist North, with its capital in Hanoi, and the South, with its capital in Saigon.
Hanoi thus became the capital of North Vietnam and its command centre during the long, devastating Vietnam War (or Second Indochina War). The war pitted the North, backed by the Soviet Union and China, against the South and its ally, the United States. Between 1965 and 1972, US aircraft bombed Hanoi and the surrounding area again and again. The most intense episode was Operation 'Linebacker II' in December 1972, known as the 'Christmas bombings'. For almost two weeks, waves of B-52 bombers struck the city, causing destruction and many civilian deaths, including in the Kham Thien neighbourhood. People sheltered in small one-person bunkers dug into the pavements.
In those years, Hoa Lo Prison was used to hold downed American pilots, who ironically nicknamed it the 'Hanoi Hilton'. The war ended in 1975 with the fall of Saigon and victory for the North. In 1976, Vietnam was formally reunified as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, and Hanoi was confirmed as the capital of the whole country. It had lost that role in 1802 and got it back after 174 years.
After the hard decades following the war and years of a centrally planned economy, Vietnam adopted a reform policy in 1986 known as 'Doi Moi' ('renovation'). It opened the economy to the market and transformed the country. As the capital, Hanoi was one of the main stages of that change. In a few decades it went from a grey, austere city to a booming metropolis, with skyscrapers, shopping centres, a growing middle class, swarms of motorbikes and, more recently, its first metro lines.
In 2010, Hanoi celebrated the thousandth anniversary of its founding as Thang Long in grand style. That same year UNESCO added the central sector of the Imperial Citadel of Thang Long to the World Heritage List, recognising its outstanding value as the continuous seat of Vietnamese power for thirteen centuries. It is one of several UNESCO honours for the city, along with the doctors' steles at the Temple of Literature, which are listed on the Memory of the World Register.
Today Hanoi is one of the most fascinating capitals in Southeast Asia, precisely because of these layers living side by side: the imperial dragon of Thang Long, the wistful elegance of the French colonial quarter, the memory of the 20th-century wars and the frantic energy of a city growing at full speed. In the Old Quarter, a thousand-year-old temple can share a block with a specialty coffee shop. At Hoan Kiem Lake, older people do tai chi at dawn while young people take selfies. That mix may be the best definition of Hanoi: a thousand-year-old city that, like its founding name, keeps on ascending.
