Hanoi is a very livable city. Although its sidewalks are overstuffed with merchants' displays and parked motor scooters, it's a very walkable city. Yesterday, for example, I walked from the History Museum back to our hotel, a distance of perhaps two kilometers, past the giant statue of the sage Ly Thai To (974-1028)...
...where an adolescent practiced skating on platform skates (which he deftly jumped between while moving), around Hoan Kiem Lake with its pagoda and temple on two separate islands, and through the dense commercial areas, until I arrived at the bamboo merchants, right around the corner from the hotel. Like Ho Chi Minh City it has its share of international brands: Salvatore Ferragamo, KFC, Sony, Panasonic, Samsung, California Body Works. But it also has a population that turns out in force at 6 am on a Saturday morning to play badminton in the parks, to run, and to exercise on the railings of Truc Bach and West Lakes in the north of the city.
I had one more day in Hanoi, so I decided to do something that for me was radical: have my photo vest laundered. I had worn my photo vest every day on this trip; it was essential to me. I carried my super-wide angle lens in one pocket, passport, notebook, friendship cards, hand sanitizer, tissues, water bottle, magnifier, polarizing filter in other pockets, plus various souvenirs that I didn't want to weigh down or lose track of in my other luggage. The problem was that I had perspired so much into this vest, that its odor was polluting the air around me. It was so strong, the vest could, as they say, practically stand up on its own. White precipitants of salt had appeared in various places. I just had to figure out how I could carry a bare minimum for one day without it, but I did, and I was fine, and when the hotel gave me my clean laundry that night I felt like celebrating. I could return home without repelling anyone within four feet of me, never mind the effect on my own health of breathing two months of congealed perspirations.
I had a little cold, so my energy wasn't great, but there were three things I had to see: the Temple of Literature, the Hoa Lo Prison (Museum, aka the Hanoi Hilton), and the Museum of History.
A Temple of Literature? Its very existence seemed to bespeak a level of culture beyond the conceivable in the US, or something out of a Hermann Hesse futuristic fantasy novel.
It turned out to be a complex of buildings in a beautiful landscaped campus, with stone-walled lily-and-lotus ponds, plants in animal shapes (too small to be called topiaries), a marvelous selection of large potted banzi trees with ceramic pagodas, sages, and figures playing a board game, and rows of stone stele with effaced Chinese writing on them, whose bases were tortoises, which symbolize wisdom, endurance, wealth and longevity in Chinese culture. These were the memorials to Confucian mandarins who had successfully passed all the examinations. The Temple of Literature was really the institution where traditional Chinese literary and philosophical culture was taught, the culture that is credited with humanizing Chinese feudalism. It was effectively the first university in Vietnam, dating back to 1076, during the reign of king Ly Nhan Tong. It was rebuilt on its present grand scale in the 18th Century, when it could accommodate 300 students, with classrooms and dormitories.
The grounds featured extremely creative landscaping, for example a series of circular potted plant tableaux emerging from lotuses, each one presenting a Chinese character. One can imagine that they are billboarding wisdom, respect, longevity, etc.
Two of the topiary beasts that populated the park: a cat and a dragon.
One of the walled-in ponds.
A row of stele on tortoises in honor of individual Confucian scholars of past centuries.
Bronze exploding dragon hemispheres in footed pots flanked the walkway inside the second gate.
Banzai trees and their ceramic pagodas, sages and board game players.
The very last in the series of buildings contained large seated polychrome statues of various sages (I assume one was Confucious, but the labels were in Chinese and Vietnamese), occupying the places Buddhas would have been in their temples. Bronze cranes standing on tortoises guarded them. Stylized tortoises in gold (leaf?) were in glass cases lending their mystical power of longevity (also wealth and wisdom) to them. Young people were praying to them.
Stylized gold tortoise in a glass case.
Bronze tortoise, polished by generations of touch, at the base of a crane.
It was a delightful place, very amply visited by the public of all ages. The souvenir stands offered a charming array of what looked like traditional Vietnamese water puppets.
I was finished there in a little over half and hour, and I hopped a cab to Hoa Lo Prison. Its high enclosing stone and concrete walls are topped with broken green glass, which should have been a giveaway that it was constructed by the French--which it was, in 1896, to house mostly indigenous people who opposed the French colonial regime. It offered a very clear picture of the brutality of the French colonists: cells and dormitory where every bed was equipped with leg irons. They've supplied mannekins for a more realistic representation of what it was like. So one sees facing rows of beds, with their occupiers in various position of conversation or relaxation, all shackled at the ankles. The explanatory material explains that the prison became a training ground for the Vietnamese in their anti-colonial struggle, and there was great camaraderie and mutual help.
We see the solitary confinement area (the "cachot") for prisoners who broke regulations, plus their original guillotine, its blade now rusty, but everything intact, for executions. It was apparently used three times against the "terrorists" of the day. And there's a grisly photograph of the three severed heads, each in its own basket. On the wall prison regulations are posted in Vietnamese and French. It is, in effect, a very powerful history museum.
The women's section was well represented, too, with emphasis on the fact that there were no special facilities for the children that accompanied their mothers into the prison and received no separate rations. Such was the cruelty of the French administration.
A separate section is devoted to the incarceration of shot-down US pilots. There are two English subtitled videos that tell the story and show footage of communal meals and recreational activities. The message stresses that US pilots were deliberately treated very well, as a way of proclaiming the humanity of the North Vietnamese--in contrast to the atrocities committed by US forces, as documented by the well-known photos in the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City of US soldiers dragging to his death a captured North Vietnamese soldier behind a tank, not to mention the use of napalm and the infamous massacre of civilians at My Lai. Display cases show off the uniforms and personal effects of selected pilots, with a large case devoted to those of John McCain, including his parachute and boots, shot down in October of 1967.
McCain's effects.
Prison uniform and items issued to the prisoners.
Sample spread of album that documents each captured pilot.
The pilots cook Christmas dinner.
Pilots receive supplies from their families.
And there are also photographs of reconciliation. Here is Vietnam President Tran Doc Luong welcoming President Clinton to Vietnam, Nov. 16, 2000, after resumption of diplomatic relations in 1995.
And Senator John McCain's visits to Hoa Long Prison in April of 2000 completes the circle:
At the gift shop I treated myself to a North Vietnamese Army red star cap for 40,000 VND (about $1.85). At that price I should have bought one for all my Communist friends.
I took a taxi back to the hotel to rest for a while before venturing out to my third museum of the day. My cold was costing me energy.
After about an hour's nap I boarded a cab again for the Museum of History, in the Southeast section of town, near the opera house. My driver left me off about a block from the entrance. He clearly didn't know where it was. On the way in I met up with man about my age escorting a much younger woman to the museum. When he jumped up to touch the hanging strings from a banyan tree, I suspected he was not a conventionally-minded person. In fact, he was Italian, from near Torino, escorting his daughter then heading to a small town in China to act as a consultant for their high-speed train. I took a chance and mentioned Biela, a town I had visited in 1995 thanks to my friend Lucetta who lived nearby, and that was exactly where he was from. We chatted for a while in Italian. It turns out he spent the first five years of his life in the religious retreat of Oropa, home of a famous black virgin, and where Marconi first tested his wireless transmission, since it overlooks a valley with an unobstructed view for miles. We made a warm connection, and I met up with him later as I waited for the plane to Guanzhou, on my way to Osaka.
The History Museum started its exhibits in the early Paleolithic with a rich harvest of artifacts from a surprising number of sites in Vietnam. There was even a reference to Homo erectus, the species immediately predating Homo sapiens, which I hadn't known had ever left Africa.
Life-size diorama that took up an entire wall, representing Paleolithic people in what is today Vietnam.
It had a good Neolithic selection as well, but then seemed to jump around, with some special collections under dramatic lighting in side halls--ceramics from the past century, and exquisite Oc Eo cultural artifacts from the first millenium C.E. in the Mekong Delta region.
Oc Eo artifacts in a side room under dramatic lighting.
The two-story Museum turned out to be more a one that displayed historical objects than one that offered an overview of Vietnamese history per se, since no effort was made to present a continuous chronology. Displays jumped from several centuries BCE to the Middle Ages. I had seen similar and better versions of the ceramic figures and bronzes in the two Fine Arts museums I had visited in Ho Chi Minh city and here in Hanoi. It did however have charming ceramic figured dioramas representing significant battles in Vietnamese history, including one in which the Mongol invaders were repulsed in the late 13th Century, plus one sea battle. Distance perspective was created by using smaller figures to represent those far away.
The Museum did offer a rich account of the French colonial period, with photographs, decrees, and weapons. This helped fill in the story whose more extreme episodes were accounted for in Hoa Lo Prison. In the Museum shop I bought a biography of Ho Chi Minh for 200,000 VND (about $9.26), which seemed high for Vietnam, but I didn't have time to shop around.
In 1975 I visited the history museums in Communist East Berlin and Prague. In both cases a narrative was maintained that presented a Marxist view of human history, eventually focusing on the particular country the museum was in, and culminating in its socialism. I was hoping for this kind of treatment here in Hanoi, and it was completely absent. In fact I could find precious little that characterized the country as socialist, despite its name ("The Socialist Republic of Vietnam"). Had it succumbed to Ferragamo and California Body Works (and HSBC)?
I was famished as I left the museum, so I plunked myself down in an open-air restaurant a few blocks away and ordered the tofu and "meat" with rice. It was decent and satisfying, but when the bill came to 85,000 VND, I found I only had 75,000 after all those taxi rides and purchases. I was assured this was adequate (especially since they had raised their prices a bit in front of my eyes--just for me). I didn't want to withdraw any more money from an ATM, and I figured the hotel would change $10 into Dong, so I could pay my share of the cab to the airport the next day, so, despite my cold, I decided to walk back to the hotel. It was exhilerating.
First I passed by Hoan Kiem Lake, a great relief from the bustle of the city, with its natural beauty, flowers growing out of the water, stone Pagoda on one island and the Ngoc Son Temple on another, accessible by a red footbridge. Since I was out of Dong, I had to pass it up, but I had seen so many such temples in China and here, I was sure I could imagine the interior.
Hanoi street scenes captured during my walk back to the hotel.
I made it back to the hotel without rushing in about 40 minutes from the restaurant, passing the statue of the sage and the platform skater mentioned abovel. On the way I refused all offers from the bicycle rickshaw men and tried to imagine how they could make a living, since they're more expensive by far than taxis. But the tourist season was over by now. I saw a whole block of them lined up with most of the drivers fanning themselves.
It was just after 4 pm when I got back, but that was it for me for the day. I rested, read and wrote the rest of the time. We were extremely happy with the Charming II Hotel. They couldn't do enough for us and treated us like old friends. The accommodations were wonderful, as was the breakfast--not buffet, but a good selection, and you could have anything you wanted. We can't recommend it highly enough.
View of street sign and wall across street, seen from inside the glass door of the Charming II Hotel. It's on Hang Ba Street.
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Views from the hotel roof, strating with pre-dawn.
We had to get up at 5 the next morning to catch our plane to Guangzhou, China, and then to Osaka in the last leg of this trip before heading home. But it was in the taxi to the airport at that early hour when I saw the badminton players and all the exercisers during this coolest part of the day.
...where an adolescent practiced skating on platform skates (which he deftly jumped between while moving), around Hoan Kiem Lake with its pagoda and temple on two separate islands, and through the dense commercial areas, until I arrived at the bamboo merchants, right around the corner from the hotel. Like Ho Chi Minh City it has its share of international brands: Salvatore Ferragamo, KFC, Sony, Panasonic, Samsung, California Body Works. But it also has a population that turns out in force at 6 am on a Saturday morning to play badminton in the parks, to run, and to exercise on the railings of Truc Bach and West Lakes in the north of the city.
I had one more day in Hanoi, so I decided to do something that for me was radical: have my photo vest laundered. I had worn my photo vest every day on this trip; it was essential to me. I carried my super-wide angle lens in one pocket, passport, notebook, friendship cards, hand sanitizer, tissues, water bottle, magnifier, polarizing filter in other pockets, plus various souvenirs that I didn't want to weigh down or lose track of in my other luggage. The problem was that I had perspired so much into this vest, that its odor was polluting the air around me. It was so strong, the vest could, as they say, practically stand up on its own. White precipitants of salt had appeared in various places. I just had to figure out how I could carry a bare minimum for one day without it, but I did, and I was fine, and when the hotel gave me my clean laundry that night I felt like celebrating. I could return home without repelling anyone within four feet of me, never mind the effect on my own health of breathing two months of congealed perspirations.
I had a little cold, so my energy wasn't great, but there were three things I had to see: the Temple of Literature, the Hoa Lo Prison (Museum, aka the Hanoi Hilton), and the Museum of History.
A Temple of Literature? Its very existence seemed to bespeak a level of culture beyond the conceivable in the US, or something out of a Hermann Hesse futuristic fantasy novel.
It turned out to be a complex of buildings in a beautiful landscaped campus, with stone-walled lily-and-lotus ponds, plants in animal shapes (too small to be called topiaries), a marvelous selection of large potted banzi trees with ceramic pagodas, sages, and figures playing a board game, and rows of stone stele with effaced Chinese writing on them, whose bases were tortoises, which symbolize wisdom, endurance, wealth and longevity in Chinese culture. These were the memorials to Confucian mandarins who had successfully passed all the examinations. The Temple of Literature was really the institution where traditional Chinese literary and philosophical culture was taught, the culture that is credited with humanizing Chinese feudalism. It was effectively the first university in Vietnam, dating back to 1076, during the reign of king Ly Nhan Tong. It was rebuilt on its present grand scale in the 18th Century, when it could accommodate 300 students, with classrooms and dormitories.
The grounds featured extremely creative landscaping, for example a series of circular potted plant tableaux emerging from lotuses, each one presenting a Chinese character. One can imagine that they are billboarding wisdom, respect, longevity, etc.
Two of the topiary beasts that populated the park: a cat and a dragon.
One of the walled-in ponds.
A row of stele on tortoises in honor of individual Confucian scholars of past centuries.
Banzai trees and their ceramic pagodas, sages and board game players.
The very last in the series of buildings contained large seated polychrome statues of various sages (I assume one was Confucious, but the labels were in Chinese and Vietnamese), occupying the places Buddhas would have been in their temples. Bronze cranes standing on tortoises guarded them. Stylized tortoises in gold (leaf?) were in glass cases lending their mystical power of longevity (also wealth and wisdom) to them. Young people were praying to them.
Bronze tortoise, polished by generations of touch, at the base of a crane.
It was a delightful place, very amply visited by the public of all ages. The souvenir stands offered a charming array of what looked like traditional Vietnamese water puppets.
I was finished there in a little over half and hour, and I hopped a cab to Hoa Lo Prison. Its high enclosing stone and concrete walls are topped with broken green glass, which should have been a giveaway that it was constructed by the French--which it was, in 1896, to house mostly indigenous people who opposed the French colonial regime. It offered a very clear picture of the brutality of the French colonists: cells and dormitory where every bed was equipped with leg irons. They've supplied mannekins for a more realistic representation of what it was like. So one sees facing rows of beds, with their occupiers in various position of conversation or relaxation, all shackled at the ankles. The explanatory material explains that the prison became a training ground for the Vietnamese in their anti-colonial struggle, and there was great camaraderie and mutual help.
We see the solitary confinement area (the "cachot") for prisoners who broke regulations, plus their original guillotine, its blade now rusty, but everything intact, for executions. It was apparently used three times against the "terrorists" of the day. And there's a grisly photograph of the three severed heads, each in its own basket. On the wall prison regulations are posted in Vietnamese and French. It is, in effect, a very powerful history museum.
Photograph of three severed heads in baskets of men arrested for a "terrorist" attack on a train station.
A separate section is devoted to the incarceration of shot-down US pilots. There are two English subtitled videos that tell the story and show footage of communal meals and recreational activities. The message stresses that US pilots were deliberately treated very well, as a way of proclaiming the humanity of the North Vietnamese--in contrast to the atrocities committed by US forces, as documented by the well-known photos in the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City of US soldiers dragging to his death a captured North Vietnamese soldier behind a tank, not to mention the use of napalm and the infamous massacre of civilians at My Lai. Display cases show off the uniforms and personal effects of selected pilots, with a large case devoted to those of John McCain, including his parachute and boots, shot down in October of 1967.
McCain's effects.
Another pilot's personal effects.
Prison uniform and items issued to the prisoners.
Sample spread of album that documents each captured pilot.
The pilots cook Christmas dinner.
And Senator John McCain's visits to Hoa Long Prison in April of 2000 completes the circle:
At the gift shop I treated myself to a North Vietnamese Army red star cap for 40,000 VND (about $1.85). At that price I should have bought one for all my Communist friends.
I took a taxi back to the hotel to rest for a while before venturing out to my third museum of the day. My cold was costing me energy.
After about an hour's nap I boarded a cab again for the Museum of History, in the Southeast section of town, near the opera house. My driver left me off about a block from the entrance. He clearly didn't know where it was. On the way in I met up with man about my age escorting a much younger woman to the museum. When he jumped up to touch the hanging strings from a banyan tree, I suspected he was not a conventionally-minded person. In fact, he was Italian, from near Torino, escorting his daughter then heading to a small town in China to act as a consultant for their high-speed train. I took a chance and mentioned Biela, a town I had visited in 1995 thanks to my friend Lucetta who lived nearby, and that was exactly where he was from. We chatted for a while in Italian. It turns out he spent the first five years of his life in the religious retreat of Oropa, home of a famous black virgin, and where Marconi first tested his wireless transmission, since it overlooks a valley with an unobstructed view for miles. We made a warm connection, and I met up with him later as I waited for the plane to Guanzhou, on my way to Osaka.
The History Museum started its exhibits in the early Paleolithic with a rich harvest of artifacts from a surprising number of sites in Vietnam. There was even a reference to Homo erectus, the species immediately predating Homo sapiens, which I hadn't known had ever left Africa.
Life-size diorama that took up an entire wall, representing Paleolithic people in what is today Vietnam.
It had a good Neolithic selection as well, but then seemed to jump around, with some special collections under dramatic lighting in side halls--ceramics from the past century, and exquisite Oc Eo cultural artifacts from the first millenium C.E. in the Mekong Delta region.
Oc Eo artifacts in a side room under dramatic lighting.
The two-story Museum turned out to be more a one that displayed historical objects than one that offered an overview of Vietnamese history per se, since no effort was made to present a continuous chronology. Displays jumped from several centuries BCE to the Middle Ages. I had seen similar and better versions of the ceramic figures and bronzes in the two Fine Arts museums I had visited in Ho Chi Minh city and here in Hanoi. It did however have charming ceramic figured dioramas representing significant battles in Vietnamese history, including one in which the Mongol invaders were repulsed in the late 13th Century, plus one sea battle. Distance perspective was created by using smaller figures to represent those far away.
The Museum did offer a rich account of the French colonial period, with photographs, decrees, and weapons. This helped fill in the story whose more extreme episodes were accounted for in Hoa Lo Prison. In the Museum shop I bought a biography of Ho Chi Minh for 200,000 VND (about $9.26), which seemed high for Vietnam, but I didn't have time to shop around.
In 1975 I visited the history museums in Communist East Berlin and Prague. In both cases a narrative was maintained that presented a Marxist view of human history, eventually focusing on the particular country the museum was in, and culminating in its socialism. I was hoping for this kind of treatment here in Hanoi, and it was completely absent. In fact I could find precious little that characterized the country as socialist, despite its name ("The Socialist Republic of Vietnam"). Had it succumbed to Ferragamo and California Body Works (and HSBC)?
I was famished as I left the museum, so I plunked myself down in an open-air restaurant a few blocks away and ordered the tofu and "meat" with rice. It was decent and satisfying, but when the bill came to 85,000 VND, I found I only had 75,000 after all those taxi rides and purchases. I was assured this was adequate (especially since they had raised their prices a bit in front of my eyes--just for me). I didn't want to withdraw any more money from an ATM, and I figured the hotel would change $10 into Dong, so I could pay my share of the cab to the airport the next day, so, despite my cold, I decided to walk back to the hotel. It was exhilerating.
First I passed by Hoan Kiem Lake, a great relief from the bustle of the city, with its natural beauty, flowers growing out of the water, stone Pagoda on one island and the Ngoc Son Temple on another, accessible by a red footbridge. Since I was out of Dong, I had to pass it up, but I had seen so many such temples in China and here, I was sure I could imagine the interior.
Hanoi street scenes captured during my walk back to the hotel.
It was just after 4 pm when I got back, but that was it for me for the day. I rested, read and wrote the rest of the time. We were extremely happy with the Charming II Hotel. They couldn't do enough for us and treated us like old friends. The accommodations were wonderful, as was the breakfast--not buffet, but a good selection, and you could have anything you wanted. We can't recommend it highly enough.
View of street sign and wall across street, seen from inside the glass door of the Charming II Hotel. It's on Hang Ba Street.
We had to get up at 5 the next morning to catch our plane to Guangzhou, China, and then to Osaka in the last leg of this trip before heading home. But it was in the taxi to the airport at that early hour when I saw the badminton players and all the exercisers during this coolest part of the day.
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