Hanoi
Vietnam's capital, the city of the ascending dragon
Hanoi is Vietnam's thousand-year-old capital, a city of around five and a half million where ancient pagodas, French colonial villas, and tree-shaded lakes lend a graceful counterpoint to the roar of motorbikes. Slower and more traditional than booming Saigon to the south, it is the political and cultural heart of the country, a place of narrow Old Quarter lanes named for the trades once practiced there, steaming bowls of pho, and a deep sense of history.
The city sits on the flat, fertile delta of the Red River in the north of Vietnam, laced with lakes and ponds and prone to the floods that the river has shaped life around for millennia. Hoan Kiem Lake anchors the historic center, and the wide, silt-laden Red River curls past the city behind its protective dykes. The subtropical climate brings hot, wet summers and cooler, sometimes drizzly winters, distinct from the steady heat of the south.
In 1010 the Ly dynasty king Ly Thai To moved his capital here and named it Thang Long, the ascending dragon, beginning a near-continuous role as the seat of Vietnamese power. The French made it the capital of their Indochina colony, lining it with boulevards and villas, and after the long wars of the twentieth century it became the capital of a reunified Vietnam in 1976. Today Hanoi governs the country and guards its heritage even as new districts and highways spread across the delta.