Hanoi Ba Dinh & the Temple of Literature

1. Temple of Literature

Vietnam's first university, founded in 1076 — and 82 stone tortoises carrying the names of those who passed.

Start at a Confucian temple founded in 1070 and, six years later, the site of the Imperial Academy — Vietnam's first university, which trained the country's officials for some seven hundred years. Everything after this stop is about the twentieth century; this is the part of Hanoi that is much older than that. Five walled courtyards run one behind another, each a step further in. In the third are the stelae: 82 stone tablets, each carried on the back of a stone tortoise, inscribed with the names and birthplaces of men who passed the royal examinations between 1442 and 1779. They are on the UNESCO Memory of the World register, and they are the reason to come — an actual, checkable list of who got through, carved in stone, going back nearly six centuries. Students still come here before exams. You will see them photographing the tortoises, and sometimes touching them, though the signs now ask people not to.

Ticketed and open all day, unlike the mausoleum complex further on — so it is the safe place to start whatever time you set out. Graduating students photograph here in gowns; give them the courtyard.

2. One Pillar Pagoda

A wooden shrine on a single stone pillar, built out of a dream about a lotus.

A small wooden shrine, about three metres square, standing on a single stone pillar in a pond. It is one of the most recognisable buildings in Vietnam and it takes two minutes to see. Its formal name is Dien Huu — 'pagoda of extended blessings' — and the shrine itself is the Lotus Pedestal. It was added to and finished in 1105 under the next emperor, who also had a bell cast for it. The bell turned out too heavy to hang, was left on the ground where it could not be rung, and was eventually carted out to farmland full of turtles; it has been known as the bell of the turtles' field ever since. The story: Emperor Ly Thai Tong, childless, dreamed that the bodhisattva Quan Am handed him a baby son while seated on a lotus. He married a peasant girl, a son was born, and in 1049 he built this pagoda in the shape of a lotus rising from water to give thanks. What you see is a reconstruction. The original was destroyed by French forces in 1954 in the last days before their withdrawal, and it was rebuilt immediately afterwards. That is a pattern worth carrying: on this walk almost everything is either much older than it looks or much newer, and often both.

3. Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum & Ba Dinh Square

Independence was read out on this square on 2 September 1945.

This is the square where, on 2 September 1945, Ho Chi Minh read the Declaration of Independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam — a text that opens by quoting the American declaration of 1776. Construction began on 2 September 1973 — the anniversary of that speech — and the mausoleum was inaugurated on 29 August 1975. It stands 21.6 metres high and 41.2 metres wide. Its grey granite block is often described as echoing Lenin's in Moscow, and the design borrows from the communal house of the Vietnamese village as well. He had asked to be cremated; the state decided otherwise, and his embalmed body lies inside. The square itself is enormous and mostly empty, divided into two hundred and forty green squares by walkways — a parade ground, and still used as one. The lawn in front of the mausoleum alone runs to about 18,000 square metres. Soldiers change guard on the hour at the mausoleum steps.

The mausoleum interior has strict rules — no bags, no cameras, no shorts, silence, and you keep moving. The queue is long and morning-only. From outside, the square and the guard change need no ticket.

4. Presidential Palace & the Stilt House

He refused to live in the palace and built a wooden house behind it.

The mustard-yellow building was built between 1900 and 1906 as the palace of the French Governor-General of Indochina — Italianate, symmetrical, designed to be looked at. The architect was Charles Lichtenfelder, though the credit is still widely given to Vildieu, the colony's official architect. Broken pediments, quoins, a grand staircase up to the formal floor: nothing about it concedes that it is in Asia at all, except the mango trees. After independence Ho Chi Minh declined to live in it. He used it for state receptions and lived instead in a small wooden stilt house in the garden behind, two rooms upstairs and an open space below, modelled on the houses of the ethnic minority regions where he had spent the resistance years. Whether you read that as genuine austerity or as politics performed well, the two buildings standing a hundred metres apart are the clearest single image of what the country was arguing about in 1945. The house and its grounds were made a historical site in 1975. The palace itself is not open; the garden, the house, the carp pond and the mango alley are.

The grounds are ticketed and share opening hours with the mausoleum — closed on Mondays and Fridays, and mornings only. Check before you plan the day around it.

5. Quan Thanh Temple

A black bronze guardian of 3.6 tonnes, cast in 1677.

A Taoist temple, not a Buddhist one — which is worth noticing, because the two traditions sit side by side in Vietnam and this walk passes both. It is dedicated to Tran Vu, the guardian of the north, and the reason to come in is the statue: 3.96 metres tall, cast in black bronze in 1677 under the emperor Lê Huy Tông, weighing about 3,600 kilograms. The god stands with a sword resting on a turtle wound with a snake — the animals are his attributes, and they are why the figure reads as still rather than fierce. The temple is one of the Four Sacred Temples that guarded the four directions of the old capital — Quan Thanh the north, Bach Ma the east, Kim Lien the south, Voi Phuc the west. It is much older than its statue: the founding is placed in the reign of Ly Thai To, who ruled from 1010 to 1028. The bronze was offered by the casters of Ngu Xa, a bronze-founding village on the Truc Bach peninsula a few minutes north of here, and it is counted a masterpiece of Vietnamese casting. The gate and shrine you walk through were redone in 1893, so what you see is a mixture of eras rather than one.

6. Imperial Citadel of Thang Long

A thousand years of power on one site — including a 1960s war bunker.

A UNESCO World Heritage Site, and the reason is continuity rather than any single building: this ground has been the centre of political power in the Red River delta for about thirteen centuries, from a seventh-century Chinese fortress through the Ly, Tran and Le dynasties to the French and then the Vietnamese army. Excavations begun in 2002 exposed foundations, wells, roof tiles and ceramics stacked in layers, each dynasty built on the one before. The flag tower of 1812 still stands at the southern end. And underneath is House D67, the command bunker from which the North Vietnamese military directed the war in the 1960s and 70s — concrete, steel doors, a conference table still in place. A thousand years of the same hill being the place decisions get made — which is where the walk leaves you.

Ticketed, and larger than it looks — allow forty minutes if you go in, and it closes earlier than you expect. The bunker and the archaeological pit are the two things not to skip.