Among the streets of the old quarter in Hà Nội, I have a soft sport for Hemp Street. This is quite natural since I was born there, and there too I spent my childhood and a good part of my young manhood. My grandfather, a scholar of the old school who had earned a bachelor’s degree at the triennial examination, had left his native village in Bắc Ninh Province north of the Red River to settle as a practitioner of traditional medicine and a private teacher of classical education.
Hemp street is contiguous to Silk
Street, which is more frequented by foreign
tourists. It has so changed over half a century that the only landmark allowing
me to recognize it is a banian to whose roots reaching from the branches to the
ground people would suspend pots of slaked lime believed to placate wandering
souls of the dead. This age-old tree witnessed many historical events. In 1882,
following the French occupation of the capital city, resident Governor Bonnal
had his offices installed just across the street from it, at the present number
82, while the residence of the Vice-roy of Tonkin Nguyễn Trong Hợp at number
83.
The
banian sheltered under its foliage the communal house of Cổ Vũ Hamlet – the
street having resulted from the merger of Cổ Vũ (in the west) and Đông Hà (in
the east) Hamlets.
When I was a
child I often went with my father to shrine dedicated to the cult of the
deities White Horse (Bạch Mã) and Linh Lang. On sacrificial days he officiated
there in his capacity as president of the Council of Natables, a job he had
inherited from my grandfather. Himself a Confucian scholar he had studied the
French language to become a clerk for the French electricity company. I
remember that behind the communal house there was a quite active printing shop,
which printed texts written in Chinese Hán characters or in nôm demotic characters engraved on
wood-blocks by craftsmen from LiễuChàngVillage
in HảiDươngProvince.
Hemp
Street was a bit of a contrast to Silk
Street. While the latter was essentially a trading
road the former rather symbolized letters and courtesy. There lived many
licentiates and bachelors who stayed away from the mandarinate, honest retired
mandarin officials, well-educated young women…
Why the name of Hemp Street?
Formerly hemp had been sold there. It was a material to weave hammocks for
everyday use or for the transport of mandarins, to make fishing nets, ropes,
strings…
The eastern section of the street, springing from Đông Hà Hamlet, had
borne the name Turner’s Street (Phố Hàng Tiện). Those craftsmen had come from NhịKhêVillage, where the
greatest Vietnamese humanist, Nguyễn Trãi (15th century) was born.
They shaped pieces of wood on lathes into cult objects, trays, and the like.
The name of Turner’s street eventually faded away to be superseded by that of
Hemp Street, the turners having moved to the neighboring lane of Tô Lịch.
A picturesque sight has disappeared from Hemp Street since the 1930’s: the yearly
fair of paper toys on the approach to the children’s Mid-Autumn Festival. The
fair was held every evening from the first to the fifteenth days of the eighth
lunar month. Children and adults alike crowded into the street to watch or buy
unicorn’s heads, lanterns crowds were so thick that the tramway had to inch its
way forward. At present the fair is held on the Street of Votive Paper Objects
(Phố Hàng Mã). Starting from the years 1938-1940 Hemp Street lost its dignified
standing. It has become quite common with its innumerable shops selling
garments, linen-draper’s items, embroidered articles…
