Silk street

Silk Street, as indicated in the 15^th century Treatise on Geography (Dư địa chí) by Nguyễn Trãi, was part of a dyke separating Lake Thái Cực (Great Primary Principle), which is now completely dry, from the Lake of the Restored Sword (Hoàn Kiếm). The two lakes used to communicate with each other through a canal which lay on the site of the present Street of the Wooden Bridge (Phố Cầu Gỗ) thus called in memory of the bridge which spanned it.

In his Collection Written on Rainy Days (Vũ Trung Tùy Bút), Phạm Đình Hổ (18^th century) left us vivid descriptions of scenes in Silk Street and Jewelers’ Street where the wealth, corruption and fraud of a troubled period could be seen. French attacks in 1873 and 1882 reduced the prosperity of Silk Street, which was eventually revived toward the end of the century.

The face of Silk Street has changed more than once in recent times. At the beginning of the century, its traditional features were still intact: trading in silk and silk fabrics practiced by families from generation to generation (the craft of dyeing having moved elsewhere, e.g. to the Street of the Wooden Bridge); the reputation of its scholars and mandarins; the beauty of its young women, elegant and skilful in commerce, whose plentiful dowries attracted graduates of the newly opened French university.

On both sides of a badly graveled road, about a hundred shops housed in narrow, low-roofed houses jostled each other in picturesque disorder. There was no pavement. Each shop was made up of two compartments: the outer one was fitted with a small glass-window displaying rows of buttons and the like behind which a woman, young or middle-aged, had the job of touting passing customers, many of whom were from the countryside; the inner compartment featured a plank-bed, on which sat the owner of the shop or her daughter, surrounded by glass cases filled with rolls of brocade (gấm), flowered satin (vóc) and silk gauze. Trading in raw silk (tơ sống) was also a local specialty. Much haggling usually accompanied the business done, for as a rule exorbitant prices were asked to begin with.

Each lunar month, on the 1st, 6th, 16th, 21st and 26th days, great animation came to Silk Street. People from weavers’ villages brought their products: gauze (the) of Cả and La Khê, silk-floos (đũi) of Đại Mỗ, satin (lĩnh) of Bưởi. They also came to buy raw silk. They gave orders to dyers from Chợ Dầu (Đình Bảng) from areas bordering West Lake, from Bưởi, from Dyers’ Street (Hàng Bông Nhuộm) and from Wooden Bridge Street.

After the end of the First World War, Silk Street experienced a measure of modernization. Indians coming from the five French trading-posts in India opened shops selling cotton fabrics distributed by French companies (Dumarest, Denis Frères).

Shops selling Vietnamese silks decreased in number. Their fronts were arranged like those kept by Indians: a wide glass-window, a counter and a signboard lettered in the Romanized vernacular of French instead of a curtain, on which the name of the shop was traced in Chinese characters.

The first haberdashery appeared is 1917. Toward the 1930’s Silk Street was dominated by linen-drapers’ shops selling also fancy goods from Paris: perfumes, cosmetics, hats, neckerchiefs, handkerchiefs, and ties.

For several decades following the liberation of Hà Nội which was occupied by French troops from 1946 to 1954, Silk Street’s activities were muted, private trade not being encouraged.

Starting from the mid-1980, with the adoption of a market economy, there has been a spectacular revival, with a mushrooming of watch-maker’s shops, haberdasheries, shops selling ready-to wear garments…and concrete buildings which threaten to disfigure the quarter.

Strange to say, it was in this commercial quarter that traditions of patriotism and culture blossomed. It was at houses numbers 10 and 63 that the licentiate Lương Văn Can (later exiled to the prison island of Poulo Condor) and his scholar friends opened around 1907 the “School of the Northern Capital Upholding the Just Cause” (Đông Kinh Nghĩa Thục) which started the struggle against the colonial administration. His son Lương Ngọc Quyến was to be killed in the course of a military rebellion against the French in Thái Nguyên in 1917.