Hàng Gai
04/06/2010
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11:00:00
VGP - Both Hàng Hòm and Hàng Mành turn into Hà Nội’s luxury shopping street, Hàng Gai, known to foreigners as Silk Street. In the fifteenth century this street sold rope and jute products, but from the nineteenth century, wood block printing came to Hàng Gai.
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Hàng Gai Street in early 20th century
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Printing had appeared in Việt Nam as early as the twelfth century.
During the Lý Dynasty,
a Buddhist monk named Tín Học (died 1190)
had carved wood blocks to print Buddhist scriptures.
In 1459, Lục Như Học went to China and learned woodblock
printing. He came back and taught his craft to his native village (in Hải Dương Province),
where a communal house was set up honouring him as the founder of woodblock
printing. There is still in existence a book in demotic Vietnamese script, Truyền Kỳ Mạn Lục, printed
in 1680.
When woodblock printing came to Hàng Gai in the
nineteenth century, at first the books printed here were mostly traditional
medical treaties and folk stories as well as a few “popular” works such as the Confucian Classics, The Tale of Kiều and A Woman Baccalaureate Phan Trần.
The Ngô Tử Hạ Printing House at No. 101 (now selling baby clothes) was
a print shop extending to Hàng Hành Street. Some thick history books required an entire room
to hold the wooden engraving blocks. Houses that stored the wood blocks later
became known as publishers.
Books were sold to itinerate vendors, mostly women
peasants, who between harvest and planting, went around peddling farm products
as well as buying up old books from families living in the countryside. These
old books would be exchanged for new books in Hàng Gai Street, put into baskets dangling
from shoulder poles and carried back to rural markets to sell – primitive
distribution.
When
the French arrived, the house at No. 80-82 (now a souvenir shop and the Green
Palm Gallery) became the first French Embassy in Hà Nội. When
the Nguyễn Dynasty in Huế
appointed a mandarin, Nguyễn Trọng Hợp, as
the Governor of the North, he set up headquarters at No. 79 and lived at No. 83
(now a jewelery shop), opposite the Residence de France. It was the French
ambassador who first brought rickshaws to Hà Nội from
Japan. From soldiers to mandarins, and of course, the French, everyone
traveled by rickshaw, in those days pulled by a man on foot.
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A
section of modern Hàng Gai Street |
An old man sitting in front of the jewelery shop at No.
83 says the small temple next door under a fig tree is three hundred years old and
writes its name: Đình Cổ Vũ. The “temple” was the communal house (đình) of Cổ Vũ Village
at the back of which was a print shop. Slowly, more shops began to appear:
stationery shops, hat shops, an optician. For a time during the Resistance
against the French, they controlled the odd numbered side of the street; the
Vietnamese, the even numbered side.
In the past,
at the Mid-Autumn Children’s Festival, the street was a child’s delight, hung
with colorful lanterns in the shape of lion heads, rabbits, toads, fish and
dragons.
These days, Hàng Gai is a silk shopper’s paradise: shimmering
scarves and stoles, finely tailored men’s and women’s clothes, heavily
embroidered and sequined evening gowns, handbags, silk bed throws, cushion
covers. Choose your silk – thick nubbly raw silk, heavy or fine – in a
kaleidoscope of deep, rick colors or a wide selection of subtle shades. If it’s
not hanging on a rack, it will be tailored to your personal measurements and
requirements in twenty four to forty-eight hours (best to have Western
tailoring copied).
From Hàng Gai, it is only a few steps along Lương Văn Can (to the
right, south) to Hoàn
Kiếm and a rewarding cup of tea, coffee or ice cream at Thủy Tạ, overlooking
the lake.
By Carol Howland