Hanoi: what to see, where to stay and how to get around
In 1010 King Ly Thai To moved the capital here and called it Thang Long, the ascending dragon — the city has been a capital for a thousand years with a few interruptions. The quarter beside the lake grew as craft guilds, each with its own street, its own guardian temple and its own village of origin, and the streets still carry those names: Hang Bac is silver, Hang Gai is hemp and now silk, Hang Ma is paper offerings. The number thirty-six is symbolic; there are actually about seventy-six. Ninety minutes, flat, and crossing a road here is a skill — walk steadily and do not stop.
Live camera
A short history of Hanoi
In 1010 Emperor Lý Thái Tổ moved his capital here and named it Thăng Long, "ascending dragon". In 1070 the Temple of Literature was built here in honour of Confucius, and it housed Vietnam's first university. In the 19th century the capital moved to Huế, and the city received its present name in 1831. In 1902 it became the capital of French Indochina, and the French built boulevards and buildings here that still stand today. On 2 September 1945 Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnam's independence in Ba Đình Square. In December 1972 the United States bombed the city from the air for 12 days.
The ten best sights in Hanoi
1Hoan Kiem Lake"Returned Sword": the legend says a king gave a magic sword back to a turtle here
2Ngoc Son TempleOn an island in the lake; a preserved giant softshell turtle is inside
3The Huc BridgeThe red wooden bridge to the temple; the name means where morning light rests
-
4Ta Hien Street
"Beer corner": plastic stools on the pavement and draught beer for a dollar
5Bach Ma TempleThe oldest temple in the Old Quarter, founded in the 11th century
6Water Puppet TheatreA thousand-year-old form performed in a waist-deep pool; book ahead
7Temple of Literature70,000 dong, 08:00–17:00; Vietnam’s first university, founded 1070. Verified 10/2026
8Imperial Citadel of Thang Long100,000 dong; UNESCO 2010, and the 1968 command bunker is under it. Verified 10/2026
9Flag Tower1812, 33 metres, and one of the few structures the French did not demolish
10Hoa Lo PrisonAbout 50,000 dong; the French built it, and American pilots named it the Hanoi Hilton. Verified 10/2026
Scan with your phone camera to open the map there
What is an audio walk?
Tours in Hanoi →A guide in your headphones: open the walk on our site, walk from stop to stop, and at each one your phone tells its story. No guide, no group, and free. This is the first walk in Hanoi:
Free walking tours in Hanoi
The thirty-six streets
In 1010 King Ly Thai To moved the capital here and called it Thang Long, the ascending dragon — the city has been a capital for a thousand years with a few interruptions. The quarter beside the lake grew as craft guilds, each with its own street, its own guardian temple and its own village of origin, and the streets still carry those names: Hang Bac is silver, Hang Gai is hemp and now silk, Hang Ma is paper offerings. The number thirty-six is symbolic; there are actually about seventy-six. Ninety minutes, flat, and crossing a road here is a skill — walk steadily and do not stop.
- Hoan Kiem Lake · The name means Lake of the Returned Sword, from the legend of Le Loi, who was given a magic sword by a turtle to drive out the Ming and then gave it back here in 1428. The legend had a physical basis: a species of giant softshell turtle lived in this lake, and the last one died in 2016. Its predecessor is preserved in the temple on the island.
- Ngoc Son Temple · Reached by the red The Huc bridge, whose name means where morning sunlight rests, and the temple is dedicated to three figures at once: a Confucian scholar, a Taoist deity and Tran Hung Dao, the general who defeated the Mongols three times in the thirteenth century. The combination is normal here and tells you how Vietnamese religion actually works.
- Bach Ma Temple · The oldest temple in the Old Quarter and the guardian of the eastern gate of the old city. The story is that Ly Thai To could not get the citadel walls to stand until a white horse appeared and traced the line they should follow — he built on that line and the walls held. White Horse Temple, and the horse is inside.
- Hang Bac Street · Silver Street, and the guild here was not local: in the fifteenth century a king ordered the silversmiths of three villages in Hai Hung province to move to the capital and mint coins, and their descendants still work this street. Several of the shops can name the village they came from. That pattern — a street that is one village transplanted — repeats across the quarter.
- Hang Ma Street · Votive paper: paper money, paper houses, paper motorbikes and paper phones, all made to be burned so the dead receive them. It is a serious trade with real volume. In the weeks before Tet the whole street turns red and gold with decorations, and in the month before the mid-autumn festival it fills with lanterns — it is the one street whose stock changes completely four times a year.
- Dong Xuan Market · Built by the French in 1889 on the site of two older markets, and it is the wholesale heart of northern Vietnam — three floors, mostly fabric, clothing and household goods, and the retail prices are at the front while the real trade is behind. It burned down in 1994, taking most of the original iron structure, and was rebuilt; the original facade was kept.
The French city beside the Vietnamese one
The French took Hanoi in 1882 and made it the capital of all of French Indochina — Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia run from this one city. They did not rebuild the Old Quarter; they built a second city beside it, with wide boulevards, villas, an opera house and a prison, and the two still sit side by side with the lake between them. Ninety minutes, flat, and the contrast is the point: walk from one into the other in five minutes.
- Hanoi Opera House · Finished in 1911 as a smaller copy of the Palais Garnier, for a European population of a few thousand. On the nineteenth of August 1945 the Viet Minh held the rally on its steps that began the August Revolution, and two weeks later Ho Chi Minh declared independence. The building that was built to be the most French thing in the city is where that happened.
- St Joseph’s Cathedral · Built in 1886 in neo-Gothic, deliberately modelled on Notre-Dame, and built on the site of the Bao Thien pagoda — an eleventh-century Buddhist complex that the colonial administration had demolished for the purpose. The choice of site was not accidental and the Catholic Church in Vietnam has acknowledged it since. The square in front is now a café street.
- Hoa Lo Prison · Built by the French in 1896 to hold Vietnamese political prisoners, with a guillotine on site, and most of the first generation of the Vietnamese Communist Party passed through it. From 1964 it held captured American pilots, who named it the Hanoi Hilton. The museum devotes most of its space to the French period and a smaller, contested section to the American one. About fifty thousand dong, verified 10/2026.
- Trang Tien Street · The street from the Opera House to the lake, and the ice cream shop halfway along it has been there since 1958 — people queue, buy a stick and eat it standing on the pavement, and it costs about fifty cents. There is no seating by design. The bookshops along the same stretch are state-run and have been since the fifties.
- Hanoi Railway Station · Opened in 1902, and the central block was destroyed by American bombing in 1972 and rebuilt in a completely different style — you can see the join. From here the Reunification Express runs the full length of the country to Saigon in about thirty-three hours, on a line the French built and the war cut in half for twenty years.
- Long Bien Bridge · Finished in 1902 by Daydé & Pillé of Paris, nearly two kilometres over the Red River, and it was the longest bridge in Asia when it opened. American aircraft bombed it repeatedly between 1967 and 1972 and the Vietnamese rebuilt it each time under fire; the mismatched spans in the middle are the repairs. It still carries the railway, motorbikes and pedestrians, and nothing heavier.
Ba Dinh: the citadel and the mausoleum
A kilometre west of the lake is the ground that has been the seat of power here for a thousand years without a break: the Ly dynasty citadel of 1010, the French governor-general’s palace on top of part of it, the command bunker from which the air war was run in 1972, and the mausoleum of Ho Chi Minh. The citadel was listed by UNESCO in 2010, on the thousandth anniversary of the city. Two hours, and go in the morning — the mausoleum closes at eleven.
- Imperial Citadel of Thang Long · Excavations begun in 2002 for a new parliament building found thirteen centuries of occupation stacked on one site — Chinese, Ly, Tran, Le and Nguyen layers under the French barracks — and the parliament was moved elsewhere. UNESCO listed it in 2010. Underneath is bunker D67, the concrete command room from which the North Vietnamese high command ran the war, with its original maps still on the walls.
- Flag Tower · Built in 1812 under the Nguyen dynasty, thirty-three metres, and the only part of the old citadel the French did not demolish — they kept it because they used it as an observation post. It has flown, in order, the Nguyen flag, the French tricolour, the Japanese flag, the French flag again and since 1954 the Vietnamese one.
- Ba Dinh Square · On the second of September 1945 Ho Chi Minh stood here and read a declaration of independence that opens by quoting the American one — "all men are created equal" — in front of around half a million people. The French returned within months and the war that followed lasted thirty years. The square is the parade ground and the flag is raised and lowered here daily with a ceremony.
- Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum · He asked to be cremated and his ashes scattered in three parts of the country, and the Politburo did the opposite — his body was embalmed with Soviet help and has been displayed here since 1975. It closes for around two months every autumn when the body goes to Russia for maintenance. Entry is free, silence is enforced, and arms and legs must be covered.
- Ho Chi Minh Stilt House · He refused to live in the governor-general’s palace after 1954 and had this two-room wooden house built in its garden instead, on stilts, in the style of the northern hill peoples. He lived in it from 1958 until his death in 1969. The palace itself was used only for state receptions and he worked in an electrician’s cottage beside it.
- One Pillar Pagoda · Built in 1049 by a childless emperor who dreamed that Quan Am handed him a baby son while sitting on a lotus — the pagoda is a wooden shrine on a single stone pillar in a pond, shaped as a lotus rising from the water. The French army blew it up in 1954 as they withdrew, and it was rebuilt immediately afterwards.
Getting to Hanoi and getting around
- Noi Bai Airport · 27 kilometres north; the bus 86 to the Old Quarter costs a dollar and a half
- Hanoi Railway Station · The Reunification Express to Saigon leaves here; 33 hours end to end
- Long Bien Bridge · Built 1902 by a French firm; bombed repeatedly and never fully replaced
- Hanoi Train Street · The track runs a metre from the houses; officially closed, repeatedly reopened
- Long Bien Market · The wholesale night market under the bridge; two to five in the morning
Cheap eats in Hanoi
Hanoi eats on the pavement, on plastic stools twenty centimetres off the ground, and the best places in the city are single-dish shops that have been making one thing for forty years and close when it runs out. Thirty thousand to eighty thousand dong — one to three dollars. The rule everywhere: go at the hour the dish is eaten, because a pho shop at four in the afternoon is reheating.
- Pho · A breakfast dish; the good shops sell out by ten
- Bun cha · Lunch only; you assemble it yourself
- Banh mi · The rice flour is why it is crisper than a baguette
- Cha ca · The street is named after the restaurant
- Egg coffee · Invented in 1946 when there was no milk
- Bia hoi · Brewed and drunk the same day; under 50 cents
- Banh cuon · Watch it being made; fifteen seconds a sheet
- Long Bien night market · Eleven at night to five; nothing to buy, much to see
Museums in Hanoi
Hanoi’s museums carry three layers that do not blend: a thousand years as an imperial capital, seventy years as the capital of French Indochina, and thirty years of war. The best of them are not the war ones — the Museum of Ethnology and the Women’s Museum are the two that most visitors skip and should not. Tickets are cheap, most close at five, and several shut for lunch.
- Museum of Ethnology · Five kilometres out; the garden houses are the point
- Women’s Museum · The street-vendor floor is better than it sounds
- Temple of Literature · ₫70,000, 08:00–17:00; the 82 stelae. Verified 10/2026
- Imperial Citadel · ₫100,000; bunker D67 is included. Verified 10/2026
- Hoa Lo Prison · The American section is contested; know that first
- National Museum of History · The Dong Son bronze drums are the thing
- Fine Arts Museum · Lacquer painting is a Hanoi invention of the 1930s
- B-52 Victory Museum · Free; the wreck is where it fell in 1972
Nature and day trips near Hanoi
Hanoi sits in the Red River delta on flat alluvial ground a few metres above sea level, and the city is built around lakes — there were once well over a hundred, many have been filled in, and the remaining ones are the public space. An hour or two out, the delta ends abruptly in limestone karst: the same geology as Ha Long Bay, but on land.
- West Lake · 17 kilometres around; the sunset side is the west
- Hoan Kiem Lake · Closed to traffic Friday evening to Sunday night
- Truc Bach Lake · The marker is small, concrete and still there
- Trang An · UNESCO mixed site; two to three hours rowed
- Tam Coc · Green in June, gold in late September
- Ha Long Bay · UNESCO 1994; overcrowding is a real issue
- Perfume Pagoda · Over a million pilgrims in the first lunar months
- Ba Vi National Park · Above the delta haze; the ruins are the reason
Holy places in Hanoi
Vietnamese religion is layered rather than exclusive: most people practise a mixture of Mahayana Buddhism, Confucian ancestor worship and Taoist folk belief, often in the same building and without distinguishing between them. Add a Catholic minority of several million from the Portuguese and French missions, and a state that is officially atheist, and nothing here fits a single label.
- Temple of Literature · Confucian, not Buddhist; the distinction matters
- Tran Quoc Pagoda · The bodhi tree is a cutting from Bodh Gaya
- Quan Thanh Temple · Taoist, not Buddhist; cast on site in 1677
- St Joseph’s Cathedral · Sunday mass is crowded; the square is a café street
- Quan Su Pagoda · Impassable on the 1st and 15th of the lunar month
- Ancestor altars · The 1st and 15th of the lunar month; the whole quarter
Things to do in Hanoi with kids
- Water Puppet Theatre · A thousand-year-old form in a waist-deep pool; fifty minutes
- Hoan Kiem at the weekend · Streets closed to traffic; toy cars, dancing and street games
- Museum of Ethnology · Full-size houses in the garden you can climb into
- Bat Trang · Throw a pot yourself and they fire it; an hour out
- Thu Le Park · A lake, pedal boats and a zoo; the park is the good part
- B-52 in the pond · A bomber wreck in a residential street; free, and astonishing
- Train Street · Officially closed and repeatedly reopened; check before going
- Tam Coc boats · Rowers who row with their feet, through three caves
Nightlife in Hanoi
Hanoi has an official curfew — bars are supposed to close at midnight, and in the Old Quarter it is enforced by police who come down Ta Hien and clear the stools, after which everything reopens two streets away. The night here is on the pavement rather than indoors: beer corner, iced tea stalls, and the lake road closed to cars at the weekend.
- Bia hoi corner · From five; the police clear it at midnight
- Hoan Kiem walking street · Friday evening to Sunday night; free
- Tay Ho · Earlier and dearer than the Old Quarter
- Egg coffee at night · Up an unmarked staircase; served in hot water
- Water Puppet Theatre · Fifty minutes; book a day ahead
- Long Bien at three in the morning · Nobody is selling to you; stand at the edge
Frequently asked questions about Hanoi
What is there to see in Hanoi?
The top sights in Hanoi are Hoan Kiem Lake, Ngoc Son Temple and The Huc Bridge. The full list on this page has 10 sights, each with a photo and a short note.
How many days do you need in Hanoi?
Three to four days are enough to see the best of Hanoi without rushing, including at least one walking tour.
Is there a free walking tour in Hanoi?
Yes. sleepntrip has 3 free audio walks in Hanoi, with no guide and no group: your phone tells the story at every stop. The first one: The thirty-six streets.
How do you get to Hanoi and get around?
The main ways are Noi Bai Airport, Hanoi Railway Station and Long Bien Bridge. Full details are in the transport section on this page.
Where to stay in Hanoi, and for how much?
sleepntrip shows only rooms in Hanoi that meet nine conditions: a good location, high guest scores, cleanliness, and a price of up to $80 a night for two. Pick your dates and see what is free.
Looking for a hotel in Hanoi for your dates?
Only rooms that meet nine conditions, up to $80 a night.