It will not shock you to learn that Vietnam has a rich, deep culture of making beautiful things, and that those things are well represented in Hà Nói. From the 36 Streets to craft villages to boutiques mixmastering modern takes on traditional techniques, Hà Nói is chock full of beautiful, affordable arts and crafts.

Embroidery, Weaving, & Textiles

This may be the least surprising of Vietnam’s wonders. They’ve been doing this for centuries, and it shows. First up is Tailor Cát, a shop specializing in extravagantly embroidered modern versions of traditional áo dài and blouses. We learned, by the way, that áo dài is pronounced ow zye. The hard D is the letter Ð.

Embroidery

Would you be surprised to learn that Dorothy bought an embroidered piece? They recut the armscye to fit and had it ready the next day.

Tailor Cát was not the only high end embroidery shop.

Embroidered paintings are also a thing here. We saw more spectacular examples in Hội An, but these smaller pieces were all over the souvenir shops.

Totes

Another manifestation of the weaving heritage shows up in tote bags, one of Dorothy’s favorite forms of weaving. She has harvested woven totes at every one of our stops, adding up to quite the international collection.

Fabric Markets

Hà Nội, no surprise, also boasts several robust textile markets. One was just around the corner from our apartment in the Old Quarter, but the big one, Chợ Hom, was a short cab ride south.

Vạn Phúc Silk Village

Making traditional Vietnamese dinners for us (twice!) apparently wasn’t enough for our host An and her daughter An Binh. They also docented us on a trip just south of Hà Nói to the Vạn Phúc Silk Village. We probably wouldn’t have gone without them, but even if we’d found it, the experience would have been much the poorer for not having our ridiculously adorable hosts to guide us.

The whole range was on display in Vạn Phúc, from weaving on vintage Jacquard looms to fabric by the meter to finished goods. This was an absolute highlight of our stay, and we almost missed it. This was our next-to-last day in Hà Nói.

The shops were full. And the village was full of shops. Over 1,000 households in Vạn Phúc are involved in some part of the silk production process. It felt like we visited all of them, but I suspect we fell short.

Those of you who have been following us know that we rarely post pictures of ourselves. That’s a reflection of the fact that we rarely take photos of ourselves. At any given location, we are absolutely guaranteed to be the least interesting thing there. Other people, however, seem to find us fascinating.

But I’ve saved the best for last. As delightful as the setting was, as spectacular as the offerings were, the highlight was seeing vintage Jacquard looms in operation.

Joseph Marie Jacquard invented, in 1804, a method for using punch cards to control a loom, automating the weaving process and initiating a Cambrian Explosion of textile complexity, spawning designs that were inconceivable by hand.

More than that, it is widely acknowledged as the first computer, and was one of the forebears of Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine. The first electronic computer, ENIAC, was programmed by Jacquard-inspired punch cards. My college statistics class in the 70s required writing a program with punch cards. The Jacquard Loom is the OG.

I have no idea the precise vintage of the looms in Vạn Phúc. I’m sure they don’t date to 1804. But these were old fucking looms. Seeing a room full of them in action was like stepping into a time machine. A mill in Jacquard’s time would have looked much like the room we were in.

Every so often on this journey we have been in places that offered a hallucinatory stereo vision, where past and present coexist and can be viewed in the same frame. That’s a mind-blowing, double-rainbow experience, and Vạn Phúc’s Jacquard looms offered it up in spades.

Here they are, as they are meant to be, in action.

There’s a wooden paddle at each end that slams the shuttle back to the other side once a weft row is complete.

You can clearly see the intricacy and delicacy of the brocade. It’s just astonishing that this level of complexity is possible with 200+ year old technology. Like sending people to the moon with sub-iPhone computing power.

Ceramics

We have reliably gobbled up ceramics on every one of our stops. Mexico, Cuba, Morocco, Tunisia, Turkey… They’ve all had some take on ceramics so seductive we’ve had to tamp down our acquisitiveness. We’ve safely muled home a lot of heavy, breakable specimens, but there’s only so much we can do.

The good news in Southeast Asia, I suppose, is that we haven’t been truly beguiled by the local ceramics. We did find one shop in Cambodia that had things that spoke to us, but for the most part we found the pieces either too utilitarian or too subtle for our clown car aesthetic. Same for Vietnam. Maybe Hội An will have something tempting, but we’re leaving Hà Nội completely bereft of pottery.

I know this stuff is objectively beautiful, but there’s too strong a flavor of turn-of-the-(last)-century Chinoiserie for me to overcome.

Mandalas

One of the delights of staying someplace for an extended period is getting past the tourist shops. There are always treasures, but they’re hard to find on a tight schedule. Wander around aimlessly long enough, though, and you’ll stumble on something amazing.

Just so with these insanely beautiful hand-painted mandalas. Specifically, these are Thangka mandalas, most often associated with Nepali Buddhism, but also made by Vietnamese monks.

Lacquerware

Lacquerware is another major art form here. Unfortunately, the options ranged from exceedingly expensive fine art offerings to cheap tourist ware. There weren’t a lot of attractive options in the affordable middle. We would up with a few lacquered coconut shell bowls, because the deep lacquered colors, even on tourist goods, are pretty awesome.

Propaganda Posters

This was kind of a surprise. There are multiple shops in Hà Nói where you can buy either hand-painted reproductions or prints of the hand-painted reproductions, and there’s a museum with an impressive collection of originals.

This is what’s on offer in the shops.

And this is the museum collection. Captions courtesy of Google Translate. Most of them are fine, but the first one is kind of word salad. I asked our host’s daughter, An Binh, if she’d translate for me, and she didn’t do any better.

Mother Of Pearl

We didn’t see much of this in stores, but there was a museum that featured sumptuous use of mother of pearl.

Signage & Graphic Design

Don’t be like that. The commercial arts are still arts, and they offer entertainment and delight everywhere we’ve been.

Shoes

I made the mistake of mentioning to my sister Nef that Vietnam didn’t seem to be a shoe culture. Then we found these. I stand grievously corrected.

Bamboo carving

This guy was set up on Hoàn Kiếm Lake and we ran across him on Day Two. We didn’t know that the balancing hummingbirds were in every souvenir shop, but he was legitimately cutting the bamboo by hand.

Random Acts Of Art

The Plant (& Carved Wood) District

Shut up. Plants are art.

The plant district is a long stretch of road with plant stores, aquarium stores interspersed throughout, and carved wood shops at one end. It’s well outside the Old Quarter, at the foot of West Lake. We picked up a couple of lovely house plants. Maybe silly, since we were only in Hà Nói six weeks, but they brightened our apartment and we left them behind for our host.

Hanoi Ceramic Road

In 2010 Ha Noi celebrated its Millennial Anniversary, 1,000 years since its founding as Emperor Lý Thái Tổ’s capital, Thăng Long. The Hanoi Ceramic Road was started in 2007 and was completed in 2010 in time for the Millennial celebration. It runs four full miles, and includes work by both Vietnamese artists and friends of Vietnam.

Driving alongside it is quite the experience. It just keeps going.

Temples

Hà Nội is a festival of little temples and pagodas all over the place, and they are their own legitimate art form. While we didn’t get any good pictures of the exterior of Emperor Lý Thái Tổ’s Temple, there was plenty to love inside.

Here’s one of our favorites, the Little Spite Temple That Wouldn’t.

The Lý Triều Quốc Sư Pagoda is just another little temple along the shore of Hoàn Kiếm Lake. In case you’re concerned, I asked permission before taking pictures. As is my habit.

Here’s one more temple we didn’t even get the name of. These are just everywhere here. The critter in the middle is the Vietnamese version of the Cambodian Moon Eater. They’re all over the Angkor-era temples, and share a Hindu/Buddhist origin story. They tend to sit over doorways as protectors.

The altars are a major part of each temple. They hold offerings for the ancestors, and trend heavily towards packaged foods. There’s a street in the Old Quarter with nothing but shops specializing in snacks in fancy boxes suitable for altars.

This temple was in the botanical garden.

Architectural Detail

In addition to the temples, there is a metric buttload of carvings, friezes, and woodworking adorning buildings throughout the Old Quarter.

Places We Didn’t Go

Much like Oaxaca, Hà Nội is surrounded by a nimbus of craft-oriented villages. There’s the Bát Tràng Ceramic Village. The Quảng Phú Cầu Incense Village. The Ha Thai Lacquer Village. The Làng Chuông Conical Hat Village.

All of them sounded interesting, all of them were close to Hà Nội, and all of them were available on inexpensive tours, about $15/person for the whole circuit. We skipped them all.

We’re not a big fan of packaged tours with other folks. We did a few in Turkey and didn’t really care for them. We much prefer to be on our own cadence and follow our own interests. But the real problem was that all of these villages were curated tourist experiences. Make a ceramic bowl. Make a conical hat. Make incense. Make a lacquer bowl. Take your treasures home with you!

Pardon me, but eww. We’re interested in how artisans create art, and we’re interested in the art they create. We don’t see anything of value in the summer camp lanyard-making experience. Which is not to say we haven’t done any classes. Dorothy and my sister Nef took a two-day intensive course in Oaxaca on using natural materials to dye fabric. They took a class in Marrakech on traditional Moroccan cooking. But those aren’t the craft version of a ladies-who-lunch Mahjong game. That’s useful knowledge that can be applied in real life.

I contacted the main pottery collective in Bát Tràng and asked if we had to come on a tour or if we could just show up and look around. I was told that the actual production work was done in people’s homes, so there really wasn’t a tour available in that sense. The tour groups come in, do the hands-on thing, and then shop in the showroom. But you can’t just show up, even for that attenuated experience.

The whole thing seemed very EPCOT Center, so we passed. All of those crafts were available in shops in Hà Nội, without the tour group hassle and the playdate ambiance.

The journey is as much about having wonderful experiences as it is about avoiding those we know won’t work. Check.