Hanoi

Hanoi has been a seat of power for close to a millennium, since the Ly dynasty moved its court here in 1010 and named it Thang Long, the ascending dragon. That history sits close to the surface: temples, a citadel and a walled inner city still trace the outline of the old imperial capital, even as motorbikes stream past on the same ground.

The French left their mark in the early twentieth century with broad boulevards, yellow-washed villas and a taste for the pavement café, all of which survived colonial withdrawal, war and reunification more or less intact. Around them, the Old Quarter keeps its own older logic: streets named for the guilds that once worked them, selling silk or tin or votive paper, packed close and low and loud.

The result is a city that rewards walking more than any grand itinerary. Hoan Kiem Lake sits at its centre, ringed by pavements filled with tai chi at dawn and street food by dusk. Government Hanoi, with its wide avenues and Soviet-era monuments, lies apart from the tangle of the old streets, and the two halves rarely feel like the same place.

Hanoi is also, unmistakably, Vietnam's political and cultural capital rather than its commercial one, a distinction Vietnamese visitors draw more sharply than foreigners tend to. It moves at a different register to Ho Chi Minh City: older, more bureaucratic, more attached to ceremony, and considerably more interested in its own past.