4 Days in Hanoi: A Literary Guide Through Doctors’ Steles, Colonial Cafés and a City Built to Remember

Hanoi opened a university before most of Europe had settled on the idea. Nine hundred years later, the exam results are still standing: stone turtles in a temple courtyard, each carrying a scholar’s name on its back so that no one could argue with it later. That instinct, to carve the record down rather than let it drift, runs through almost everything else here too. Colonial-era novelists came for a war and stayed for a hotel bar. A prison turned itself into a museum. A lake keeps a sword myth alive purely by refusing to give it up. Four days move through that instinct in roughly the order it laid itself down, oldest ground first.

Day 1: The Old Quarter & the Temple of Literature

Start at the root of it: the place Vietnam decided, a thousand years ago, that scholarship was worth building a university around.

Morning: the Temple of Literature. Founded in 1070 to honour Confucius and expanded six years later into Quoc Tu Giam, Vietnam’s first national university, this five-courtyard complex functioned as a school for more than seven centuries. Walk through slowly toward the fifth courtyard, where 82 stone stelae, each set on the back of a carved turtle, record the names of doctoral graduates from exams held between 1442 and 1779. They’re recognised by UNESCO as a Memory of the World documentary heritage. Reading down the rows, worn but still legible after five centuries, is as close as a visitor gets to watching a country’s respect for literacy carved directly into stone.

Midday: Hoan Kiem Lake and Ngoc Son Temple. A walk south brings you to the lake at the Old Quarter’s edge, named for a legend in which a magic sword was returned to a golden turtle god after Emperor Le Loi used it to drive out Chinese occupiers. The small island temple, reached by a red wooden bridge, holds a preserved specimen of the enormous soft-shell turtles once said to inhabit the lake. Myth or not, Hanoi has never seemed inclined to let the story go.

Afternoon: the 36 streets. Wander north into the Old Quarter proper, where each street still carries the name of the guild that once worked it: Hang Bac for silversmiths, Hang Ma for paper offerings, Hang Gai for silk. The layout has barely changed in centuries, even as the trades behind each name have mostly moved on.

Evening: Bo Ho Bookshop. Tucked on the first floor of an old, moss-covered house near the lake, this small shop trades in both Vietnamese and English titles and carries the unhurried, slightly dusty calm of a bookshop that has no interest in being anything else.

Day 2: The French Quarter

South and east, into the wide boulevards the French laid down, and the writers who later made use of them.

Morning: the Hanoi Opera House. Modelled on the Palais Garnier in Paris and completed in 1911, this is the centrepiece of the French Quarter’s grid of tree-lined streets, still hosting performances today. Circle it once before the day’s heat sets in.

Midday: the Sofitel Legend Metropole. A short walk away, this 1901 hotel has hosted more literary history than almost any building in Southeast Asia. Somerset Maugham finished writing “The Gentleman in the Parlour” here in 1923. Graham Greene stayed in 1951 while working as a war correspondent, and wrote much of “The Quiet American” within these walls. He once said of the city: “Whatever you’re looking for, you will find here.” A bunker beneath the hotel, sealed for decades and rediscovered in 2011, sheltered guests including Joan Baez during the bombing raids of the 1970s. It’s now open on a daily guided tour.

Afternoon: Hoa Lo Prison. A walk south leads to the surviving gatehouse of what was once “Maison Centrale,” built by French colonists in the 1890s to hold Vietnamese revolutionaries. It was later used to detain American prisoners of war, who gave it the sardonic nickname “Hanoi Hilton.” The museum devotes most of its space to the earlier, longer chapter: decades of Vietnamese political imprisonment under colonial rule, told through reconstructed cells and an original guillotine.

Evening: cocktails at the Metropole’s Bamboo Bar. Come back to where the day started. The bartenders here will, if asked, make a drink named for Greene himself. Whether that counts as literary tourism or just a good excuse for a martini is a question worth sitting with over the drink itself.

Day 3: War, Memory & the Written Record

North and west, to the part of the city most concerned with how the twentieth century gets remembered, and by whom.

Morning: the Ho Chi Minh Complex. The mausoleum, the modest stilt house where Ho Chi Minh lived and worked for over a decade, and the nearby One Pillar Pagoda together form one of the most visited sites in the city. Whatever one makes of the mausoleum itself, the stilt house next door, plain, wooden, deliberately unshowy, tells its own understated story about a leader who wrote as much as he governed.

Midday: the Vietnam Military History Museum. A short ride away, this museum traces the country’s twentieth-century conflicts largely through Vietnamese eyes, a useful counterweight for readers who’ve only encountered this history through Western war literature. If you’ve read Bao Ninh’s novel “The Sorrow of War,” told from a North Vietnamese soldier’s perspective and still considered one of the most important books to come out of the conflict, this is the closest thing to a physical companion piece the city offers.

Afternoon: Bookworm Hanoi. In the Ba Dinh district, a short walk from the Ho Chi Minh Complex, this remains the city’s essential English-language bookshop, carrying more than twenty thousand titles across fiction, history and a strong shelf of Vietnamese and Southeast Asian writing in translation. It began in the early 2000s as an informal book exchange for expats and has grown into something closer to a small, well-loved institution.

Evening: dinner near Truc Bach Lake. A quieter lake than Hoan Kiem, a few minutes from the bookshop, and a reasonable place to let the day’s heavier stops settle before tomorrow’s slower pace.

Day 4: West Lake & the Quiet Edges

The final day moves out to Hanoi’s largest lake, where the city finally allows itself to slow down.

Morning: Tran Quoc Pagoda. Set on a small peninsula jutting into West Lake, this is Hanoi’s oldest Buddhist pagoda, with roots going back some 1,500 years to the 6th century. Come early, before the causeway fills with visitors, for the pagoda at its most reflective.

Midday: a slow walk around West Lake. There’s no single stop to aim for here. Follow the water as far as the morning allows, past fishing boats, flower gardens and the occasional temple, and let the pace of the previous three days finally drop.

Afternoon: Tranquil Books & Coffee or Nha Nam Book Café. Either of these bookshop cafés, scattered in the calmer streets around the lake, makes a fitting last literary stop: less about the browsing and more about sitting still with something for an hour, which is, in its own way, the whole point of a trip built around books.

Evening: sunset over West Lake. Wherever you find yourself along the water as the light drops, that’s the right place to end. Hanoi has spent four days insisting on the value of a record kept carefully. Let the last evening be the one part of the trip you don’t write down.

Bookshops to Visit

A consolidated list, if you’d rather build your own route than follow the days above:

• Bookworm Hanoi (Chau Long Street, Ba Dinh): the city’s essential English-language bookshop, trading since the early 2000s
• Bo Ho Bookshop (near Hoan Kiem Lake): small, atmospheric, Vietnamese and English titles
• Tranquil Books & Coffee (West Lake area): a café-bookshop hybrid, better for lingering than browsing quickly
• Nha Nam Book Café (multiple locations): run by one of Vietnam’s major independent publishers, strong on contemporary Vietnamese fiction in translation

Where to Stay

For a four-day, book-focused stay, these are my favourite places to stay:

The Old Quarter puts Day 1’s temple, lake and bookshop route within easy walking distance, and stays lively well into the evening. La Siesta Central Hotel & Spa trades the Metropole’s grand literary pedigree for a calmer, French colonial-styled base with lake views from many of its rooms, close enough to Day 1’s entire route to skip the taxi altogether.

The French Quarter sits closest to Day 2’s route, wider and quieter than the Old Quarter, with the city’s grandest colonial architecture close at hand. Sofitel Legend Metropole Hanoi is, quite simply, the address itself. Staying here means sleeping a few floors from where Greene and Maugham once worked, and the hotel’s own history tour covers ground this entire itinerary only gestures toward.

Getting Around

The Old Quarter and French Quarter are both walkable, though Hanoi’s traffic, dense, constant, largely made up of motorbikes, takes some getting used to before crossing feels routine rather than nerve-wracking.

For the Ho Chi Minh Complex, the Military History Museum and West Lake, a Grab taxi or motorbike ride is the simplest option; distances stretch out quickly once you’re past the Old Quarter’s edges.

Even so, a schedule can only take you so far in a city this insistent on being noticed. Some of the best finds here, a stele worn smooth by five centuries of hands, a bookshop with no sign to speak of, never make it onto any map to begin with.