Start at Hoan Kiem Lake and walk the Old Quarter by its guild streets, then take the Temple of Literature and the Imperial Citadel of Thang Long in one morning. Hoa Lo Prison and the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology carry the modern and the ethnographic halves of the story. Keep an evening for water puppetry and an egg coffee, and give a full day to Ninh Binh or Ha Long Bay.
Hanoi is a thousand-year-old capital that never cleared its old town to make room for the new one. The Old Quarter still trades by guild street, the French laid a grid of villas and boulevards alongside it, and the whole city runs on two wheels and a low plastic stool. Three days covers the sights. The eating takes longer.
The hinge between the Old Quarter and the French Quarter, and the city treats it as a shared front garden. By six the path is full of runners and tai chi groups; by eight it belongs to the traffic again. From Friday evening to Sunday midnight the streets around it close and the whole thing becomes a walking street.
Thirty-six guild streets, each named for what it sold: hang means merchandise, so Hang Bac is silver and Hang Ma votive paper. Plenty still trade to type, which makes an aimless walk more legible than it looks. The shophouses are narrow and deep because frontage was taxed.
Founded in 1070 and given an Imperial Academy six years later, this is where the country educated its mandarins for seven centuries. The third courtyard holds the reason to come: 82 stone stelae carried on tortoises, listing graduates of the royal examinations between 1442 and 1779.
Thirteen centuries of Vietnamese power on one piece of ground, from a seventh-century fort to the command post of the North Vietnamese army. Walk in through Doan Mon gate, climb the Kinh Thien steps with their fifteenth-century dragons, then go down into the D67 bunker.
Ho Chi Minh read the declaration of independence here in 1945, and the granite mausoleum faces the spot. The queue is silent, single file and quick. Behind it sit the Presidential Palace he declined to live in, the stilt house he used instead, and the One Pillar Pagoda. Mornings only, and closed Mondays and Fridays.
The French built this in 1896 to hold Vietnamese political prisoners, and it later held American pilots who named it the Hanoi Hilton. The gatehouse is what survives: the shackled sleeping platforms, the isolation cells, a guillotine. The most affecting hour in central Hanoi.
The best-explained museum in the country, and the one that makes the rest of a trip legible. The garden behind is the part people remember: full-scale houses rebuilt on site by the communities they belong to, including an Ede longhouse you climb into on a notched log.
Water puppetry started in the flooded paddies of the Red River Delta, where a village would perform on the field itself. The theatre keeps the mechanics: puppeteers stand waist-deep behind a bamboo screen and work lacquered figures on submerged poles. About fifty minutes, several times a day.
A loop of about 17 km ringed with cafes and the villas of anyone who could afford the view. Tran Quoc is the oldest pagoda in Hanoi, founded in the sixth century on the river bank and moved here when the bank gave way. An eleven-storey stupa of lotus windows stands over the courtyard.
The museum moved to a new campus on the western edge of the city in 2024, which turned a cramped colonial-era collection into one of the largest in the country. Outside, the hardware is arranged in an open park: MiG fighters, tanks, artillery and the wreckage of downed aircraft. Allow travel time.
The family started grilling turmeric-marinated fish here in the nineteenth century and the street was renamed after the dish. One thing on the menu.
The other cha ca house, bigger and easier to get a table in. Same ritual, same pan of dill, and staff who will cook it for you.
The bun cha shop where Bourdain and Obama ate in 2016. Ignore the shrine and order what they had, with a crab spring roll on the side.
Fourteen seats around a teppanyaki counter in a hotel basement. The only Japanese kitchen on the city's starred list, and the most expensive meal here.
A colonial villa courtyard with street-food stalls rebuilt around it, each cooking its own speciality. The fastest way to taste fifteen dishes at once.
The pho queue everyone photographs: line up, pay, carry your own bowl. Broth simmered clear rather than sweet. Mornings only, until the pot goes.
Opened in 1979 and serving one variant: beef seared hard in fat with garlic before it goes in the bowl, under a raft of spring onion.
Bun cha on Hang Manh, in business long enough that the street name is used as the address. Patties charred off the coals into the broth.
Rice batter steamed on cloth into sheets thin enough to see through, rolled around pork. Watching it made is half the visit: it takes forty seconds.
Sticky rice as a full meal, which is how Hanoi eats breakfast when it is cold. Open long past when the pho shops have closed.
The market opened in 1889 and the alley along its flank is where the traders eat: bun cha in bamboo clips, bun oc, che for afterwards.
Egg coffee was invented here in 1946, when the bartender whipped egg yolk with condensed milk because fresh milk had run out. Still the same family.
Up an unmarked staircase, with a balcony straight down the lake. Run by the daughter of the man who invented egg coffee, so the recipe is the same.
Every surface is papered in sticky notes, which sounds unbearable and works because the coffee is competent and the staff are quick.
On the first floor of a 1930s French villa, with the original tiles and tall shutters. Order the coconut coffee and let the morning go.
A three-storey house down a lane, with a leafy terrace and an all-day kitchen. The closest thing the Old Quarter has to a room you can work in.
The oldest pagoda in the city, founded in the sixth century and moved onto its West Lake islet when the bank eroded. The stupa is the picture everyone takes.
A Taoist temple at the end of the Thanh Nien causeway, holding a four-tonne bronze of Tran Vu cast in 1677, worn smooth on one foot.
The eastern guardian of Thang Long, and the oldest temple in the Old Quarter. Small, dark, still busy with offerings, and easy to walk past.
A single wooden hall on one stone column, built to look like a lotus rising out of its pond. First raised in 1049, and rebuilt since.
The seat of the Vietnam Buddhist Sangha and the busiest working pagoda in the centre, especially on the first and fifteenth of the lunar month.
Out on the Nghi Tam peninsula, and the one to walk to if the causeway pagodas are full. The finest old wooden architecture on the lake.
The official life, told through documents and a set of large symbolic installations that are stranger than anything else in Hanoi. Beside the mausoleum.
An inverted concrete pyramid, wider at the top than at the base, built for the city's millennium in 2010. The building is the exhibit.
An outdoor park of MiG fighters, radar trucks and missile launchers. Rougher than the new military museum, and closer to the centre.
South and east of the lake: wide boulevards, plane trees, the 1911 Opera House and the Metropole. Where you can walk on a pavement that is not parked on.
The West Lake shore, and the long-stay quarter: bakeries, lakeside bars and the biggest concentration of foreign residents in the city.
The small lake cut off from West Lake by the causeway, with the old bronze-casting quarter on its peninsula. Come for pho cuon in the evening.
The political quarter: the mausoleum, the National Assembly, the citadel and most of the embassies, on wide streets that empty at night.
Across the Red River on the 1902 bridge, with the mid-river sandbank below. The wholesale market runs through the small hours.
Limestone karst rising out of flooded rice fields, and a rowing boat through a chain of water caves. A UNESCO site since 2014, about two hours south.
Some 1,600 limestone islands in the Gulf of Tonkin, and the day trip most people build the trip around. The expressway has cut the drive to two and a half hours.
A pottery village on the Red River firing since the fourteenth century, and still supplying most of the crockery in Hanoi. Workshops sell direct.
A village of laterite-walled houses and lanes, some four hundred years old, with families still farming and making soy sauce in the courtyards.
Temples up a limestone mountain, reached by rowing boat and then a climb or a cable car. Go outside the festival months if you want the walk to yourself.
Lunar New Year, and the one week the city stops. Hang Ma turns red and gold, and most family-run kitchens close for several days.
Held on the fifth day of Tet at Go Dong Da mound, marking the 1789 defeat of the Qing army. A procession, drums and a fire dragon.
From the sixth to the sixteenth day of the first lunar month, at the temple of the king who built the spiral citadel of Co Loa.
Days six to eight of the first lunar month on Ve Linh mountain, for the boy who grew into a warrior. UNESCO-recognised since 2010.
The longest pilgrimage in the north, from the first to the third lunar month. Boats queue down the Yen stream from dawn.
The sixth day of the second lunar month, for the two sisters who led the revolt against Han rule in AD 40.
The fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month. Hang Ma sells star lamps and lion masks, and every bakery switches to moon cakes.
The anniversary of the day in 1954 when the Viet Minh marched back into Hanoi. Flags on every street and ceremonies at Ba Dinh.
The gateway for northern Vietnam, north of the city across the Red River, roughly 45 minutes from the Old Quarter. Express bus 86 links both terminals with the centre for a flat fare.
The northern end of the North to South line, with sleepers running the length of the country and night trains to Lao Cai for Sa Pa. Tickets are sold on the railway's own site.
Line 2A opened in 2021 and the first elevated section of line 3 in 2024. Neither reaches the Old Quarter yet, so the metro is useful for the western suburbs rather than for sightseeing.
Ride-hailing is the default and the price is fixed in the app before you accept. A motorbike ride costs a fraction of a car and is faster in the Old Quarter lanes.
A clear beef broth simmered with charred ginger and onion, flat rice noodles, rare beef or brisket.
Charcoal-grilled pork in a bowl of sweetened fish-sauce broth, with cold rice noodles and herbs to dip.
Turmeric-marinated catfish finished at the table in a pan of dill and spring onion, over rice noodles.
Rice batter steamed on cloth into translucent sheets, rolled around minced pork, dipped in warm fish sauce.
The most laborious bowl in the city: clear chicken and shrimp broth with shredded omelette and pickled radish.
The Haiphong-style crab spring roll Hanoi adopted, wrapped square and fried until the shell shatters.
Sticky rice steamed with mung bean, shaved over the top in a yellow curl, with crisp fried shallot.
Egg coffee: yolk whipped with condensed milk into a warm custard and poured over strong Vietnamese coffee.
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