Hanoi
— — motorbikes parting around you like water.
Not only on a wall.
“The Old Quarter is a knot of thirty-six streets, each one originally named for the trade it held: Silver Street, Silk Street, Paper Street, Fish Street. In the middle, Hoan Kiem Lake sits quiet enough at dawn for the tai chi to come out around it. The Red River runs to the east. The French left wide boulevards and yellow-ochre villas, and the city kept them, threaded through with banyan trees and the smell of pho on the wind.
Hanoi, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Hanoi sits on the right bank of the Red River in northern Vietnam, about 90 kilometres inland from the Gulf of Tonkin. With roughly 8.5 million people across its metropolitan area, it is the country's second-largest city after Ho Chi Minh City and has been the capital, on and off, since 1010, when King Lý Thái Tổ moved his court here and named it Thăng Long, Ascending Dragon. The historical centre is built around Hoan Kiem Lake. To its north lies the Old Quarter; to its south, the French colonial district laid out in the late nineteenth century.
The Old Quarter is the oldest continuously inhabited part of the city. Its thirty-six streets were each named for the trade or guild that lived along them: Hàng Bạc for silver, Hàng Đào for silk, Hàng Mã for paper offerings. Many still hold to those trades. At the southern end of the quarter is Hoan Kiem Lake, with the small red Huc Bridge leading out to the Ngoc Son Temple on its island. Two kilometres west, the Temple of Literature, founded in 1070 and Vietnam's first national university, sits behind walled courtyards of frangipani.
Hanoi has four distinct seasons, unusual for Southeast Asia. Spring brings a fine cool drizzle the locals call mưa phùn that hangs in the air for weeks at a time. Summer turns hot and wet, with afternoon storms rolling off the Red River basin. Autumn, from late September through November, is the loved season: dry, cool, and lit by the yellow leaves on the city's tamarind and bàng trees. Winter dips into the low teens Celsius. The food adapts: pho in cool weather, bun cha at noon, egg coffee in the cold rain.