by Jim Goodman
Palais du Résidence-Superieur, the first French administrative building |
St. Joseph's Cathedral |
Hòa Phong Tower |
The next target was the
examination ground on today’s Tràng Thi Street. They built a military post in its place and widened the road
on the south side of Hoàn Kiếm Lake, demolishing the
lakeside houses, and, since they intended to introduce French currency, tore
down the mint on Tràng Thi and turned the area over to French merchants for shops. They renamed the street Rue Paul Bert,
starting a trend they would continue as they built more new roads, naming them after
colonial administrators or soldiers.
the former Báo Ân Pagoda |
The colonial adventure
included mission civilatrice as part
of its policy, with the spread of Catholicism a main factor. So the French decided they needed a
cathedral right away, too, both for themselves and for Vietnamese converts. But instead of finding an appropriate
empty lot, of which there were many, they chose to erect it on the site of Chùa
Báo Thiên, one of the city’s most venerable pagodas, dating from the reign of
Lý Thánh Tông, that had been standing there for over eight centuries. The French leveled the pagoda,
expropriated much of the compound of the Lý Quốc Sư Temple next
to it and constructed the Gothic style, twin-spire St. Joseph’s Cathedral. It held its first services Christmas
Eve, 1886, though it took several more years to finally complete.
Chwvassiwux Fountain |
The new French buildings were
in the European, neo-classical design, massive, ornate, and, in the mind of the
government’s chief architect, Henri-Auguste Valdieu, were expected to overawe
the local population and remind them of France’s might and majesty. This
attitude partly stemmed from their perceived need, in the face of ongoing
resistance to their rule, to overwhelm the conquered population with highly
visible symbols of their own power.
the French bandstand, used for Sunday concerts |
But the early French
administrators also held a low opinion of Vietnamese culture and arts and
expected the Vietnamese to recognize the superiority of French civilization. They would build their own version of
Paris by developing little-used portions of the existing city, but they would also
introduce modern improvements into the old city, expecting the grateful
residents to then realize the value of their “civilizing mission.”
The largely
vacant area south of Hoàn Kiếm Lake was to be the main
colonial residential neighborhood.
The French constructed wide parallel streets intersecting at right
angles and houses in the French style.
Unlike homes in the old quarter, jammed together with shared walls,
those constructed in the new French Quarter were two- and three-story mansions
surrounded by a wall enclosing gardens and trees.
ex-Governor-General's Palace, now Presidential Palace |
As the government began constructing ministries and palaces
further away from Hoàn Kiếm Lake, new neighborhoods began springing up,
especially around the old Citadel in Ba Đình and on today’s Quán Thánh Street,
leading to West Lake. Still the
French Quarter remained the social center. It was close to the lake with its big, shady trees and
mixture of old and new buildings, a favorite place to stroll. The main business outlets serving the
foreign community were there, as well as the Hotel Métropole, which would long
be rated among the finest in Asia, and the Resident’s Palace just
opposite. In a small triangular
park just up from the Métropole was the Chevassieux Fountain, built in 1901 in
a blend of styles, with spouting dragons around the edge of the pool of a
basically French-style fountain.
The bandstand, with its free Sunday concerts, was in the vicinity, too,
so a colon in the French Quarter
could wander around in neighborhoods near his home that resembled, and
suggested, life in the mother country.
Long Biên Bridge |
Bert’s successor, Paul Doumer,
sponsored the construction of yet more gigantic buildings intended to overawe
the Vietnamese. In 1901 he ordered
a new Governor-General’s palace built on 20 hectares of land in Ba Đình, past
the Citadel. This involved demolishing
a Lý Dynasty temple and expropriating private land without compensation. Completed in 1906, in classical northern
French style, four stories high, with rectangular windows on the upper floors
and arched windows on the lower floors, all spaced evenly apart, low-angled
tiled roofs, lavish ornamentation on the façade and the building painted a
mustard yellow, it was the most impressive French building in the city yet.
Municipal Theater |
With the Red River Delta pacified
by this time, he ordered the construction in 1903 of an iron bridge, 1.7 km
long, across the river, for trains to reach the countryside. Originally named after himself, it is
now called the Long Biën Bridge, bombed during the American War, but restored
to its original condition afterwards.
At the same time, back in the
French Quarter, at the east end of Rue Paul Bert, work began on the Municipal
Theater, completed in 1911. Budget
constraints kept it from having annexes and more decorative stonework. Nevertheless, it is still quite a large
structure, with pillars on the front façade, a pair of domed, slate roofs,
decorative balustrades, the walls a light yellow. The interior was in the ultra-baroque style, opulent
furnishings everywhere, marble floors, high ceilings and a grand staircase. Commonly known as the Opéra, it could
seat 870 patrons, at a time when the French population of the city was around
2500.
Ô Quan Chưởng--the last of the old city gates |
Besides creating neighborhoods
for themselves, the French also imposed changes on Old Hanoi. Admittedly, the city had suffered
infrastructural neglect since the beginning of the Nguyễn
Dynasty. The dikes were in sad
shape and one of the first French actions was to commission their
renovation. They would later fill
in parts of the Tô Lịch River and the small ponds scattered throughout
the old town. They also demolished
the city walls and all but one of the city entry gates
Vietnamese mandarins,
ostensibly working for the French authorities, lobbied to protect one city gate
as a symbol of their heritage. The
French agreed to spare it, but not for that reason. They kept it as souvenir of Francis Garnier’s ill-fated
attempt to seize Hanoi in 1873.
This gate, Ô Quan Chưởng, still standing, was the one Garnier passed
through to attack the Citadel.
the water tower on Hàng Đậu |
Most of the French projects in
the old town aimed to improve sanitation and hygiene and make it easier to get
around. Besides demolishing the
walls that separated the old town guilds, they widened the streets by lopping
off the fronts of the houses. In
1895 they installed electric street lamps and in 1900 electric tramways. Besides filling in the ponds, they also
built public urinals and constructed a water tower at the end of Hàng Đậu Street,
which piped water to several collection points in the city.
French colons were not about to move into the old quarter as a result, but
the administrators hoped that by improving the living conditions of the
Vietnamese the latter would at least acquiesce to French rule. Mandarins could occasionally resist the
changes and save some ancient trees and the last city gate, but not often. The French had their own ideas of what
Hanoi should look like.
After World War I this
attitude became somewhat modified.
Reformers pushed new ideas like ‘association’ and ‘cultural relativism’
that were designed to incorporate indigenous styles into building designs and
make adaptations that took into account the local climate and culture. In 1923 the colonial government
established a Town Planning and Architecture Service, with Ernest Hébrard its
first Director. He expanded the
city south and west and created a new administrative zone in Ba Đình. But it was in architecture that he made
his greatest impact.
Hébrard's Cừa Bắc church |
In Hébrard’s view the existing
French-style buildings in the city, with their mansard roofs, attics and tiny
windows, were ill suited to local weather conditions. They were also, like the Gothic St. Joseph’s Cathedral with
its towering spires, out of synch with the rest of the city’s
architecture. The church he
designed—Cửa
Bắc,
outside the northern gate of the Citadel—dispensed with Gothic features and
exhibited an eclectic set of influences, especially art deco, Hébrard’s own favorite. And for secular buildings Hébrard favored verandahs,
canopied windows, bigger rooms for greater ventilation and indigenous
decorative motifs.
Four other major city
buildings, all featuring Hébrard’s Indochinese Style, went up in the
mid-1920s. The Pasteur
Institute, several blocks south of the French Quarter, most resembled a French
building, in a pale mustard color, but had bigger windows and lay surrounded by
gardens. The long,
three-story Ministry of Finance in Ba Đình featured roofed balconies at each
level. The University of Hanoi
entrance gate had a double roof and a long, thin arch just above the door.
the former Bank of Indochina |
The masterpiece of the period
is the Louis Finot Museum, now called the History Museum, just beyond the Municipal
Theater. With a tall,
double-roofed tower in the front, the building has a long, two-story extension
in the back, with columned verandahs and tile roofs supported by wooden
brackets. The façade is
embellished with chiseled corbels and regular indented spaces of rectangular
glass panels, evoking the parallel sentence boards on the pillars of a village
communal house.
In 1927 authorities set up the
Hanoi School of Fine Arts to instruct Vietnamese in the principles of
architecture. Hẹbrard
hoped to instill his Indochinese Style into the students’ consciousness. But already a competing, international modernist
style was appearing with the construction of the Bank of Indochina, completed
in 1930. This long, sleek building
featured tall, dark rectangular recesses along the front façade and an entrance
tower with a layered dome canopy and stone screens on its upper walls.
Pasteur Institute |
With the economic depression
of the1930s fewer official buildings went up, but the newly trained Vietnamese
architects found employment with both European and Vietnamese clients and
constructed over a hundred villas in the French Quarter and around Ba Đình
before the end of World War II.
They featured terraced roofs, curved facades, arched and circular
windows and Vietnamese designs in ornamental plastering above doors and
windows. Many of these today serve
as foreign embassies.
They also worked in the
southern part of the city, where the land space was far more restricted. So Vietnamese architects adopted a
modified Old Quarter tube-house style, with the fronts employing the features
of the villas. They combined
elements of art deco, Western
classical and native Vietnamese in a way that went beyond the characteristics
of the Indochinese Style.
main entrance to Hanoi University |
After World War II the French
were too absorbed in fighting the insurgency to do much building in Hanoi. And as they faced defeat, some of the
original animosity to Vietnamese culture returned. In a last act of cultural vandalism before their evacuation
from Hanoi, the French blew up the One-Pillar Pagoda, which had been standing
there for over nine centuries.
After independence the
Vietnamese rebuilt the pagoda, though a little smaller, and demolished the Town
Hall on Hoàn Kiếm Lake and replaced it with a very modern building. But the other colonial administrative
buildings they kept and used themselves.
For example, the Governor-General’s palace became the Presidential
Palace. The former Resident's Palace became the State Guest House for visiting foreign
statesmen.
Ba Đình villa, Vietnamese-designed |
Vietnamese version of the Indochinese Style |
In the 1990s, after more
decades of war, isolation and privation, Vietnam’s economy began improving such
that suddenly architects were busy replacing old houses with new ones. Nowadays the results of their mixed
architectural heritage are rows of houses with individual facades, balconies, multi-paneled
windows, each house a different color, each sporting a different kind of roof, different
exterior designs, no two alike. Different
from urban houses anywhere else in Southeast Asia, they exemplify the further
elaboration of the Indochinese Style of decades earlier.
With his patronizing
attitude, Hébrard had assumed his Vietnamese students would adhere to the style
he taught them. But as with
everything the Vietnamese import from foreign cultures, they added their own
notions and wound up creating an indigenous style of their own.
the History Museum--the masterpiece of the1920s |
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