Daily life in Hanoi during the French colonial period

A grounded look at routines in a Red River city where Vietnamese guild streets, colonial offices, railways, schools, markets, and unequal urban services shaped everyday life.

Hanoi during the French colonial period was an older Vietnamese capital remade into the administrative center of Tonkin and, from 1902, French Indochina. The city kept the dense trading streets of the Old Quarter, the lakeside habits of Hoan Kiem, temple and family networks, craft villages tied to the Red River Delta, and forms of household authority that predated French rule. At the same time, colonial planners opened boulevards, cleared parts of the citadel, built villas and offices, expanded police and public health systems, and connected Hanoi to railways, tramways, bridges, newspapers, schools, hospitals, and imported goods. For most residents, daily life was not a simple shift from old to new. It was a layered routine of market buying, small workshops, family compounds, rented rooms, school fees, religious obligations, official regulations, and constant movement between the Vietnamese commercial city and the colonial administrative city.

Housing and Living Spaces

Housing in colonial Hanoi reflected the sharp spatial divide between the older Vietnamese city and the French-planned quarters south and west of Hoan Kiem Lake. In the Old Quarter, many families lived in narrow shophouses often described as tube houses, with a shop or workshop at the street front, living and storage spaces stretching inward, and small courtyards or light wells where cooking, washing, and repair work could be fitted into limited space. These buildings served commerce and family life at the same time. A tailor, herbal seller, paper merchant, metalworker, or food vendor might keep goods near the front, sleep in an interior room, and share cooking, water storage, and child care with relatives, apprentices, tenants, or hired help.

Crowding was a regular feature of Vietnamese neighborhoods. Rented rooms, shared courtyards, alleys, and back spaces housed migrants from Red River Delta villages, servants, porters, students, apprentices, widows, and small traders. Domestic comfort depended less on privacy than on careful management of mats, wooden chests, low tables, baskets, stools, oil lamps, cooking pots, water jars, bedding, and trade goods. Houses opened onto the street because selling, greeting neighbors, hearing news, arranging credit, and watching children all belonged to the daily rhythm. Temples, communal houses, market entrances, lakesides, and street corners extended household life into public space.

French officials, European merchants, senior colonial employees, and some wealthy Vietnamese professionals lived in larger villas, townhouses, or apartments with more air, garden space, masonry walls, tiled roofs, verandas, servants' quarters, and access to improved roads or water systems. These homes were visible symbols of rank, but they depended on Vietnamese cooks, gardeners, laundresses, drivers, guards, carpenters, masons, and suppliers. Public services were uneven. Sewers, piped water, paved streets, and lighting reached colonial and commercial districts before many crowded Vietnamese quarters, where families still relied on wells, vendors, ponds, public taps, night-soil removal, baskets, and hand labor. Housing therefore made colonial hierarchy tangible, but it also showed the resilience of older urban forms that kept shop, home, workshop, and kin network tightly connected.

Food and Daily Meals

Food in colonial Hanoi drew on the Red River Delta, city markets, street vendors, and new colonial trade routes. Rice remained the central staple for households that could afford it, supported by fish, pork, chicken on special occasions, tofu, eggs, freshwater crabs, shrimp paste, pickled vegetables, herbs, greens, bananas, cassava, sweet potatoes, and seasonal fruit. Noodles and rice flour preparations were especially suited to urban life, because they could be sold fresh in markets or carried through streets in baskets and shoulder poles. Pho became associated with northern urban foodways during the colonial period, while bun, banh cuon, xoi, chao, and simple soups helped students, clerks, porters, and market workers eat around schedules that did not always allow a return home.

Markets organized daily meals. Dong Xuan Market, built by the French administration in 1889 after the consolidation of older markets, became a major covered market in the Old Quarter, while smaller neighborhood markets, lakeside vendors, and mobile sellers kept food close to households. Women did much of the buying, bargaining, cooking, and selling. They purchased small quantities according to cash on hand, stretched soups with greens or noodles when prices rose, and used drying, salting, fermenting, pickling, and frequent shopping rather than refrigeration. Firewood and charcoal were still common fuels, with kerosene stoves appearing where cost and supply allowed. Kitchens could be compact, smoky, and shared, so prepared food from vendors was practical rather than merely recreational.

Colonial contact added ingredients and settings without replacing local food habits. Bread, coffee, condensed milk, tinned goods, beer, wine, butter, and restaurant dishes circulated through hotels, cafes, military kitchens, European households, mission schools, and wealthier Vietnamese families. A clerk might drink coffee or eat bread before office work, while his household still depended on rice, fish sauce, vegetables, and noodle dishes. Servants working in French homes learned some European cooking methods, but they also carried local tastes and market knowledge into those kitchens. Meals were social markers as well as nourishment. Feeding guests, preparing offerings for ancestors, contributing to temple events, and providing food for apprentices or dependents all reinforced household reputation. Daily eating in Hanoi thus linked delta agriculture, women's market labor, street commerce, and selective colonial consumption.

Work and Labor

Work in colonial Hanoi ranged from household production and craft streets to government offices, schools, railways, printing shops, military supply, and domestic service. The Old Quarter's street names preserved older specializations in silk, paper, bamboo, metal, herbs, drums, sweets, and other goods, and many trades still operated through small workshops, shopfronts, family labor, and apprenticeship. Craft villages around Hanoi supplied lacquer, paper, textiles, ceramics, votive goods, baskets, foodstuffs, and other products that entered the city through markets and wholesalers. Market women, hawkers, porters, cooks, washerwomen, barbers, carpenters, masons, boat operators, tailors, and repairers formed a large part of the practical economy.

Colonial administration created new kinds of wage and salaried work. Clerks, translators, copyists, teachers, postal workers, telegraph operators, railway employees, police, hospital attendants, printers, survey assistants, guards, and office messengers were needed by the government and by private firms. French-language schooling and romanized Vietnamese print culture opened limited routes into clerical and professional employment, especially for families able to pay fees and keep children out of full-time work. The railway station, Long Bien Bridge, workshops, tram lines, and roads connected Hanoi more tightly to Haiphong, the Red River Delta, mines, military posts, and export networks. These systems gave jobs to mechanics, drivers, track workers, ticket sellers, loaders, cleaners, and watchmen, while also imposing stricter clocks and written regulations.

Most households combined several forms of income because steady salaries were not available to everyone. A family might rent a front room to a trader, send a son into apprenticeship, rely on a daughter's market selling, take in sewing, and host a relative who worked as a servant or clerk. Women were central to household survival through trade, cooking, washing, sewing, food vending, and money management, even when formal offices favored men. Children ran errands, watched siblings, learned trades, or attended school depending on income and aspiration. Workdays began early, especially for food sellers, market traders, railway laborers, servants, and porters. Office workers and students increasingly followed posted schedules, while artisans and vendors followed customers, daylight, feast days, and market cycles. Hanoi's labor world was therefore both old and new, combining guild-rooted skill with colonial time discipline.

Social Structure

Colonial Hanoi's social structure was visibly unequal but internally complex. French officials, officers, professionals, merchants, missionaries, and their families held formal power and occupied privileged institutions and residential spaces. They used clubs, schools, hospitals, villas, offices, police authority, and legal distinctions to maintain status. Below them, but not simply outside power, were Vietnamese mandarins, interpreters, teachers, landlords, merchants, contractors, doctors, lawyers, journalists, printers, and clerks who used education, property, language skills, and official connections to build influence. Chinese and Indian merchants, Catholic communities, Buddhist institutions, Confucian lineages, and village migrants all added further layers to the city.

Most residents belonged to practical working groups: artisans, shopkeepers, hawkers, servants, porters, cooks, students, apprentices, laundresses, transport workers, construction laborers, and market traders. Status depended on occupation, wealth, education, gender, family background, neighborhood reputation, and relations with officials. A literate clerk in a clean white suit could claim a different public position from a porter or street seller, even if both lived in crowded Vietnamese quarters. A successful market woman might command real household authority through credit and trade, even without access to colonial office. Family hierarchy remained strong, with elders managing marriages, ancestral rites, property, apprenticeships, and obligations to rural kin.

Religion and association shaped social life. Buddhist temples, village communal houses transplanted into urban neighborhoods, ancestor altars, Catholic churches, schools, guild ties, mutual aid groups, and native-place networks helped people find housing, settle disputes, support funerals, arrange festivals, and protect reputations. Colonial policing and public health campaigns entered these networks through permits, inspections, taxes, censuses, vaccination drives, sanitation rules, and school requirements. Social life therefore involved constant negotiation: residents dealt with landlords, police, schoolmasters, priests, monks, elders, market chiefs, creditors, and employers. Hanoi society was hierarchical, but it was also active, literate, and associational, with newspapers, cafes, schools, and public meetings creating new arenas for status and argument.

Tools and Technology

Daily technology in colonial Hanoi mixed hand tools with modern infrastructure. In households and shops, people used shoulder poles, baskets, ceramic jars, wooden stools, low tables, bamboo screens, oil lamps, charcoal braziers, iron pans, rice steamers, knives, mortars, sewing needles, scissors, scales, abacuses, ledgers, locks, trunks, and mats. Craftspeople relied on specialized tools for carpentry, lacquer work, metal repair, paper making, printing, embroidery, tailoring, herbal preparation, and food production. Much labor still depended on carrying goods by hand or shoulder pole through narrow streets, even when railways and bridges transformed long-distance movement.

Colonial systems changed the public rhythm of the city. Long Bien Bridge, opened in the early 20th century, connected Hanoi across the Red River and became part of a wider railway network. Tramways, paved roads, telegraph lines, postal services, clocks, schools, hospitals, printing presses, typewriters, cameras, bicycles, motorcars, street lamps, and piped water made new forms of movement, surveillance, and administration visible. Access was uneven. A French office might use typewriters, filing cabinets, electric lighting, and telephones while a nearby Vietnamese household still cooked on charcoal and stored water in jars. Technology in Hanoi was therefore not a single stage of modernization. It was a layered toolkit in which colonial infrastructure, local repair skill, street vending equipment, and household improvisation worked side by side.

Clothing and Materials

Clothing in colonial Hanoi showed occupation, gender, class, and setting. Many Vietnamese men wore loose trousers, long tunics, headscarves or turbans, wooden clogs, sandals, and cotton garments suited to heat, work, and repeated washing. Women commonly wore long tunics with trousers, skirts in some older settings, head coverings, sashes, and practical market clothing that allowed carrying, cooking, and washing. The ao dai changed during the colonial period, especially among urban women and educated families, becoming more closely fitted and publicly associated with refinement. Materials ranged from everyday cotton and homespun cloth to silk, satin, brocade, and imported fabrics used for weddings, festivals, wealthy households, and formal visits.

European-style dress became important in schools, offices, courts, military spaces, and elite public life. Clerks, students, professionals, and servants in colonial households might wear shirts, trousers, jackets, white uniforms, leather shoes, hats, or hybrid outfits depending on the workplace. Dress could signal literacy, salary work, Catholic schooling, official service, or ambition, while traditional garments still marked family respect, ritual duty, and comfort at home. Tailors, laundresses, dyers, shoe repairers, hat sellers, and cloth merchants kept the clothing economy active. Garments were patched, altered, handed down, re-dyed, or remade because cloth represented cash and respectability. In Hanoi, clothing revealed the pressures of colonial modernity: new standards of neatness and Western schooling stood beside older habits of textile care, seasonal dress, and family ceremony.

Daily life in French colonial Hanoi was shaped by close contact between an older Vietnamese commercial city and a colonial capital built around administration, transport, and display. Families moved between markets, temples, schools, offices, rail lines, villas, workshops, and crowded shophouses, using old networks to survive new rules. The city became modern unevenly: railways, tramways, boulevards, sewers, newspapers, and schools changed the public landscape, while food buying, household labor, craft production, kinship obligation, and market credit remained central to ordinary routine.

References

Logan, W. S. (2000). Hanoi: Biography of a City. University of Washington Press.
Vann, M. G. (2007). Building whiteness on the Red River: Race, power, and urbanism in Paul Doumer's Hanoi, 1897-1902. Historical Reflections / Reflexions Historiques, 33(2), 283-304. https://www.berghahnjournals.com/view/journals/historical-reflections/33/2/hrrh330206.xml
Vuong, Q.-H., Bui, Q.-K., La, V.-P., Vuong, T.-T., Ho, M.-T., Nguyen, H.-K. T., Nguyen, H.-N., Nghiem, K.-C. P., & Ho, M.-T. (2019). Cultural evolution in Vietnam's early 20th century: A Bayesian networks analysis of Hanoi Franco-Chinese house designs. Social Sciences & Humanities Open, 1(1). https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590291119300019
Vietnam National Authority of Tourism. (2021). Long Bien Bridge: The iconic French construction in the heart of Hanoi. https://vietnamtourism.gov.vn/en/post/15992
Dong Xuan Joint Stock Company. (n.d.). History of Dong Xuan Market. https://dongxuanmarket.com.vn/