Hanoi is the capital of Vietnam, a centrally governed city of 3,358.6 square kilometres on the Red River in the north of the country, with a population of 8,807,523 in 2025. It has been a seat of power for most of the past thousand years: Emperor Lý Thái Tổ made it the capital of Đại Việt in 1010 under the name Thăng Long, “ascending dragon”, and after spells as a provincial town and a colonial capital it became the capital of a reunified Vietnam in 1976. Almost everything distinctive about Hanoi comes from the people who were drawn to it or pushed out of it: rebels and Tang garrisons, Confucian scholars, craft guilds from the surrounding villages, French administrators, Chinese merchants, northern Catholics who fled south in 1954, and the rural migrants who now sell produce on its pavements. This guide follows those communities in turn.
Lạc Việt Rebels, Tang Governors and the Traders of Đại La
Long before it was a capital, the land that is now Hanoi was a meeting point of local chiefs and outside rulers. In about the third century BC a fortified citadel later called Cổ Loa rose here, with an outer embankment enclosing some 600 hectares, the first political centre of the Vietnamese before Chinese rule. The Han dynasty took the region in 111 BC. In AD 40 two sisters of a Lạc aristocratic family from Mê Linh, now a district of Hanoi, led a rising against the Han that won the support of about 65 towns and settlements. Trưng Trắc and Trưng Nhị set up their court at Mê Linh before the Han general Ma Yuan crushed the revolt with 32,000 men in 43.
The city itself began as a garrison. In the fifth century the Liu Song dynasty founded Tống Bình on the site, and in 866 the Tang general Gao Pian retook it from Nanzhao and local rebels, renamed it Đại La and ringed it with a wall 6,344 metres long, in places more than eight metres high. Đại La then had about 25,000 residents, and they were not all local: the population included Persians, Arabs, Indians, Cham, Javanese and Nestorian Christians. Muslim merchants of the ninth to twelfth centuries knew the town as Luqin, a name taken from the older Chinese Longbian. In 880 the Tang army in Annam mutinied and seized Đại La, ending de facto Chinese control of the north.
Mandarins of the Temple of Literature, 1070 to 1779
When Lý Thái Tổ moved his court to the Đại La site in 1010, he brought a new ruling class with him, and within two generations it had its own institution. The Temple of Literature, or Văn Miếu, was built in 1070 under Emperor Lý Thánh Tông and dedicated to Confucius, and in 1076 the Imperial Academy, Vietnam’s first university, opened inside it to train the bureaucrats, nobles and royals who governed the kingdom. The academy taught there until 1779. Its compound covers more than 54,000 square metres, laid out like the temple at Qufu, Confucius’s birthplace, and the stelae of successful doctoral candidates still stand in its courtyards.
The scholar-official class rose and fell with the city’s status. The capital was moved to Thanh Hóa in 1397, and the Ming occupied the city from 1408, renaming it Đông Quan. After Lê Lợi drove them out in 1428, he called it Đông Kinh, the “eastern capital”, a name European traders turned into Tonkin for the whole of northern Vietnam. Western diplomats of the 17th century estimated the population at about 100,000. The blow came in 1802, when the Nguyễn dynasty moved the court to Huế and founded a new imperial academy there; in 1831 Emperor Minh Mạng renamed the demoted city Hà Nội. The scholars’ tradition survives in a different form: an estimated 62 per cent of Vietnam’s scientists live and work in Hanoi, and before each Lunar New Year calligraphers gather outside the Temple of Literature to write wishes in classical characters.
Craft Guilds of the 36 Streets and the Potters of Bát Tràng
While mandarins ran the citadel, artisans and traders built the commercial town beside it. The Old Quarter near Hoàn Kiếm Lake kept most of its original street plan, and at the start of the 20th century it was still known as the “36 streets”. Each street housed households specialising in one trade, such as silk, jewellery or bamboo, and the street names still record those specialisations; a few streets sell nothing else even now. Around the city, specialist craft villages in the Red River countryside supplied the same kind of goods to the capital and its court.
The best documented is Bát Tràng, now a commune of Hanoi. The royal official Nguyễn Trãi recorded that it “makes cups and bowls” and supplied the court with tribute of 70 sets of bowls and plates, and the village may date from the 14th century. Its golden age ran from the mid-15th to the early 18th century, when its ceramics travelled by ship far beyond Vietnam; in 2025 it had 48,987 residents, all registered as Kinh.
The French reorganised this trade without ending it. In 1889 the colonial administration closed the Old Quarter’s two main markets, on Hàng Đường and Hàng Mã streets, and replaced them with Đồng Xuân Market, a covered hall of about 6,500 square metres behind a five-arched entrance, 600 metres north of Hoàn Kiếm Lake. After a fire in 1994 destroyed about US$4.5 million of stock, it was rebuilt and remains the city’s largest covered market; in its ward, about half of all households trade. The mix of cultures shows on the houses too, where French-style columns stand beside Confucian scrolls, yin-yang signs and Buddhist lotus carvings. Ownership has shifted as well: many street-front shops now belong to merchants from other provinces, while the original families rent them out and live behind or elsewhere.
French Officials, Chinese Merchants and the Exodus of 1954
The French took Hanoi by force in 1873 and held it formally from 1883. It became capital of the protectorate of Tonkin and, from 1902, of all French Indochina, and Governor-General Paul Doumer, in office from 1898 to 1902, shaped its planning. The capital attracted French residents, Chinese traders and Vietnamese from surrounding provinces; by the 1940s the city held 132,145 people. They left behind tree-lined boulevards, the Opera House and buildings that fused French and Vietnamese styles, such as the old École française d’Extrême-Orient, now the National Museum of Vietnamese History. Colonial needs could override the older elite’s legacy: during the war years of 1945 to 1954, the French demolished parts of the Temple of Literature to make room for the overcrowded Saint Paul Hospital.
The 1954 Geneva settlement split the country at the 17th parallel and set off a mass movement of people through the city. Forces of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam entered Hanoi on 10 October 1954, and a 300-day window, ending on 18 May 1955, let civilians move between north and south. Between 600,000 and one million northerners went south, including more than 200,000 French citizens and soldiers, and about 60 per cent of the north’s 1.14 million Catholics. The ethnic Chinese stayed longer. In 1956 China’s premier Zhou Enlai, visiting Hanoi, urged them to integrate, but after Vietnam broke with China in 1978 more than 170,000 Hoa fled overland from the north into Guangxi. For how that northern frontier runs today, see our guide to the countries that border Vietnam.
From 2.7 Million to 8.8 Million: Pavement Vendors and New Hanoians
Since the Đổi Mới reforms of 1986, Hanoi has been rebuilt by newcomers. The city grew from 2,672,122 people in 1999 to 8,807,523 in 2025, partly by migration and partly by redrawing the map: on 1 August 2008, Hà Tây Province, Mê Linh District and four communes of Lương Sơn were merged into the capital, lifting its population to 6,232,940 overnight.
Officially the city is almost uniform: the 2019 census found more than 50 ethnic groups, but the Kinh made up 98.66 per cent, followed by the Mường at 0.77 per cent and the Tày at 0.24 per cent. The Vietnam Museum of Ethnology, opened in 1997 northwest of the centre, displays the many groups the capital itself barely registers. The real diversity is of origin rather than ethnicity. A 2006 count found 5,600 rural produce vendors working in the city, 90 per cent of them from the surrounding countryside and most of them women. In July 2008 the city government partly banned street vending on 62 streets, citing public health and the city’s image, yet the pavement trade persists, and in-migration controls still aim to admit people whose skills the economy needs. More than three-quarters of jobs remain state-owned, with 13.3 per cent in the private sector. A different set of newcomers arrives through diplomacy: the capital hosts 78 foreign embassies, and most of the French colonial buildings in Hoàn Kiếm district have ended up as embassies.
The result is a capital with a small, dense historic core wrapped in a large territory of former villages, where a family may keep a shop in the 36 streets, a flat in a newer apartment block and relatives in one of the old villages. If you want to walk those streets yourself, our guide to the best time to visit Hanoi explains how its four seasons shape a trip.
Quick Facts About Hanoi
- Country: Vietnam
- Continent: Asia (Southeast Asia)
- Country population: approximately 102.2 million
- Capital city status: Hanoi is the capital of Vietnam, the seat of national government, and the location of foreign embassies, parliament, and the head of state's official residence.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the capital of Vietnam?
The capital of Vietnam is Hanoi. Hanoi is the seat of national government, hosts most foreign embassies and consulates, and is typically where the head of state and parliament are located.
What continent is Hanoi in?
Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam, is located in Asia, in the Southeast Asia region. As Vietnam's capital, Hanoi serves as the country's primary connection to the broader Asian political, economic, and cultural sphere.
Why is Hanoi the capital of Vietnam?
Hanoi was chosen as the capital of Vietnam for reasons that typically combine geography, history, and politics. Capital city selections often reflect a desire for centrality (being accessible from across the country), historical importance (being a longstanding seat of government or culture), or neutrality (being acceptable to multiple regions or ethnic groups within the country). The specific reasons for Hanoi's designation are detailed in the city's history above.
What is Hanoi known for?
As the capital of Vietnam, Hanoi is best known for housing the country's central government institutions — parliament, presidential or royal residences, supreme court, and key ministries. It is also typically a major cultural and economic center within Vietnam, hosting national museums, embassies, and signature monuments. The introduction and history sections above provide detailed coverage of the city's specific notable institutions and landmarks.
Related Pages
- Vietnam Country Guide — full geography, climate, economy, and culture overview
- Flag of Vietnam — meaning, history, and design of Vietnam's national flag