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Salient. An Organ of Student Opinion at Victoria University, Wellington N.Z. Vol. 22, No. 4. April 27, 1959

Hanoi

Hanoi

Hanoi is a beautiful city—a city of wide tree-lined avenues and graceful French colonial architecture; of houses painted pastel yellow and pale green and pink, with spacious gardens and balconies.

It is a city of vivid colours and scents and sounds . . . the magenta and emerald green and white silk of the girls' tunics; the cascading scarlet of bougainvillea; the russet brown of the peasants' dress; the gold skins and blue-black long hair of the children; the scent of evening sunlight on the hot earth mingled with the scents of spices and cooking; the sounds of wooden clogs clip-clopping through the morning streets, the harsh cries of the street vendors and the soft swish of the street cleaners' brooms.

It is a city which is undergoing a major social and economic transformation.

Formerly, the most attractive quarters were occupied by European officials and by the European and Chinese commercial groups who flourished under the French colonial regime. Today, these groups have gone; their houses have been broken up into apartments for the working people of Hanoi—the clerks and the shop assistants and the mechanics—whose families and dependents spill out into temporary housing in the palm-shaded gardens.

In the past, as the administrative centre of a colonial regime, it was characterised by a great development of luxury trades and activities; it was a city largely parasitic on the countryside.

Today, it is the economic centre of a developing Asian state; the old luxury trades are vanishing and are being replaced by the workshops and factories turning out the consumer goods and capital equipment so desperately needed by the masses of Vietnam.

It is a city in which the old world and the new world struggling to be born are sharply juxtaposed—the new machine tool factory is full of gleaming Russian machinery, and in its grounds women carry the scrap iron in the traditional peasant baskets and cut the grass of the verges with the tiny peasant knife.