A street of Hanoi in an old photograph on display at an exhibition in HCMC

A century and a half of photographs of Hanoi in the late 1800s and early 1900s are on display at the Ho Chi Minh City exhibition center until next Monday.

Quoc, the editor-in-chief of Xua va nay (Old and Now), said the photos had been selected from thousands of postcards and acted as a supplemental source of historical material about Hanoi.

“Its advantage is that it is visual and natural, and therefore objective, while learned tomes and scholarly papers are often colored by the authors’ views,” Quoc said.

The photos are divided into three categories: the traditional Hanoi of the Vietnamese people, French colonial architecture and cultural life, and the changes wrought by the French from 1887 to 1945.

After HCMC, the exhibition will travel to Can Tho in the Mekong Delta, Da Lat in the central highlands, and Da Nang on the central coast.

“If we get good feedback, I want to hold the exhibition in Paris and other countries where there are Vietnamese communities, especially people who used to live in old Hanoi,” Quoc said.

Sometime soon, Quoc intends to augment the traveling show with paintings based on old photos to make the presentation friendlier and less formal.

Copies of the photos on display can be obtained at the City Exhibition House, 92 Le Thanh Ton Street, District 1, or by calling Xua va nay magazine on (08) 38.385.117, according to an article on Voice of Vietnam News.

Source: Thanh Nien, SGTT