#street cred

Saigon

Street Cred: Phan Đình Phùng, My Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Grandfather

An unassuming street named Phan Đình Phùng runs through Saigon’s Phú Nhuận District. It is named after a Vietnamese revolutionary who led rebel armies against French colonial forces in the 1880s and 1890s. He is also my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather.

Vietnam

Street Cred: Dauntless Antiwar Icon Nguyễn Thái Bình and His Tragic Death

If one were to see the streets of Vietnam as a tangled network of people whose names they took, every city would resemble a messy collection of historical fragments.

Hanoi

Street Cred: Pháo Đài Láng, Home of Ông Voi and Where the War Began

More often than not, a country’s independence is won with guns. The location where the first shots were fired for Vietnam is memorialized to this day.

Natural Selection

Lêkima: The Flower Worthy of a National Heroine

Don’t you find it bewildering when you have existed for centuries, and are suddenly thrust into stardom due to a small cameo in a nationalist saga?

Vietnam

Chợ Âm Phủ and the Embattled History Behind Hanoi's Book Street

19/12 Street was once a mass burial ground for those who died in the National Resistance against France in 1946. The event shaped the history of the city and the relationship that thrived for 71 years between locals, the street and chợ Âm phủ (Hell Market).

Vietnam

Street Cred: The Fame and Shocking Death of Cải Lương Icon Thanh Nga

Fame, murder, sex and music — this story has it all.

Saigon

Street Cred: The Sins and Saving Grace of Dr. Albert Calmette

If you help save hundreds of thousands of lives via medical breakthroughs and establish one of the country’s first and most advanced research institutes, but also assist in the colonial regime’s brutal oppression of natives via a draconian alcohol monopoly, do you get a street named in your honor? If you’re Albert Calmette, you do.