Hanoi has been a capital since 1010, and the layers show: Lý-dynasty citadel foundations, a Confucian university from 1070, French colonial cell blocks, and a B-52 still lying in a neighbourhood pond. Three days across eleven centuries.
UNESCO-listed: 1,300 years of power on one site, from the Tang-era fort to the D67 bunker where the 1968 Tet Offensive was planned. Climb the Kinh Thien dragon staircase, then cross to the dig at 18 Hoang Dieu.
Vietnam's first university, founded 1070 as a Confucian temple and opened to scholars in 1076. Eighty-two stone stelae on stone turtles list every doctoral graduate from 1442 to 1779, across five walled courtyards.
One of the four guardian temples of Thang Long, founded in the 11th century under Ly Thai To to protect the northern gate. Its centrepiece is a four-metre, four-tonne black bronze statue of Tran Vu, cast on site in 1677.
Hanoi's oldest pagoda, founded in 541 on the Red River bank and shifted to this West Lake islet in 1615 when the bank collapsed. The eleven-tier stupa carries a white stone Buddha in each of its lotus-shaped arches.
The 1896 Maison Centrale, where the French shackled Vietnamese revolutionaries in communal cells beside a working guillotine, and where North Vietnam later held captured US pilots — the sardonic 'Hanoi Hilton'. Open 08:00–17:00.
The tail section and undercarriage of a B-52 shot down on 27 December 1972 during Operation Linebacker II still sit in a residential pond in Ngoc Ha, ringed by houses and drying laundry. No gate, no ticket, one plaque.
Ernest Hebrard's 1932 Indochinese-style pavilion holds Dong Son bronze drums from 700 BC, Cham sandstone sculpture and ironwood stakes recovered from the 1288 Bach Dang river battle that broke the Mongol fleet.
Built 1899–1902 by Daydé & Pillé as the Paul Doumer Bridge, bombed repeatedly between 1967 and 1972 and rebuilt with mismatched spans that still read as a scar line against the original French lattice.
Four floors on women in family, history and belief: wartime propaganda posters, the southern Long Hair Army guerrillas, filmed testimony from street vendors, and the embroidered costumes of Mother Goddess mediums.
An 1890s tube house restored with Hanoi–Toulouse city funding in 1999: two storeys, two open light wells, a merchant's timber frame roughly three metres wide and twenty deep — the shape colonial frontage tax produced.
All 54 recognised ethnic groups, plus a garden of full-scale buildings: a Bahnar communal house with a soaring thatch roof, an Ede longhouse you climb into, and a Giarai tomb ringed by carved mourning figures.
The Old Quarter's oldest temple, founded in 1010 after a white horse reportedly appeared to Ly Thai To and traced the line his citadel walls should follow. Red lacquer palanquin, 18th-century carved beams, still in daily use.