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Hanoi ( ; ) is the Capital city and second-most populous city of Vietnam. It encompasses an area of , and as of 2025 has a population of 8,807,523. It had the second-highest gross regional domestic product of all Vietnamese provinces and municipalities at US$48 billion in 2023, behind Ho Chi Minh City.
In the third century BCE, the Cổ Loa Capital Citadel of Âu Lạc was constructed in what later is Hanoi. In 1010, under the Lý dynasty, Vietnamese king Lý Thái Tổ established the capital of the imperial Vietnamese nation Đại Việt in what later is central Hanoi, naming the city Thăng Long , 'ascending dragon'). In 1428, King Lê Lợi renamed the city to Đông Kinh , 'eastern capital'), and it remained so until 1789. The Nguyễn dynasty in 1802 moved the national capital to Huế and the city was renamed Hanoi in 1831. It served as the capital of French Indochina from 1902 to 1945 and French protectorate of Tonkin from 1883 to 1949. After the August Revolution and the fall of the Nguyễn dynasty, the North Vietnam (DRV) designated Hanoi as the capital of the newly independent country. From 1949 to 1954, it was part of the State of Vietnam. It was again part of the DRV ruling North Vietnam from 1954 to 1976. In 1976, it became the capital of the unified Socialist Republic of Vietnam. In 2008, Hà Tây Province and two other rural districts were annexed into Hanoi, almost tripling Hanoi's area.
Hanoi is the cultural, economic and educational center of Northern Vietnam. As the country's capital, it hosts 78 foreign embassies, the headquarters of the Vietnam People's Army (VPA), its own Vietnam National University system, and other governmental organizations. It has 18.7 million domestic and international visitors in 2022. It hosts the Imperial Citadel of Thăng Long, Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum, Hoàn Kiếm Lake, West Lake, and Ba Vì National Park near the outskirts of the municipality. Its urban area has a range of architectural styles, including French colonial architecture, brutalist apartments and disorganized and stemming from the city's growth in the 20th century.
In 866, it was turned into a citadel and named Đại La (大羅, ). This gave it the nickname La Thành (羅城, ). When Lý Thái Tổ established the capital in the area in 1010, it was named Thăng Long (昇龍).Anh Thư Hà, Hồng Đức Trần A Brief Chronology of Vietnam's History 2000– Page 40 "Taking this as a good omen, he named the new capital Thăng Long (City of the Soaring Dragon), now Hanoi. Lý Thái Tổ reorganized the administration"Patricia M. Pelley Postcolonial Vietnam: New Histories of the National Past 2002– Page 213 "When Lý Thái Tổ relocated the capital in 1010."
Arab manuscripts between the 9th and 12th century referred to Hanoi as Luqin (لوكين), a term derived from Longbian (Middle Chinese: Ljowng-pen), and was originally used by Muslim traders to mention the Vietnamese. (1991). 9789836222657, Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, Kementerian Pendidikan Malaysia. . ISBN 9789836222657
In March of 40 AD, Trưng Trắc and Trưng Nhị, daughters of an aristocratic family of Lac Viet ethnicity in Mê Linh district (Hanoi), led the locals to rise up in rebellion against the Han. It began at the Red River Delta, and spread south and north from Jiaozhi, stirring up all three Lạc Việt regions and most of Lingnan, gaining the support of about 65 towns and settlements. Trưng sisters then established their court upriver in Mê Linh. In 42 AD, the Han emperor commissioned general Ma Yuan to suppress the uprising with 32,000 men, including 20,000 regulars and 12,000 regional auxiliaries. The rebellion was defeated in the next year as Ma Yuan captured and decapitated Trưng Trắc and Trưng Nhị, then sent their heads to the Han court in Luoyang.
By the middle of the fifth century, in the center of what later is Hanoi, a fortified settlement was founded by the Han Chinese Liu Song dynasty as the county seat of a new district called Tống Bình (Songping) within Giao Chỉ commandery. The name refers to its pacification by the dynasty. It was elevated to its own commandery at some point between AD 454 and 464. The commandery included the districts of Yihuai (義懷) and Suining (綏寧) in the south of the Red River (later is Từ Liêm and Hoài Đức districts) with a metropolis in what later is inner Hanoi.
By the year 679, the Tang dynasty changed the region's name to Annan (), with Songping as its capital.
In the latter half of the eighth century, Zhang Boyi, a viceroy from the Tang dynasty, built Luocheng () to suppress uprisings. Luocheng extended from Thu Le to Quan Ngua in what later is Ba Đình district. Over time, in the first half of the ninth century, this fortification was expanded and renamed as Jincheng (). In 863, the kingdom of Nanzhao, and local rebels, laid siege of Jincheng and defeated the Chinese armies of 150,000. Tư trị thông giám, quyển 250. In 866, Chinese jiedushi Gao Pian recaptured the city and drove out the Nanzhao and rebels. He renamed the city to Daluocheng (). He built a wall around the city measuring 6,344 meters, with some sections reaching over eight meters in height. Đại La at the time had approximately 25,000 residents, including foreign communities of Persians, Arabs, Indian, Cham, Javanese, and Nestorian Christians. It became a trading center of the Tang dynasty due to the ransacking of Guangzhou by the Huang Chao Rebellion. By tenth century AD, what later is Hanoi was known to the Muslim traders as Luqin.
=== Nguyễn dynasty and the French colonial period ===
When the Nguyễn dynasty was established in 1802, Gia Long moved the capital to Huế. Thăng Long was no longer the capital, and its chữ Hán was changed from 昇龍 () to the homophone 昇隆 (), in order to reduce any loyalist sentiment towards the old Lê dynasty. In 1831, the Nguyễn king Minh Mạng renamed it Hà Nội (河內). Hanoi was conquered and occupied by the French military in 1873 and passed to them ten years later. As Hanoi, it was located in the protectorate of Tonkin and became the capital of French Indochina in 1902. Nominally it still belonged to the sovereignty of Vietnam (Nguyễn dynasty) under French protectorate in Tonkin, and since 1888 it had been a French concession and had directly been ruled by the French like Cochinchina.
During the Vietnam War between North and South (1955–1975), North Vietnam (including Hanoi) was attacked by the United States and Air Forces. Following the end of the war with the fall of Saigon in 1975, Hanoi became the capital of the Vietnam when North and South Vietnam were reunited on 2 July 1976.
On 29 May 2008, it was decided that Hà Tây Province, Vĩnh Phúc Province's Mê Linh District and four communes in Lương Sơn District, Hòa Bình Province be merged into the metropolitan area of Hanoi from 1 August 2008. Hanoi's total area then increased to 334,470 hectares in 29 subdivisions with the new population being 6,232,940.
Public outcry in opposition to the redevelopment of culturally significant areas in Hanoi persuaded the national government to implement a low-rise policy surrounding Hoàn Kiếm Lake. The Ba Đình District is also protected from commercial redevelopment.
The region has a positive water balance (i.e. the precipitation exceeds the potential evapotranspiration). Hanoi averages of rainfall per year, the majority falling from May to October. There are an average of 114 days with rain. The average annual temperature is , with a mean relative humidity of more than 80%. The coldest month has a mean temperature of and the hottest month has a mean temperature of . The highest recorded temperature was in May 1926, while the lowest recorded temperature was on 12 January 1955. During a January 2016 cold wave, snow was seen to appear on the nearby Ba Vì mountain range, where the temperature fell to on 24 January 2016.
In 1954, the city had 53 thousand inhabitants, covering an area of 152 km2. By 1961, the area of the city had expanded to 584 km2, and the population was 91,000 people. In 1978, National Assembly (Vietnam) decided to expand Hanoi for the second time to 2,136 km2, with a population of 2.5 million people. By 1991, the area of Hanoi continued to change, decreasing to , and the population was still over 2 million people. Hanoi's population reached 2,672,122 people in 1999. After the expansion in August 2008, Hanoi has a population of 6.233 million and is among the 17 capitals with the largest area in the world. According to the 2009 census, Hanoi's population is 6,451,909 people. As of 1 April 2019, Hanoi had a population of 8,053,663, including 3,991,919 males and 4,061,744 females.
In the Old Quarter, where commerce started hundreds of years ago and consisted mostly of family businesses, some of the street-front stores are owned by merchants and retailers from other provinces. The original owner family may have either rented out the store and moved into the adjoining house or moved out of the neighborhood altogether. The pace of change has escalated after the abandonment of central-planning economic policies and relaxing of the district-based household registrar system.
Agriculture has striven to reform itself, introducing new high-yield plant varieties and livestock, and applying more modern farming techniques.
Infrastructure is being upgraded, with new roads and an improved public transportation system. Hanoi has allowed fast-food chains into the city, such as McDonald's, Lotteria, Pizza Hut, KFC, Popeyes, Domino's Pizza, Jollibee and others. Locals in Hanoi perceive the ability to purchase "Fast food" as an indication of luxury and permanent fixtures. City officials are motivated by food safety concerns and their aspirations for a "modern" city to replace the 67 traditional food markets with 1,000 supermarkets by 2025. Over three-quarters of the jobs in Hanoi are state-owned. 9% of jobs are provided by collectively owned organizations and 13.3% of jobs are in the private sector. The structure of employment has been changing as state-owned institutions downsize and private enterprises grow. Hanoi has in-migration controls which allow the city to accept only people who add skills to Hanoi's economy. A 2006 census found that 5,600 rural produce vendors exist in Hanoi, with 90% of them coming from surrounding rural areas. These numbers indicate the greater earning potential in urban rather than in rural spaces. The uneducated, rural, and mostly female street vendors are depicted as participants of "microbusiness" and local grassroots economic development by business reports. In July 2008, Hanoi's city government devised a policy to partially ban street vendors and side-walk based commerce on 62 streets due to concerns about public health and "modernizing" the city's image to attract foreigners. Some foreigners believe that the vendors add a traditional and nostalgic aura to the city. The vendors have not able to form effective resistance tactics to the ban and remain embedded in the dominant capitalist framework of Hanoi.
Hanoi is part of the Maritime Silk Road that runs from the Chinese coast through the Strait of Malacca towards the South India to Mombasa, from there through the Red Sea via the Suez Canal to the Mediterranean, there to the Upper Adriatic Sea region to the Northern Italy hub of Trieste with its rail connections to Central Europe and the North Sea.Marcus Hernig: Die Renaissance der Seidenstraße (2018) pp. 112.Jianglin Zhao "21st-century Maritime Silk Road Initiative" (2020), pp. 204.
On Vietnam's Provincial Competitiveness Index 2023, a key tool for evaluating the business environment in Vietnam's provinces, Hanoi received a score of 67.15. This was an improvement from 2022 in which the province received a score of 66.74. In 2023, the province received its highest scores on the 'Labor Policy' and 'Time Costs' criterion and lowest on 'Access To Land' and 'Proactivity'.
Two master plans have been created to guide Hanoi's development. The first was the Hanoi Master Plan 1990–2010, approved in April 1992. It was created out of collaboration between planners from Hanoi and the National Institute of Urban and Rural Planning in the Ministry of Construction. The plan's three main objectives were to create housing and a new commercial center in an area known as Nghĩa Đô, expand residential and industrial areas in the Gia Lâm District, and develop the three southern corridors linking Hanoi to Hà Đông and the Thanh Trì District. The result of the land-use pattern was meant to resemble a five cornered star by 2010. In 1998, a revised version of the Hanoi Master plan was approved to be completed in 2020. It addressed the significant increase of population projections within Hanoi. Population densities and high rise buildings in the inner city were planned to be limited to protect the old parts of inner Hanoi. A rail transport system is planned to be built to expand public transport and link the Hanoi to surrounding areas. Projects such as airport upgrading, a golf course, and cultural villages have been approved for development by the government.
In the 1980s, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Vietnamese government had designed a project to develop rural infrastructure. The project focused on improving roads, water supply and sanitation, and educational, health and social facilities because economic development in the communes and rural areas surrounding Hanoi is dependent on the infrastructural links between the rural and urban areas, especially for the sale of rural products. The project aimed to use locally available resources and knowledge such as compressed earth construction techniques for building. It was jointly funded by the UNDP, the Vietnamese government, and resources raised by the local communities and governments. In four communes, the local communities contributed 37% of the total budget. Local labor, community support, and joint funding were decided as necessary for the long-term sustainability of the project.
The city's more than six decades of French colonization, and centuries of sociocultural influence from China, have influenced the designs of the old houses in Hanoi. The Franco-Chinese or hybrid architectural styles can be reflected in the front of a house in the co-existence of French-styled columns, Confucian scrolls, the Taoist yin-yang sign, and the Buddhist lotus sculpture.
South of Hoàn Kiếm's "French Quarter" has French colonial landmarks, including the Hanoi Opera House, the Sofitel Legend Metropole Hanoi hotel, the National Museum of Vietnamese History (formerly the École française d'Extrême-Orient), and the St. Joseph's Cathedral. Most of the French-Colonial buildings in Hoan Kiem are later used as foreign embassies. Northwest of the historic center, the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology opened in 1997, and consists of two exhibition halls and an Architecture Garden. Since 2014, Hanoi has been voted in the world's top ten destinations by TripAdvisor. It ranked eighth in 2014, fourth in 2015 and eighth in 2016.
Education levels are higher within the city of Hanoi in comparison to the suburban areas outside the city. About 33.8% of the labor force in the city has completed secondary school in contrast to 19.4% in the suburbs. 21% of the labor force in the city has completed tertiary education in contrast to 4.1% in the suburbs.
Hanoi is the origin or departure point for Vietnam Railways train routes in the country with 6 national railway lines passing through the city with a total length of . The Reunification Express (tàu Thống Nhất) runs from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City from Hanoi station (formerly Hang Co station), with stops at cities and provinces along the line. Trains depart Hanoi for Hai Phong and other northern cities. The Reunification Express line was established during the French colonial rule and was completed over a period from 1899 to 1936. The Reunification Express between Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City covers a distance of and takes approximately 33 hours.
In decades, motorbikes have overtaken bicycles as the main form of transportation. The increasing number of cars is the main cause of gridlocks, as roads and infrastructure in older parts of Hanoi were not designed to accommodate them. On 4 July 2017, the Hanoi government voted to ban motorbikes entirely by 2030 to reduce pollution, congestion, and encourage the expansion and use of public transport. The number of vehicles registered in Hanoi as of July 2022 is over 7.6 million, including more than 1 million cars, over 6.4 million motorcycles of and 179,000 electric motorbikes. This figure does not include vehicles of the armed forces, diplomatic missions and other localities' vehicles operating in Hanoi. People on their own or traveling in a pair who wish to make a fast trip around Hanoi to avoid traffic jams or to travel at an irregular time or by way of an irregular route may use "xe ôm" (literally, "hug bike"). Motorbikes can be rented from agents within the Old Quarter of Hanoi.
There are two Hanoi Metro in Hanoi, as part of the master plan for the future Hanoi Metro system. Line 2A opened on 6 November 2021, while Line 3 began operations on 8 August 2024.
On 6 November 2018, it was announced that in 2020, Hanoi would become the host of the first FIA Formula 1 Vietnamese Grand Prix on a street circuit on the outskirts of the city. The race was initially postponed and later cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the inaugural edition of the event postponed to . The Grand Prix was removed from the 2021 calendar because of the arrest of Hanoi People's Committee Chairman Nguyễn Đức Chung on corruption charges unrelated to the Grand Prix. As a result, the race was permanently cancelled.
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