Small Group Half-day Tour at Hanoi City with Temple and Mausoleum

Overview

Half a day and four places that between them cover most of what Hanoi has been: a Confucian academy, a revolutionary mausoleum, a French colonial opera house, and a pagoda that predates all of them by a thousand years. Small group, English-speaking guide.

Temple of Literature

One of several temples in Vietnam dedicated to Confucius, to the sages and to scholars — and the site of the country’s first national university. It is a sequence of walled courtyards, each quieter than the last, and the stone stelae standing on tortoises carry the names of men who passed the imperial examinations.

Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum

The resting place of the Vietnamese revolutionary leader, on Ba Dinh Square. It is a monumental building in a wide open space, guarded and formal, and it is the most consequential piece of twentieth-century architecture in the country.

Opera House and Tran Quoc Pagoda

The Hanoi Opera House is an architectural landmark of the city and still a working venue for performance. It is the clearest surviving statement of the French period in Hanoi.

Tran Quoc Pagoda closes the morning. It stands on Thanh Nien Road, on a promontory in West Lake, and with a history of around 1,400 years it is the oldest temple in Hanoi — a red stupa rising over the water, and the calmest stop of the four.

Worth knowing

Cover shoulders and knees for the temple and the pagoda. The mausoleum keeps its own hours and has its own rules — no bags, no photography inside, and it closes for a period each year for maintenance, which is the authorities’ decision and not the operator’s. On those days you still see Ba Dinh Square and the exterior.