Graham Greene stayed there. And so did Joan Baez, Jane Fonda and Charlie Chaplin. And then came Donald Trump. The Hotel Métropole in Hanoi has seen its share of dictators and peacemakers and novel writers and artists in its 121 years of serving as the pre-eminent hotel of Hanoi. And today, the ghosts of the Métropole’s fraught past roam the halls in low-ceiling corridors lit by flickering glass sconces and rise up from a concrete bunker that still rumbles in the night if you press your ears to the wall.
The location where “pousse-pousse” pullers once ran the dusty muddy tree-lined boulevards is now lit with glittering shopping venues – fashions straight from Paris designer houses and elegant boho cafes serving up French brews. Sidewalk pho sellers share paths with Hanoi’s spilling scooter presence whipping by in an incessant buzzing, an infestation of aluminum and rubber pests that are then parked on the sidewalks, pedestrians be damned. And the galleries, boutiques and exquisite dining establishments manage through the mayhem, even in this chic part of town. The sidewalks are the city and all comers are welcomed.
But it does not take much to yawn back to another age where the Hotel Métropole was the only luxury venue in the hot town of Hanoi and the only place to get a spiked cocktail – with ice. The French were in full form, armed with all their colonial intentions and grabbing at the rice, coal, rare minerals, and rubber proffered from Vietnam’s earth and climate. There were populations ripe for the conversion to papal law. And even then, the Vietnamese were having none of it. Resistance be damned, however. Visiting European dignitaries needed a stately place to sleep and a growing nation of alcoholics needed a watering hole. When the Hotel Métropole opened in 1901, it was all of that.
Initially, Grand Métropole Hotel had 109 rooms (unlike today’s sizeable count of 363 rooms and suites), the Métropole opened in the throes of France’s Belle Époche and nearly immediately began accruing a reputation. Air Orient, which eventually became Air France, connected Hanoi with Europe as early as 1929. The Hanoi Opera House, that opened in 1911, was modelled after the icon in Paris with some 900 seats and located only a few blocks from Hotel Metropole. A few years later the hotel opened the city’s first cinema. Suddenly Hanoi was Asia’s new center of culture and sophistication and the skinny profile of coastal Indochine was on the map.
By the 1930’s the lobby of the Hotel Métropole was quite the epicenter of intrigue, wealth and the crossroads of Vietnam’s Who’s Who. The Nac-Soda comprised of Cognac and fizzy water was born, and the changing occupants, be they French, Japanese or Chinese, ordered these up in doubles. The Bamboo Bar continues to serve these legions, only these days they tend to be mining company executives, optimistic entrepreneurs and curious tourists. Local residents might prefer the more modern digs to be found at the Marriott nearby or along the ambient streets of Hanoi’s Old Town overflowing with young people and a thriving arts scene.
But as an entrenched dowager unconcerned with such matters, the Hotel Métropole looks onward to some invisible point in the distance, past the din, past the bustle of tourists coming in for a nip at the pool bar or on a walking tour of the city’s present and past. This grand dame has seen other days, some better, but mostly bigger and worse and she is a survivor who may choose or choose not to share her tales.
She came up through the thrumming of Ho Chi Minh’s momentum, watching the French leave after Dien Bien Phu and the Americans come 10 years later. But the Americans did not come without consequence. In 1967 the bombing started. Vietnamese residents of Hanoi scattered into mini street shelters while the guests of the Métropole sipped their coffees and Cognac. Hotel staff were armed with rifles to shoot any plane that flew low enough, but without much result. A 600-square-foot concrete bunker was burrowed under the pool bar and 40 lucky guests would be able to crawl in and out of it until the bombing stopped. Jane Fonda was among those visitors in the early 1970s, hosted by the North Vietnamese command. And the whole world was watching. Joan Baez, too, visited the hotel that year during what became known as the Christmas Bombings in what is widely labeled in these parts as The American War. She penned her poetic ballad, “Where are You Now, My Son,” between sirens and explosions. Some 20,000 tons of explosives were dropped by hulking B52s over Hanoi that week, many of them in Hoan Kiem Lake just four blocks from the Hotel.
The Americans, like the French before them, eventually left. And the Hotel Métropole in Hanoi went into disrepair and closed. Gone were the luxuriating tourists. Gone was Ho Chi Minh. There was a country to build and a population in poverty to tend. A gallery of plaques explaining the hotel’s history seems to end there. It lists the notorious guests of yesteryear like a Vietnam monument listing the dead of a different kind. And the bunker, unearthed in 2011 in more affluent times as the hotel sought to reclaim its former glory, made a prominent tour attraction. Celebrities like Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, came not with pens or pads but with paparazzi.
President Clinton stayed at the Hotel Métropole and so did Donald Trump. A new wing, the Opera Wing came up in the mid 1990s and suites were given the names of the notables: Charlie Chaplin, Graham Greene, Sommerset Maugham, Presidential. The hotel became a Pullman, an Accor and eventually the Sofitel Legend Métropole. There is a spa there now, small but exclusive. Embarrassingly robust buffets serve breakfast and dinners with western, Asian and Indochinese choices to the tourists, while Le Beaulieu Restaurant and The Spices Garden cater to the old and new money flowing through Hanoi’s swarming streets of gold.
The hotel’s newish lobby gets all the attention now, bright and busy with dazzling red carpeting. The elevators work. The halls bustle with service attendants. The hotel’s receptionists insist there are no ghosts. But I beg to think otherwise.
I walk through the bleached corridors away from the chaos of the Opera Wing and step back, back into the quiet … a portico into an alternative era at the Grand Métropole Hanoi. No one walks here. The walls are still. A door to the outside takes me to a garden and a glassed-in courtyard dining room. But no one is seated there. I walk up a winding wrought iron staircase to a rooftop patio that is empty as well. The corridor continues, dimming as I go, until a reach a room. It is wood-paneled like a 19th century dining car and has large leather chairs with a pull rack for papers to be opened wide and perused while eyeing the portico and listening in on conversations. But there are no papers, only some throwaway fashion magazines horribly out of date. French glass bottles and some antique China plates line the standing antique cabinetry for reasons unclear. The lobby continues on in low-slung ceiling moldings over marble floors, a tall porcelain vase here, a painting there – this one of a Vietnamese boy from a photo that was painted by Joan Baez on recent revisit of her past. Nothing stirs, nothing visible. Just a lone desk manager checking out a lost traveler.
I walk the halls seeking sounds, words, messages, music. I find only silence of a grand past bombed and then buried, pulled from sleep now on occasional for the few curious souls that come this way. The bombs ceased long ago, but can be heard now in faint percussive echoes by those who move through the distances and bother to remember. The motor scooters parked on the sidewalk cover the holes and block the walls where fragments are still missing. School girls go arm in arm from café to café for that sweet egg-infused drink known as Vietnamese coffee that was invented in 1946 only meters from where I stand.
The malls are crowded now with a rising population of middle class browsers. They offer friendly greetings and remind us, those who are old enough to know, not to weep, not to apologize …and then they take a giggly selfie with us to show their friends.
Leave a Reply