Long Biên Night Market: The Everyday Heritage of Post-Industrial Urban Life

Translator's Note: This paper, originally written in Vietnamese, uses a form often ascribed to official academic language around heritage. While the author has not specified it, one might assume that the paper is suited for use within a bureaucratic context, perhaps as part of a meeting with cultural officials. The author, however, is not a state official but an experimental musician with deep expertise in Vietnamese folk music. The appropriation of this language might thus be understood as a kind of performative gesture, a way of inhabiting the tone of authority. At the same time, it speaks to how a lot of artists in Vietnam survive and thrive by latching onto the economy of cultural heritage.

I. Introduction

I’ve been to the Long Biên Night Market countless times, and passed by countless of its stalls, but there is one sentence I remember clearly: “The night belongs to us. The day belongs to you.” That line haunts me—as if there were another Hanoi, quiet and resilient, which only lives fully once the city has gone to sleep.

In the historical development of Vietnamese cities, markets have always played a central role, not only as places of exchange but also as sites of social life, collective memory, and cultural symbolism. As urban rhythms entered the post-industrial stage—marked by more flexible forms of labor, the extension of working hours, and the growing divides within the urban fabric—a new form of market gradually emerged and took root in the everyday practices of the people: the night market. Among them, the Long Biên Night Market, nestled beneath the venerable bridge of the same name, stands as a striking case of the quiet yet powerful presence of an ‘everyday heritage’ at the heart of Hanoi’s modern metropolis.

Unlike cultural heritage recognized by the government or celebrated by UNESCO, the notion of everyday heritage points to daily practices, habits, and spaces—informal and unspectacular elements that play an irreplaceable role in shaping community identity. As scholars such as Laurajane Smith (2006) and Sharon Macdonald (2013) have argued, heritage is not simply an object or tradition to be preserved, but rather an ongoing process of constructing and negotiating cultural meaning in everyday life. Within this line of thought, the Long Biên Night Market stands out as a performative space, where practices of nighttime labor, trade, and social life —practices often excluded from official urban planning and development—quietly persist, carrying memory and forging the identities of migrant and working-class communities.

Taking the Long Biên Night Market as its case study, this essay asks: How might the spaces and practices of the Long Biên Night Market be understood as an everyday heritage within the rhythms of post-industrial urban life? By examining its spatial structures, working rhythms, collective symbols, and its resistance to the official narratives of urbanization, this essay seeks to illuminate the multiple cultural layers embedded in the market. In doing so, it challenges narrow conceptions of heritage and calls for a broader, more dynamic, and more humane perspective on the unnamed heritages of contemporary urban life.

II. Theoretical Frameworks and Methodologies

1. Everyday Heritage: Everything We Live Holds Values

When we think of heritage, we often imagine grand monuments or traditional festivals officially recognized by the state or celebrated by UNESCO. Yet heritage can also be something far more ordinary—what we do and participate in on a daily basis. Everyday heritage has no signboards. It is not built to attract tourists. It exists organically within life itself—in how people communicate, how they arrange goods, how they reproduce themselves and how they survive. This kind of heritage does not have to be preserved because it is being lived. Heritage, in that sense, is not only something that has passed by but also what is still unfolding. It is created daily through the ways people interact with one another and with their surroundings. 

2. Space Created by the People Themselves 

The Long Biên Night Market has no formal planning or design. It emerged from the practical needs of the working class. Each night, they arrive, set up temporary stalls, and arrange their goods, generating a vibrant space of exchange. This is precisely how people produce space, not through machines or top-down planning, but in everyday assembly and activities. Vendors have transformed an empty plot of land into a bustling market simply by being there, by living and working in that space. It is striking that they do not own this space in any legal sense, yet they create and sustain it every night. This constitutes a clever and effective form of spatial appropriation.

3. Memory and Identity in an Era of Mobility

Most vendors at the Long Biên Night Market are migrants from other provinces who come to Hanoi to make a living. Even though they often lack city residency registration and thus do not appear in official statistics on city life, they contribute to shaping the nighttime economy, culture, and community of Hanoi. Their identities are not fixed—they carry memories of their hometowns while adapting to urban life. The night market becomes a space where they meet, connect, and sustain a sense of community within an unfamiliar city.

4. Research Approach

To gain a deeper understanding of the Long Biên Night Market, I employed the following methods:

• Direct observation: Visiting the market at different hours of the night to observe how people work and interact.
• Recording personal experiences: Incorporating my own impressions and memories from visiting the market.
• Visual and spatial analysis: Looking at the market as a ‘painting’ to interpret the messages conveyed through the arrangement and decoration of stalls.
• Short conversations: Listening to stories and personal reflections from the vendors.

III. Nightlife at the Long Biên Market

1. A Self-Assembled Space Each Night

The Long Biên Night Market has no gates, no signboards. It appears and disappears like a flowing current. From around 10 p.m., trucks begin to gather beneath the Long Biên Bridge. The yellow light from their headlights, flashlights, and makeshift bulbs creates a unique kind of illumination. This is not the glittering, dazzling light of a bustling city, nor a carefully planned aesthetic. It is the light of necessity—to see the goods, to work, to survive. Each lamp tells a story of having to take care of oneself.

This space is built each night not with bricks or cement, but through the presence of people. They arrive, set up tents, arrange their goods, and the market takes shape. By morning, they leave, and the market disappears. It is a unique kind of architecture—one that exists through time rather than material.

2. Reversed Rhythms: When Night Becomes Day

A statement of temporal ownership: “The night belongs to us. The day belongs to you.” 

The market comes alive around 11 p.m., peaks between 2 and 3 a.m., and gradually quiets as dawn breaks. Its rhythm is completely inverted from the daytime city. When Hanoi sleeps, the market awakens. When Hanoi awakens, the market rests. This is not simply about working night shifts, it is a way of optimizing time. The day belongs to those with greater means and stable jobs, while the night is reserved for those who must fend for themselves and find ways to survive.

3. A Small Community in the Urban Night

The night market is not only a place for trade. It is also where people meet, talk, and share stories. Brief conversations, a cigarette passed from hand to hand, a hammock strung temporarily between two baskets of goods—all create a humble, intimate, and lively space. These moments show that the market is not just a place to earn money, but also a space where people find connection. For migrant workers, being named, greeted, seen, and acknowledged is deeply significant.

4. The Language of Colors and Goods

Each type of product in the market is arranged according to its own order. The red of chili peppers, the yellow of ripe bananas, the green of vegetables all combine to form a vivid and colorful fabric. Interestingly, these colors are not meant to be decorative. They serve to classify items and make quality easily identifiable. This is a market language that is only understood fully by those who work within its carefully arranged stalls. Vegetables, roots, and fruits differ not only in color but also in shelf life and target markets. Each color tells a story about time, value, and destination.

IV. Cultural Values of the Night Market 

1. An Archive of Old Hanoi

Hanoi is changing rapidly. Many informal street markets have been cleared away, craft streets have turned into convenience stores, and collective housing blocks have been demolished. Against this backdrop, the Long Biên Night Market stands like a time pocket, a place that preserves the rhythms and working practices of Hanoi from decades past.

Here, everything is still done in rather rudimentary ways: Vegetables and fruits are sorted by eye, goods are weighed without much precision, and prices are negotiated through experience. These are skills that are gradually disappearing in the age of machinery and technology. The market is not a museum, yet every corner, every way of arranging goods, every sales pitch carries within it the memory of a Hanoi that hasn’t yet been fully modernized.

2. A Living Heritage, Not a Preserved One

Unlike historical relics kept behind glass, the Long Biên Night Market is a living heritage. It is not conserved but enacted daily. Every act of carrying, sorting, or calling out to customers is a way of sustaining and transmitting culture. What is remarkable is that this heritage is not meant for tourists. It exists because of the practical demands of life, as well as the need to support people’s livelihoods. Paradoxically, it is precisely this lack of exhibitionary purpose that makes it so authentic and alive.

3. The Conflicts of Preservation

Despite its profound cultural value, the Long Biên Night Market is a space perpetually at risk of being cleared away. Many areas around the market have already been dismantled on the grounds of obstructing traffic, lacking sanitation, or posing safety concerns. This presents a seeming paradox: spaces rich in social value and deep meaning are not regarded as heritage worth protecting, while structures deliberately built to become monuments are easily recognized and preserved. Such contradictions reflect a narrow conception of heritage—one that prioritizes the beautiful, the official, and the purposefully designed, while overlooking the ordinary, spontaneous, and deeply meaningful spaces that sustain community life.

V. Conclusion 

The Long Biên Night Market, with all its quiet bustle, its makeshift yet enduring rhythms, stands as a vivid testament to the idea of everyday heritage. Though it lacks official recognition, plaques, or legal protection, the market lives on each night in familiar gestures, in the reversed breathing of the city, in memories that cannot be erased.

Through the story of the Long Biên Night Market, we see that heritage is not only a product of top-down decisions, but also arises from the bottom up, from how people live, work, and connect with one another each night. In the context of rapid urbanization, the preservation of spaces like the Long Biên Night Market cannot rest on the erection of heritage markers alone. What is needed is a more flexible, community-centered approach, one that places memory, belonging, and the right to live at its core.

This essay seeks not only to illuminate the value of one marginalized cultural space, but also to open a broader perspective on what everyday heritage might mean—where the small and the ordinary become the true foundations of modern urban identity, and in turn generate distinctive cultural tourism rooted in local life.

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