The Scent of the Fragrant Milk Flower of Hanoi - A series of surveys and researches of tour and travel by following its business

Every morning you can see Vietnamese women pushing bicycles loaded with white, red, yellow and orange roses, water streaming from their baskets. Vietnam’s capital grew by absorbing the inhabitants of the surrounding countryside. “The neighborhoods in the city center, along the Red River, were the business districts,” explains historian Philippe Papin in his remarkable book Histoire de Hanoi. “Each one was named for a specific trade: the Street of Sugar, Hemp, Cards, Chicken, Platters, Tin, and so on. To understand the unique aspect of Hanoi commerce, you have to distinguish between the district (phuong), an administrative division defining “a village in a city,” and the street (pho), a plot of land where villagers sell their goods, without any official status at all.”

Is Hanoi a rural city?. Frangipani and magnolias line the chic avenues, home to trendy clothes stores. Hanoi is a city of water, of reflection, of introspection. The Red River acts like a protective rampart, and the city winds around the Lake of the Restored Sword (Hoan Kiem) and the West Lake (Ho Tay), where couples stroll along the banks and people practice tai chi.

Laurent Severac, a Frenchman who’s lived in Vietnam for nearly 20 years, creates botanical perfumes and essential oils, and is also a consultant for a Vietnamese company. He has captured the essence of Hanoi perfectly, “It’s a lush city where you can often catch the scent of the fragrant milk flower. But you can also smell the pagoda trees that are used in perfumes, notably Chanel No. 5. Unlike many Westerners, the Vietnamese have developed a keen sense of smell and are extremely wary of odors. They are drawn to natural products, like orchid flowers, for example.” Severac describes himself as a researcher, a craftsman, an explorer, Flowers are inseparable from Buddhist meditation. At the Temple of Literature, Vietnam’s first university created in the 11th century, lotus flowers bloom in the Well of Heavenly Clarity. Based on the teachings of Confucius, who promoted the study of essential arts such as poetry, music, archery, horseriding, calligraphy and mathematics, this open-air temple seems draped in a red toga, from the color of the walls to the incense sticks and even the statues. The steles with the names of scholars and graduates rest on carved stone turtles, an animal that symbolizes stability.