Hoan Kiem Lake: The Returned Sword and the City Around It

Hoan Kiem Lake is the hinge of Hanoi. A legend gave it its name, the old merchant town lies north of it, and the French grid begins at its southern tip. Almost every layer of the city stands within sight of its water, and the walk round it, and out into the lanes behind the west shore, needs no ticket.

The name is a legend, and it says so

Hoan Kiem means the Returned Sword. The Viet Nam Government Portal tells the story the name carries: in the fifteenth century, during Le Loi's war against the Ming, a magical tortoise takes back the sword, and Le Loi concludes that the god who lent it wanted it back. Before that the lake was called Luc Thuy, Green Water.

The walk keeps legend and history apart. Le Loi's victory, and his reign as Le Thai To from 1428, are history. The sword and the tortoise are a legend, and a 2019 peer-reviewed study reads the gift of a sword from heaven as a common motif in the founding stories of kings. The small tower on its islet in the middle, the Turtle Tower, is a late-nineteenth-century building from the French period, not a monument from the time of the legend. You see it from the shore.

A brush and an inkstone at the temple door

The walk starts at the gate of Ngoc Son Temple, on its island at the lake's north end. The temple honors Van Xuong, a god of literature and examinations, among others, with the thirteenth-century general Tran Hung Dao at the rear. By the portal's account it began as a temple to Guan Wu and was given in 1841 to an association devoted to Van Xuong. The scholar Nguyen Van Sieu led the fundraising and rebuilding around 1860: the portal dates it 1859 to 1862, other sources a few years later.

On the shore he left a scholar's signature. The Pen Tower is a five-storey stone column shaped like a brush, inscribed Ta Thanh Thien, Writing on the Blue Sky. The arched gate beside it carries a stone ink slab on top. The red bridge to the island is The Huc, which the portal translates as Light of Dawn. The bridge and island are ticketed, 50,000 VND by the city's published fees.

The turtle that was real

The legend's animal lived in the lake. Its last giant softshell turtle died on the afternoon of 19 January 2016, estimated at about two hundred years old. Its body was preserved with German help and handed to the temple's display on 16 March 2019, beside an older turtle caught in the lake in 1967. Our piece on the turtles of Hoan Kiem Lake tells that story in full.

The founder, and a garden with four names

On the east side stands a bronze of Ly Thai To, who made Thang Long his capital in 1010. It is new: the design won a competition in 2002 and was unveiled on 7 October 2004. The garden around it is older than the statue and has had four names since the French period: Paul Bert, Chi Linh after 1945, Indira Gandhi from 1984, and Ly Thai To since 2004. From 1889 to 1945 a statue of liberty stood here.

A tower without its pagoda

On the shore lawn by the post office stands Hoa Phong Tower, the last piece of Bao An Pagoda. Hanoi's governor raised the money from 1842 and building took four years, with bricks from Bat Trang. The French cleared the pagoda in the late 1800s as new streets and offices went in, then demolished its gate in 1898. The first post office across the road was built in the 1890s; the clock tower building you see now dates from after reunification. At the lake's southern tip, Trang Tien runs east: the colonial quarter's first main street, and the start of our French Quarter walk.

Up the west shore, the bronze King Le stands on a stone pillar above a garden raised in 1894. Who cast it is still unknown, and the Hanoi Times calls it one of the oldest preserved monuments in the city.

Three sacred places in the lanes

Behind the west shore the walk turns inland. Ba Da Pagoda, formally Linh Quang, sits down a lane off Nha Tho Street; it houses Hanoi's Buddhist association, and its four stone columns are carved with the four seasons. A few steps on is St Joseph's Cathedral. It was begun in the 1880s by Bishop Paul-François Puginier of the Paris Foreign Missions, built by the Catholic mission and paid for partly by lotteries with works of art as prizes. Its first mass was said on Christmas Eve, 24 December 1886, and it was officially inaugurated late in 1887. Its design followed the mission's church at Ke So, on a smaller scale. Both Ba Da and the cathedral are said to stand on the ground of the old Bao Thien pagoda and tower.

Round the corner, Ly Quoc Su Pagoda honors the monk Minh Khong. The chronicles say he cured King Ly Than Tong in 1136 and was named National Preceptor; the tale of the cure, with a tiger's roar, was written down some three centuries later.

Before you go

The loop is about 2.6 km with fourteen stops and takes about ninety minutes, flat, with one low step. From Friday at 7 pm to Sunday at midnight the roads round the lake have been a walking street since 2016, and the shore fills with people. Across the road from the east shore, a new public square was finishing in November 2026, and a rebuilding of the whole lake area was approved in October 2026 with completion targeted for 2029, so check before you go.

The walk ends across the road from where our Old Quarter walk begins. Walk the loop at your own pace with Hoan Kiem Lake: The Lake of the Returned Sword, stopping and skipping as you like.