A place may be physical and felt by the textures and contours of its physical embodiment: see Textures of Hanoi. A place is also unique by the culture which takes root and grows in it, and the people who consciously and unwittingly shape that culture, a sort of institutional memory of the people who inhabit that space. It is, I think, inevitable that the unique physical geography of the place forms part of the contours of the people’s social milieu.
A waterfall in a hilly countryside, for instance, is not merely a geographical feature or attraction, but the locus in which people make a livelihood, and find communion. The beautiful limestone caves in the islands of Ha Long Bay are not merely economic resources but the dotted edges of a vast oceanic home of the sea nomads. Their children somersault into the water like fish spinning out of the sea. And there are the H’mong and Dao people (and other ethnic minority groups) at Sa Pa who journey everyday to the resort town donned in their distinctively coloured ethnic costumes in hope of dignified economic transactions with tourists. The elderly traveller who begins his day early by reading the newspapers and eating pho along a quiet street in the city. And the occasional tourist who is forced to take shelter in the generous hut of a corn farmer as they watch the rain fall, the rain which fall on all peoples, without distinction of economic status, country, language or ethnicity.
They are the people who make Hanoi.
Check out the rest of the photos here.