Founded by former New York pediatrician Mark Rapoport and his wife after they moved to Hanoi in the early 2000s, this Ba Đình gallery at 44B Hàng Bún Street is devoted to the antiques and textiles of Vietnam's 54 recognized ethnic groups, with themed rooms including tribal textiles and shamanic ritual objects.
Best for Vietnamese ethnic textiles, jewelry, and ritual objects
54 Traditions Gallery was founded by Mark Rapoport, a former New York pediatrician, and his wife after the couple relocated to Hanoi in the early 2000s and began collecting cultural artifacts from Vietnam's ethnic minority communities. It is now, by its own account, the only gallery in Vietnam dedicated specifically to the arts and material culture of the country's 54 officially recognized ethnic groups. Spread across three floors and seven themed rooms at 44B Hàng Bún Street in Hanoi's Ba Đình district, the collection includes tribal textiles and costumes, Buddhist statues, tribal jewelry, ceremonial swords, ritual scrolls, and ceramic pieces the gallery says were salvaged from centuries-old shipwrecks, alongside dedicated rooms on the Central Highlands and on shamanic tradition. The gallery offers free guided tours led by staff versed in the archaeological and cultural background of the pieces on display. According to the gallery, some of the Rapoports' original finds have since entered institutional collections, including New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and American Museum of Natural History, the Musée du quai Branly in Paris, and the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology in Hanoi.
Gác Xép Bookstore sells secondhand and imported English-language fiction from its Hanoi shop. The store also buys used books and ships nationwide with free delivery over 500,000 VND.
Best for Hanoi bookshop specializing in secondhand and imported English-language fiction
The Bookshelf Hanoi sells English-language books from a French-era house at 8 Nguyễn Chế Nghĩa in Hoàn Kiếm. Founder Hana opened it in January 2018 as a single wooden shelf inside a decor shop on Đặng Văn Ngữ. The shop moved twice before settling on this street in 2021. Shelves run from fiction and poetry to science and cooking, with a pre-loved section for secondhand copies.
Best for English-language books with a pre-loved shelf and children's titles
The Bookshelf Hanoi began in January 2018 as one wooden shelf at 157 Đặng Văn Ngữ. The shelf stood in a corner of Riri Home, a decor shop of twenty square metres. Founder Hana had studied finance. As a student she bought foreign-language books from a shop near Hoàn Kiếm lake whose owner often discounted them for her. She began selling books to pay for more of her own reading. In autumn 2019 the shop moved to 12 ngõ Trần Xuân Soạn. In 2021 it settled at 8 Nguyễn Chế Nghĩa, a street laid out in 1928 near the centre of the city. The same year two sister shops opened as The Mag Shelf and The Goods Shelf. In December 2022 a further room opened at HipHub Cafe near the cathedral. Staff call the shop Seo, a Vietnamese rendering of Shelf. The stock is English-language and covers fiction, memoir, philosophy, science, business, art. A children's shelf and a pre-loved section for secondhand copies sit alongside. Each order goes out with a bookmark and a thank-you card that changes with the season. A 2026 profile in Báo Quốc tế describes the shop as a meeting point where Vietnamese readers and foreign visitors talk across the shelves. Roughly three in ten customers arrive from abroad. The registered company behind the shop is Kệ Sách Thế Giới, owned by Quách Mỹ Hoa, and its filing gives the same address on Nguyễn Chế Nghĩa.
The shop specialises in hand-painted reproductions of Vietnamese propaganda posters, printed and painted in Hanoi on rice paper across war, peace and Ho Chi Minh themes. Expert copyists recreate the bold two-colour graphics of the wartime originals rather than selling fragile antiques.
Best for Hand-painted propaganda poster reproductions
27A Nguyen Cu, Thao Dien, District 2, Ho Chi Minh City
This Thao Dien gallery and archive holds more than 1,000 wartime propaganda and combat artworks alongside roughly 2,000 philatelic pieces and 400-plus vintage photographs, most dating from 1945 to 1985. Reproductions and prints drawn from the collection are sold through its store alongside ongoing exhibition and research programming.
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