The Metropole Hanoi: A Hotel’s History in Twelve Decades

The Sofitel Legend Metropole Hanoi opened in 1901, a few steps from the opera house that the French were then building in the centre of their new capital of Indochina. It is the oldest hotel in Hanoi and has not closed for long in any period of the city’s history.

The French hotel

The Grand Hôtel Métropole was built by two Frenchmen, André Ducamp and Gustave-Émile Dumoutier. It was the largest and most modern hotel in Indochina, in the white colonial classical style, with green shutters, wrought-iron balconies and a garden court. In 1916 it gave the first film screenings in the country.

Between the wars it was the stopping place of everyone who came through Tonkin. Charlie Chaplin and Paulette Goddard spent their honeymoon there in 1936, after a wedding in Shanghai. Somerset Maugham stayed. In 1951 Graham Greene took a room on his first visit to the north, during the war between the French and the Viet Minh, while gathering the material that became The Quiet American.

The Thong Nhat years

In 1954, after the French withdrawal, the hotel was taken over by the government and renamed Thong Nhat, meaning reunification. It became the official guesthouse for foreign delegations and, during the war with the United States, the lodging of the diplomats and journalists in the city.

In 1964 an air-raid shelter was dug under the garden, with a concrete roof a metre thick. In December 1972 the American singer Joan Baez, who was visiting with a peace delegation, sheltered there for eleven nights and recorded part of a song in it, with the sirens audible on the tape. The shelter was later sealed and forgotten. It was found again in 2011 during work on the Bamboo Bar by the pool, and guests are now taken down into it on a daily tour.

The restoration

By the 1980s the building was in poor condition. It was rebuilt in a joint venture with a French group and reopened in 1992. A second wing, the Opera Wing, was added in 1996 at the back, with 135 rooms in a modern version of the same style. The hotel took its present name in 2009.

It has 358 rooms in the two wings. The original building, now called the Heritage Wing, was closed for 21 months and reopened in March 2024 with its rooms and its three suites, named after Chaplin, Greene and Maugham, restored.

For visitors

The hotel is at the eastern edge of the old French quarter, five minutes on foot from Hoan Kiem Lake. Guests who want the history should ask for the Heritage Wing, where the floors are of dark wood and the corridors creak. Le Beaulieu, the French restaurant, has served since the opening. The pavement café, La Terrasse, and the Bamboo Bar are open to those not staying, and the path of history tour, including the bunker, is offered to hotel guests each afternoon.

The neighbourhood now holds other hotels with a sense of theatre, among them Capella Hanoi, designed by Bill Bensley on the theme of the opera, and the Fairmont, which opened in 2026.