The sound comes, a dry rasp like a thumb drawn slowly across a plastered wall. It is cotton on paper. A tuft no bigger than a lentil is wound round the end of a bamboo toothpick, rolled in black powder, and set down on a sheet that is not smooth. The powder does not flow the way ink does. It sits on the grain and has to be worked into it, a little at a time. Where the tip lifts, a fine black dust stays behind on the paper, and a little of it stays on the fingers too.
The handle is whatever was close by: a chopstick cut short, the stem of an incense stick. Copper wire holds the cotton on, and for finer work a scrap of eraser takes its place. Almost none of it was made for the purpose. The black comes from a kerosene lamp left to burn smoky, with a funnel held over the flame to catch what rises, and it smells faintly scorched.
Beside the sheet lies a photograph no larger than a palm. Its edges have gone soft where it has been held, and the faces in it have gone soft with them. A magnifying glass rests on top. Under the lens a blur separates into a shirt collar, the shadow under a jaw, an eye with nothing in it yet. Two or three days of this make one portrait.
On the finished sheet the lightest places are not painted. The white is the paper, left alone, and every highlight on a cheekbone or a collar marks a spot the cotton was kept away from.
The glass, I assumed, was there to rescue the photograph. Painters in this trade describe being handed people they have never met, in a print this small or in nothing more than a relative’s words across a counter. Rescue, then, toward what?
The craft is called vẽ truyền thần Hà Nội: drawing, in Hanoi, so that a person’s thần (spirit) is passed on. A painter takes a small photograph, or a relative’s description, and returns a portrait in two colours for the family altar. For some decades this was done in shopfronts along Hàng Ngang, Hàng Đào and Hàng Đường, three streets a short walk apart.
Three Streets
People now past fifty remember the shops as small and tight, their walls hung full of portraits in black powder. Three street numbers recur in the accounts: 47 Hàng Ngang, where Nguyễn Bảo Nguyên kept his shop; 24 Hàng Đường, where Trần Văn Thịnh painted for close to fifty years; 51 Hàng Đào, still associated with the painter Thế Dung.
Thịnh’s own estimate is more than ten thousand portraits, all of them out of one doorway on Hàng Đường. Nguyên came to the trade on 15 August 1960 — a date he later noted in the corner of an early portrait — after leaving his studies in atomic physics at the University of Hanoi through illness. He began by standing in the street on Hàng Đào and watching others draw. Some accounts place him later in the Hợp tác xã Truyền thần Hà Nội, the cooperative that once required two years of training before a painter could take commissions.
The sources disagree on when the trade was busiest. A 2010 article in Người Hà Nội puts the high point in the 1930s, with more than four hundred painters in the city and a photograph still costly enough to belong to the well-off. A 2014 report and Nguyên himself put the surge in the 1960s, hundreds of shops along those three streets. I found no study that decides between them. Both decades share the price of a camera.
Two Colours
Whichever decade, the commission arrived the same way: a photograph too small and too old, or no photograph at all, only a person describing someone across a counter. In one account a customer brought a small picture of his father taken at twenty and asked to have him back at past sixty.
The black is the part of a flame that a lamp is built to avoid. Nguyên describes kerosene burned smoky and caught in a funnel, and speaks of burning rubber and tyres as well. Because the material is essentially pure carbon, he once explained, the colour holds. The white is paper.
Each part of the kit answers something the photograph sets. The print is small, so there is a glass. The detail is a pinprick, so the tip is a toothpick or an incense stick, wound with cotton or a nub of eraser. The eyes receive the most attention: the craft’s own term, điểm nhãn, is dotting the eyes, and the painters in these accounts stress it above the rest.
The glass is not there to restore the print but to read in it what can be carried forward.
The orders that filled the shops in the 1960s had been waiting. A soldier killed at the front, an old parent who died in the rear: families wanted a formal portrait for the altar, and the requests piled up. Nguyên names that backlog as the cause of the surge. The painter Lê Thiết Cương adds the rest of the conditions: a camera still a luxury, households poor, a long war, and a firm custom of honouring the dead.
The money followed. Nguyên puts his own earnings in those years at about 250 dong a month, against the 50 an engineer was paid. In the twelve days and nights of bombing at the end of 1972, the poet Nguyễn Thụy Kha recalls, the painter Mạnh Kiểm drew without a break for family after family.
Poverty was my first word for the two colours. The father at twenty replaced it. Nothing in a small print of a young man can be copied into an old one, and every grey on the sheet is a judgement.
Quieter Rooms
By November 2022 the Old Quarter held a single shopfront, 51 Hàng Đào. The two older painters had gone indoors. Nguyên’s shop at 47 Hàng Ngang burned about three years before that account was written, and he now paints at home. Thịnh left Hàng Đường because the street had grown too loud and wanted quieter rooms; later reports still place him in connection with the old street, and the sources do not fully agree on the move.
The thinning had started long before. From the 1980s and 1990s customers moved to colour prints, then digital files, then software that could do things to a face. Thịnh remembers a month with no customers at all. The shops fell to half their number, then to a few that could be counted on one hand.
As altar orders thinned, the sitters changed. Painters took commissions for artists and public figures. Foreign customers arrived, asking for something made by hand in a black that holds its colour. Nguyên draws from photographs of his own, a highland mother carrying her child, children in traditional dress. Clan temples ask for portraits of men long dead: Lê Văn Thịnh, Ngô Sĩ Liên, Vũ Tông Phan, the last drawn for the 200th anniversary of his birth.
Thịnh says that after the empty years more customers choose truyền thần over computer restoration, because they find the machine’s version lacking hồn (soul). It is his observation, and no count comes with it.
Earlier accounts from the mid-2010s described Nguyên’s hands as already trembling and the work passing to younger painters or to Thịnh. Later reports show him still at the table. Sources disagree, as they do on the peak decade.
In 2014 Thịnh said the trade would die without a next generation, that he would teach anyone who asked, and that an Iranian man had once brought his son to ask. In later years Nguyên said he did not fear the trade fading, because what is lost is later restored and honoured. No source says it has ended.
Vẽ Truyền Thần Hà Nội, Early 2025
As of early 2025 the craft is still practised. Nguyên, then ninety-one, continued to paint daily in a room of less than ten square metres. Thế Dung was still associated with the shopfront at 51 Hàng Đào. A standard portrait takes two to three days. Prices in the early 2020s ran from a little over one million dong to three million for a single portrait, and higher for larger group works; a computer retouch of the same photograph cost far less and took far less time.
The addresses remain a place to begin asking.
The Iranian man’s son was brought to Thịnh to learn, in the 2014 account, and the account stops there. What was he given to hold first: the funnel, the toothpick, or the glass?
October 2026
Bi is a Hanoi-based writer documenting Vietnam's urban textures and cultural margins. About the author.
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