Quang Ba Flower Market

Quang Ba is where Hanoi's flowers are traded wholesale, and it runs on a schedule most visitors never see: trucks come in from the growing villages around the city late in the evening, trading builds through the small hours, and by five or six in the morning it is packing up. Buyers are shop owners and street sellers loading bicycles and motorbikes with quantities that look impossible. It is at its largest before Tet, when peach and kumquat move in volume, and on the first and fifteenth of each lunar month, when households buy for the altar. It is a working trade market, not a display.

What you actually see

• A wholesale market at night - trading from around midnight.
• Loading onto bicycles - quantities that should not balance.
• Peach and kumquat before Tet - the year's biggest trade.
• Lunar first and fifteenth - when households buy for the altar.

When to go

Year round, between about midnight and five in the morning. Two hours.

Honest expectations

By dawn it is over - arriving at a normal hour means an empty street. It is a trade market and buying single stems is not really the point. It is wet, crowded and dark. Photography of workers needs asking.

Nearby

West Lake is south; the old quarter is beyond it.