SAIGON (HO CHI MINH CITY)

Which?	The Quiet American by Graham Greene (1955)
What?	Historic Vietnamese avenue evoking exoticism and espionage

THE HEAT hangs thick as a shroud. Only the beer is cool. Sipping slowly, you gaze at the road, screwing your eyes against the flat, fierce sun – and against the passage of time. Trishaw bells are now drowned by waspish motorcycles; Versace and Burger King have replaced the silk stores and milk bars. But this old thoroughfare – with its vestiges of vintage grandeur, its constant ebb and flow – still feels like the epicentre of Saigon. A street where blood and secrets were once spilt over seven o’clocktails; where privileged outsiders chewed over the fate of a nation …

The rue Catinat is one of the oldest streets in Saigon, and one that’s had many identities. Originally Sixth Road, in 1865 the French rechristened it Catinat after the warship that helped them conquer Indochina – an unsubtle reminder of who was now in control. After Vietnamese independence from France in 1954, the name was changed to Tu Do (Freedom) Street, and soon thronged with loose-living American GIs who took the freedom at face value. After the Vietnam War, the Vietcong titled it Dong Khoi (Uprising) Street – the name it still bears today.

But it was Catinat when Graham Greene was working as a war correspondent in the city from 1951 to 1954. And it’s this incarnation of the street – opium steeped, battle scarred, on the cusp of change – that forms the spine of The Quiet American. Greene’s tale of world-weary British journo Thomas Fowler, his Vietnamese girlfriend Phuong and the titular US government worker Alden Pyle is a love triangle, murder mystery and political parable set against the backdrop of the First Indochina War. Most of the conflicts between French forces and the communist Viet Minh occurred in northern Vietnam, but the whole country was affected, including far-south Saigon; including the glamorous expat enclave of rue Catinat.

Greene’s Saigon is dangerous, languorous and vividly exotic. Beautiful girls cycle in white silk trousers, locals in ‘mollusc hats’ shoulder pole-slung baskets and fortune-tellers squat under trees with soiled packs of cards. It’s vermouth cassis, opium smoke and the constant dice clicks of games of quatre cent vingt-et-un. Today, rue Catinat/Dong Khoi isn’t so evocatively other. Big brands and sleek malls have moved in. But glimmers of the past remain.

At the top end of Dong Khoi, on Paris Square, sit the red-brick Notre Dame Cathedral – ‘hideous’, according to Greene – and the Central Post Office, a handsome colonial relic with its barrel-vaulted hall and historic maps of South Vietnam and Saigon.

Heading southeastwards down the street, past shiny banks and the occasional old building, you reach the Continental. Built in 1880, this classic hotel is where Fowler always has his 6pm beer on the terrace, and where he first meets Pyle; the bar is indoors and air-conditioned these days, though a handful of tables line the pavement. Greene himself used to stay here, in corner room 214, believing it best placed to observe the happenings down in Lam Son square. In The Quiet American, Lam Son (the Place Garnier) is where a deadly car bomb explodes. It’s also home of Phuong’s favourite milk bar, which Greene based on the real Givral Café – lately demolished to make way for the Union Square mall.

Further down, at 8 Dong Khoi, is the dome-topped Grand Hotel. Dating from the 1930s, this colonial-style edifice had been converted into rented apartments during Greene’s tenure, and served as the model for Fowler’s room over the rue Catinat. After a substantial renovation in 1998, the Grand is now one of the city’s grandest; hard to imagine the opium smoke and black-trousered women chattering on the landings now.

At 7pm, Fowler – like so many of Saigon’s burnt-out expats – would head to the Rooftop Bar of the Majestic. You can still do the same. The hotel opened in 1925 and remains the best place to be at sundown, to sip a cocktail and drink in the cool, unchanging breeze from the Saigon River.