Hanoi

Hanoi rewards school groups because its layers of history sit within walking distance of one another: a Confucian academy founded in the eleventh century, a French colonial prison, and the mausoleum of Ho Chi Minh all lie within a few kilometres of Hoan Kiem Lake. For students travelling from Dubai, it offers a Southeast Asian capital reached on a single flight, where the twentieth century is documented with unusual directness and the older city is still legible in its street plan.

The Imperial Citadel of Thang Long, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, preserves both excavated Ly and Le dynasty foundations and the D67 bunker used by the North Vietnamese command, allowing a group to move from medieval archaeology to Cold War strategy on one site. Hoa Lo Prison Museum covers French colonial incarceration and the later detention of American pilots, while the Vietnam National Museum of History and the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology in Cau Giay give the longer view of dynastic rule and the country's fifty-four recognised ethnic groups. The Temple of Literature, the Old Quarter's thirty-six guild streets, the Vietnamese Women's Museum and the B-52 Victory Museum with its downed aircraft wreckage complete a itinerary that needs very little travelling between stops.