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Diplomat John Ramsden took a photo once of a bicycle tire resizing shop on Tran Xuan Soan Streetand featured it in his 2016 book “Hanoi: Spirit of Place” that portrayed daily life in the capital more than 40 years ago.

In the 1980s, bicycles were the primary means of transportation and a valuable asset for people. But tires were a scarce commodity, so scarce that sometimes people had to draw lots multiple times to buy just one.

Historian Duong Trung Quoc once wrote: “Owning a bicycle was hard enough; buying replacement parts was even more difficult. Sometimes a person might own a bicycle with a 650 mm rim but be allocated a 680 mm tire by their government workplace, which gave rise to the tire resizing service.

“They would cut the steel wire inside the tire bead, or tanh, and shorten it to fit the rim. There was also a tire retreading trade: salvaging worn-out tires or torn beads, applying layers of raw rubber, and putting them into a hot press mold to continue using them.”