It's good to be the king

I booked a tour to visit the imperial tombs outside of Hue. There are certain disadvantages to being dead. But if you have to be dead, these are pretty good places to rest for eternity. I visited three tombs. This, the tomb of Emperor Khai Dinh, was by far the smallest I visited.


After spending approximately eight kajillion hours on buses during this trip, I'm trying to find alternate means of transportation whenever possible. (I'm sure you'll remember from math class that a kajillion is a million bazillions.) I heard it was possible to visit the tombs by boat. Spending a day on a boat on the Perfume River sounds better than spending it on a bus.

After a couple tourist trap stops we visited the Thien Mu Pagoda, a truly beautiful site overlooking the river from Ha Khe Hill about three miles west of town. This is the entrance, looking up at the seven-storey tall stupa, the tallest in Vietnam.


You can see quite a few tourists here, but you ain't see nuthin' yet. I enjoyed strolling the Imperial Palace partly because there were so few tourists. No such luck here.


I was able to capture a few glimpses of what the place might have looked like as a place of quiet meditation after it was built in 1601.


I was on a cheapie tour so we didn't have a lot of time to stroll the grounds. It was only after the visit that I learned that supposedly on the grounds is the car to which Thich Quang Duc was driven to his self-immolation in Saigon in 1963, as seen in this legendary photograph.


From there we traveled about an hour to the foot of Mount Ngoc Tran, about six miles from Hue, to visit Hon Chen Temple, built by the Chams about 1,000 years ago. The site sits on a hill with an impressive view of the river, but the temple itself is small and has an intimate feel to it.


From there we went to the tomb of Khai Dinh, as seen in the top photo. It's a stone edifice built into the side of a mountain, which to dorks like me calls to mind the city of Minas Tirith in the Lord of the Rings. The weather was overcast that day and lent a gunmetal grey aspect to all the photos, as seen in this spectacular view from the tomb overlooking the surrounding countryside.


You can literally see the air. But even the weather couldn't diminish the almost ridiculous grandeur of the place, perhaps best seen on this particular day inside the tomb.


Ever wonder how incense is made? Yeah, well, me neither. But here it is.


After the tomb we stopped in little village where the stuff is produced. The street is lined with shops that sell incense. The finished products are displayed like floral bouquets.


In the distance are two other shops selling incense on the other side of the road. These same shops sell something else Hue is famous for, the making of the famous Vietnamese conical hat, or non la.


I had seen tourists in Southeast Asia wearing these hats, which struck me at the time as a little silly. Imagine my delight, then, when I arrived in Vietnam and discovered that people here actually wear them. It makes all the sense in the world. They are virtually weightless and block all sun from the face and neck.

It's one of the things I love about this country: It looks exactly the way I imagined it. Parts of Thailand, by way of comparison, look like Myrtle Beach. Nothing against Myrtle Beach, but if I want to see it I'll drive to South Carolina, not fly halfway around the world.

From there we went to the main stop of the day, the tomb of Tu Doc. All constructions on the grounds include the word Khiem ("modesty") in their names, which couldn't be more ironic considering there are nearly 50 buildings on a site the size of a small town. The surrounding wall is more than a mile in circumference.

This building would make a decent-sized house, but Xung Khiem Pavilion is where the emperor would go to write poetry.


On the right is a small island that was stocked with game for the emperor to hunt. I couldn't help but laugh imagining the emperor sitting in quiet contemplation, spending hours crafting a poem, then grabbing his gun, crossing the lake and blowing some poor monkey's head off.

Obviously if the emperor was writing poetry and hunting he wasn't quite dead yet. It was his final resting place, but he started planning the tomb long before his death in 1883. The site served as a retreat during his lifetime.

The history of this tomb is quite interesting. The king had over a hundred wives and concubines but no children! He may have become sterile from smallpox. Or he may have been cursed. That apparently was his opinion, which is part of the reason he wanted another palace to live in.

He required so much labor and increased taxes so much to build the tomb that he had to suppress a coup.

With all the buildings and lakes and gardens and canals and islands and so on and so forth the actual tomb was a bit anti-climactic.


Maybe that's because he's not actually buried there! After building this elaborate resting place the king was buried somewhere else. No one knows where. The guy definitely had a flair for the dramatic, as seen here in this building. It's called the Stele Pavilion for the giant stone slab in the center, which is about twice as tall as the tourist standing next to it.


The stone is inscribed with the king's epitaph. Normally it would fall to his heir to write it, but because the king was childless he had to write it himself. He wasn't the most subtle guy, so of course the stele is the largest of its type in Vietnam. The stone was brought from a quarry over 300 miles away and took four years to complete the trip.

To the right is a type of tree I'd never seen before. The girl at my hotel told me it's called a su tree, although that's not a very good spelling, because to pronounce it in Vietnamese requires using a vowel sound that doesn't correspond to an English letter. The trees only have leaves and flowers at the tips of the branches, which are rounded on the end like stubby fingers.

Hue Imperial City

The main attraction in Hue is the Imperial City, a walled enclosure that was home to the Nguyen Dynasty. It was modeled after the Forbidden City in Beijing and so the inner sanctum, where only the royal family was allowed, is called the Purple Forbidden City.

The entire complex is inside a bigger enclosure called the Royal Citadel, with a perimeter wall almost five miles long.

One of my goals on this trip was to lose all the weight I gained after my second back surgery. I hoped to lose 40 pounds. By the time I left Nepal I'd lost 60! But since I came to Southeast Asia all I've done is sit on buses and chow down on the wonderful (and cheap) cuisine. I wanted to do a walking tour of the Citadel and try to burn off some of the weight I've put on since I left Nepal.

Sudden changes in the weather tend to aggravate my old back injuries. The weather in central Vietnam had been surprisingly cool before I got to Hue. But I awoke on my first full day here to a hot, humid and smoggy day. My back was acting up, so I was feeling creaky and grumpy when I left my hotel.

I walked for a while before I realized I was not in the right frame of mind or body for a long day of walking in the hot sun. I'm glad I waited to tour the Citadel. This is the Thuong Tu Gate on my first day.



Here it is the following day.



I'm glad I decided to take a rest day. I spent a full day walking, which is really the only way to get to know a city.

The main entrance to the Imperial City is the Ngo Mon Gate, on the southern wall of the city, just opposite the flag tower.

Above the stone wall is the Belevedere of the Five Phoenixes, where the emperor would sit for official functions.

Once through the gate you cross a bridge over to the Thai Hoa Palace. I enjoyed touring the grounds partly because, unlike the Forbidden City, the place wasn't mobbed with tour groups. This photo was taken from the main entrance and there is exactly one tourist in the picture.



This palace has been completely restored. There's a short video with a really cool digital re-creation of what the complex would have looked like when it was used.

Which wasn't that long ago. It's tempting to use the word "ancient" to describe the grounds, but it was all built in the early 1800s. It looks old, in part, because it was allowed to fall into disrepair when the Communists took control of the country. It was neglected as a symbol of Vietnam's imperial past.

But now the city is a UNESCO World Heritage site. Much of the palace is being renovated. Those areas are not off-limits.



It's okay to see areas that are under construction, but it's sad to see areas of the complex that are neglected, including some places that are literally used as trash dumps.


Just to the right of this is an abandoned garden. I walked in and found two elephants.


I felt a little bad for them. They were chained in place with no food or water. I could see scars on this guy's back from the howdah, the chair that is strapped to his backs for tourists to sit in. I could have walked right up to him but a couple guys in a nearby hut, who I assumed to be the mahouts, or drivers, waved me off. It probably wasn't too smart to stand next to an unhappy bull elephant, even if he was staked to the ground.

In some places the unrestored, weatherbeaten buildings had a fun, haunted house kind of look.


In other places there were gardens and canals where, with no other tourists present, it was easy to imagine the emperor strolling and enjoying the peace and quiet.


Other buildings showed the French colonial influence. I didn't realize until I looked at this picture that there's an elderly woman sitting in the hut on the left.

Hue

After Hoi An I took the train to Hue. As your excellent host Wayne Campbell would say, it's pronounced hway. Yes, hway. Party on, Garth.

In one of those "I can laugh about it now" stories I took a taxi from Hoi An to Danang and then the three-hour train ride to Hue because I heard the route traces the coastline and the views are spectacular. Unless, of course, you're sitting on the aisle seat, facing backwards, next to a girl who is apparently the only one on the train not interested in the scenery.

People on the other side of the aisle were standing on their seats trying to see the view down the precipitous hillsides to the ocean crashing on the rocks below. I saw almost nothing, because the girl next to me closed the curtain as soon as we left the station and promptly fell asleep against the window.

Hue is perhaps best known to Americans, if at all, as the sight of a furious battle that began as part of the Tet Offensive in 1968. The city was important for geographical and historical reasons. Hue is just south of the DMZ, the line that split Vietnam into the US-allied south and Communist north. It also had symbolic importance as the spiritual center of Vietnam since it was the imperial capital of the Nguyen Dynasty from 1802 to 1945.

Because of its importance it suffered mightily during the wars with the French and US; because of its location near the coast it has taken a beating from Mother Nature's occasional typhoon; and because of its imperial past the Communist government essentially left its historical monuments to rot when the country was reunified in the wake of the withdrawal of American forces.

Recently, though, acceptance of the city's historical importance (and the tourist dollars at stake) has led to something of an official change of heart and restoration of the city's monuments.

The most notable of which is the Citadel, the walled inner city that was home to the royal family, which I'll cover in a separate post.

I did a walking tour through the city, which took me past the Military Museum, where US weapons captured during the war are displayed.



There is an understandable bias to the signs. This one says:

M48 TANK WITH ARTILLERY OF THE US EQUIPPED TO PUPPET SOLDIERS FOR RAIDING AND KILLING THE PEOPLE. IN THE SPRING 1975 CAMPAIGN, CAPTURED BY THE LIBERATION ARMY AT PHU BAI ON 25 MARCH 1975.

After passing the Military Museum you come to the Ngo Mon Gate to the Imperial City, from which there's a nice view of what is probably the city's most iconic sight, the Flag Tower. This is part of the Citadel wall and sits right on Song Huong, the impossibly poetically named Perfume River.


Because of its position on the river the flag is visible from all over the city.

After visiting the Imperial City I walked around the footpath that follows the moat around it...

... and down to a canal to see a sampan village. Sampans are traditional Vietnamese house boats. A sampan village then is a neighborhood where everyone lives on these boats.


As I walked down the canal I passed this striking sight, which reminded me of sea urchins I've seen while scuba diving.


This is another thing Hue is famous for: incense. The sticks are drying in the sun just above the bank of the canal. Everywhere in the city I saw these juxtapositions of old and new, traditional and modern. Here is a garden on one side of the canal. with a man paddling a boat in the canal, and motorbikes whizzing by on the opposite side.