Imperial City Of Huế

A flag goes up over a fortress on the first night of the lunar new year. It is late January 1968, and soldiers of North Vietnam and the National Liberation Front have just walked into Huế under cover of the Tet holiday. By morning their banner is flying from Kỳ Đài, the flag tower on the river side of the citadel walls. It will stay there for close to a month. Getting it down will cost South Vietnamese and American troops a fight conducted wall by wall, and when it is over, the palace behind those walls will be mostly rubble.

That is the city's most famous month. It had lived through a lot before it.

A Capital Built By Compass And By Frenchmen

The Nguyễn dynasty took the throne in 1802. Its founder, Gia Long, had won a decades-long civil war and, for the first time, ruled Vietnam from the Chinese border to the Mekong delta. He placed his capital neither in the old northern seat of Hanoi nor in the south, but halfway between, on the bank of the Perfume River. The site was chosen by geomancy: a hill called Ngự Bình across the water as a screen, two islets in the river for the dragon and the tiger, the whole city aligned on that axis.

The walls, though, came from Europe. Gia Long had French officers and engineers in his service, and the outer citadel was laid out in the style of Vauban, with angular bastions and a moat, its perimeter running to roughly ten kilometres. Inside that sat a second walled enclosure, the Imperial City, and inside that a third, the Purple Forbidden City, reserved for the emperor, his wives and the eunuchs who ran the household. Three rings, one man in the middle; Beijing's logic at a smaller scale.

Most of what you see today was finished under Gia Long's son, Minh Mạng, in the 1820s and 1830s. The Ngọ Môn gate, the grand southern entrance, is his. So is a commission that kept the court foundry busy for two years: nine bronze urns, cast between 1835 and 1837, each weighing around two tonnes, each dedicated to an emperor, each decorated with seventeen scenes of the country. Rivers, mountains, rice, a cinnamon tree, a warship, the monsoon rain. One hundred and fifty-three reliefs in all. They were lined up in front of the Thế Miếu, the temple of the dynasty's ancestors, and they have not moved since.

Everyone Who Came Through The Gate

The French arrived in force in the 1880s. In July 1885 the palace guard attempted a night attack on the French garrison; it failed, French troops stormed the citadel and looted the palace, and the teenage emperor Hàm Nghi fled to the hills, to be captured and exiled. From then on, emperors sat on the throne at Huế without ruling anything. For sixty years the court was a ceremonial shell inside French Indochina.

The shell cracked on the last day of August 1945. Bảo Đại, the thirteenth and final Nguyễn emperor, climbed to the pavilion above the Ngọ Môn gate, read a short proclamation to the crowd below, and handed the dynasty's gold seal and sword to a delegation sent from Hanoi by the Việt Minh. He is remembered for saying he would rather be a citizen of a free country than the emperor of an enslaved one. One hundred and forty-three years of the dynasty ended on top of that gate.

Fighting between the French and the Việt Minh reached the citadel in 1947 and burned some of its buildings. Then came 1968. When the battle for the city ended after roughly a month, the Purple Forbidden City was almost entirely gone, and of around a hundred and sixty structures in the palace compound only a handful were standing. What happened to the civilians of Huế during that month remains one of the most painful chapters of the war.

The nine urns came through all of it. The looting of 1885, the fire of 1947, the shelling of 1968: two-tonne masses of bronze are hard to carry off and hard to destroy by accident. The timber halls burned; the roofs fell in; the urns stood where the foundrymen had set them down, and their hundred and fifty-three reliefs are as legible today as in 1837. The dynasty's most durable legacy turned out to be its heaviest.

Today

In 1993 the Complex of Huế Monuments became Vietnam's first World Heritage site. Since then the palace has slowly been put back, and in many places that means building rather than restoring. The Kiến Trung palace inside the Forbidden City, reduced to its foundations in 1968, was rebuilt from old photographs and plans and opened to visitors in early 2024. Whether a reconstruction is the same thing as a monument is a live argument here.

Water is the other enemy. Huế is one of the wettest cities in Vietnam; the flood of 1999 turned the inside of the citadel into a lake. The flag tower stands, the Ngọ Môn stands, the nine urns stand. Whose flag flies above them has changed at least five times in two centuries.