Huế: bên ngoài Kinh thành
Imperial City · Thien Mu · Tu Duc Tomb · Perfume River
Ảnh minh họa vùng hoặc phương tiện, không phải điểm dừng cam kết. ©
Spend the cool morning inside the citadel on foot. The bike then links riverside streets and royal tombs; choose one tomb to explore properly instead of collecting quick photo stops.
Phú Xuân, a capital chosen three times
The land Huế stands on came to Đại Việt in 1306 as a wedding dowry from Champa, and it has been a seat of power ever since somebody first looked at the bend of the Perfume River and decided it would do. Under the name Phú Xuân it became a provincial capital in 1687, the capital of Đàng Trong — the southern half of a divided country — from 1738 to 1775, and then the capital of the Tây Sơn under the emperor Quang Trung after their army took it in 1786. In 1802 Gia Long ended the wars, founded the Nguyễn dynasty and made Huế the capital of the whole of Vietnam. It stayed that way until the last emperor, Bảo Đại, abdicated in 1945; in between, the French turned the court into the administrative capital of their protectorate of Annam. Today Huế is one of Vietnam's centrally governed cities, with about 1.43 million people and 4,947 square kilometres of coast, lagoon and mountain behind it.
A city drawn with a compass
Gia Long did not simply move in. Geomancers were consulted on where the new capital should sit, the citadel was begun in 1803 and the palace inside it in 1804, and thousands of workers raised a Vauban-style fortress whose walls and moat run some ten kilometres around. Inside that outer ring a second wall and a second moat enclose the Imperial City, the Hoàng thành, and inside that again lies the Purple Forbidden City, where only the emperor, his family and the eunuchs of the household could go. Minh Mạng remodelled and enlarged the whole thing in 1833, and the shape you ride around today is his. It is worth understanding the arrangement before you arrive, because the scale is deceiving: from the outside the citadel looks like a park with a flag tower, and the first courtyard beyond the Meridian Gate is already a fifteen-minute walk from the car park.
What 1968 took
On the morning of 31 January 1968 a division-sized force of the People's Army of Vietnam and the Viet Cong attacked Huế as part of the Tet Offensive and held most of the city. The Battle of Huế that followed was one of the longest and bloodiest of the war, fought street by street and then wall by wall inside the citadel. Of the 160 buildings that stood in the Imperial City, ten major structures survived: the Thái Hòa palace, the Thế Miếu temple, the Hiển Lâm pavilion and a handful of others. During the occupation an estimated 2,800 to 6,000 civilians and prisoners of war were killed in what is remembered as the massacre at Huế. The empty, grassed rectangles you walk across inside the walls are not gardens; they are the footprints of halls that are gone. Restoration has been running since the 1990s, one building at a time, and it is the reason the site is on the World Heritage list at all.
Tombs are not graves here
The emperors built their tombs upriver, in the hills, and lived in them first. Tự Đức's took three years, from 1864 to 1867, and served as a retreat long before it served as a burial place: he boated on its lake, hunted on the island in the middle of it, and sat in the Xung Khiêm pavilion composing poetry in the company of his wives. He had 104 of them and no son — probably the result of smallpox — and the stele in his tomb, which he wrote himself, is unusually frank about it. Khải Định's is the opposite building in every way. Started on 4 September 1920 and finished in 1931, eleven years of work and six years after his death, it was completed by his son Bảo Đại out of concrete, steel, iron and slate, with a blackened exterior and an interior covered in glass and porcelain mosaic. Two emperors, two ideas of what permanence looks like, fifteen minutes apart on the bike.
The bell you can hear ten kilometres away
Five kilometres upriver from the citadel, on the north bank, the Thiên Mụ pagoda was founded in 1601 by Nguyễn Hoàng, the first of the Nguyễn lords, on a hill above the water. The name comes from a local story of an old woman in red and blue — the celestial lady — who was said to sit on the hill and promise that a lord would come and build there. In 1710 a great bell of more than two tonnes was cast for it; it is said to carry ten kilometres. The octagonal seven-storey tower that everyone photographs was added in 1844 by Thiệu Trị for his grandmother's eightieth birthday and is the city's unofficial emblem. The whole ensemble — citadel, tombs, pagodas — went onto the UNESCO World Heritage list on 11 December 1993, and the court music, nhã nhạc, followed in 2003. Ride it in this order and the day works: the citadel on foot while it is cool, the river road out, one tomb properly rather than four in a hurry, and the bridge at dusk.
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Hướng dẫn viên thuộc đội của chúng tôi, tuyến đường chúng tôi đã tự chạy, và bạn có một kênh trò chuyện với chúng tôi suốt chuyến đi.
- Hướng dẫn viên từ đội của chúng tôi
- Những tuyến đường chúng tôi đã tự chạy
- Xưởng của chúng tôi tại 5 thành phố và các xưởng đối tác
- Một kênh trò chuyện với chúng tôi suốt chuyến đi
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- tour
- 71
- hành trình
- 6
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