Hue

Plane got delayed leaving Hanoi but we did eventually get to Hue, the former capital, one of the sites of the 1968 Tet offensive and the site of the heaviest fighting of the war. We, of course, were not fighting anyone. We stayed in a very nice hotel on the river (La Residence, built around the former French embassy), visited the Imperial citadel one day, three imperial tombs and a pagoda the next day, sat around the pool a little, and had three excellent dinners.

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De Toqueville: “In a democratic community individuals are very powerless; but the State which represents them all, and contains them all in its grasp, is very powerful. … In democratic communities the imagination is compressed when men consider themselves; it expands indefinitely when they think of the State. Hence it is that the same men who live on a small scale in narrow dwellings, frequently aspire to gigantic splendor in the erection of their public monuments.”

Not bad, especially considering that de Tocqueville wrote that c. 1840, long before the Washington Monument (1885) or Grant’s Tomb (189?) or the Lincoln Memorial (1922) let alone the Arc de Triomphe or the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum. But also not much help in Hue where the issue is how a democratic society represents its aristocratic past. The past in the US is pretty simple, especially in the North: colonies, independence, preserve the union, celebrate democratic capitalism in its various forms (Empire State Building, Golden Gate Bridge, Disneyworld). In France, it’s a little more complicated: How to reconcile a democratic present with an aristocratic past? But the answers are pretty simple: treat it as a symbol of the nation (Versailles) or democratize it (turn the Louvre into a museum open to the public) or commercialize it (chateaux charging admission to support otherwise impoverished aristocrats). In Viet Nam, it’s harder. The recent past is easy: The story line we heard in Hanoi was all about the triumph of the people over the French and the Americans (although not an official word about the Chinese invasion of Viet Nam following the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia). The ancient past is easy, too. The Cham temples—that’s two of their feet Naomi is standing next to—become a minor symbol of past glories (much as, on a bigger scale, Angkor Wat is for Cambodia, the Mayan ruins are for Mexico, and the Roman excavations were for Mussolini, with heavy doses of nationalism thrown in .)
But the Nguyen Dynasty (1804-1955) is a big problem. The first batch of emperors weren’t so great to begin with—lots of poets, lots of concubines, lots of succession issues, no notable accomplishments. The middle ones were even worse: They capitulated to the French in the 1880’s, with some but very limited resistance, and then ruled as French puppets. Bao Dai, the last of the emperors, has to be the worst. Not only was he a puppet of the French, he was also a puppet of the Japanese in 1945, abdicated to Ho Chi Minh the same year, reappeared with the French in 1949 and then was deposed by Ngo Dinh Diem in 1955. The Nguyen capital was in Hue, which is pretty much in the center of the country. In the center of Hue is a citadel (famous for having been captured by N. Vietnamese troops for 3 weeks in 1968), within which was a Forbidden City and then, within that, there’s yet another set of buildings that was reserved exclusively for the emperor, his concubines, and a few eunuchs. On the outskirts of Hue are various imperial tombs, part burial places, part country estates, each used by a different emperor. Except: There was pretty heavy fighting in hue during the French was and very heavy fighting during the American War. It’s hard to know exactly who did what damage but it’s clear that the US bombed parts of the Imperial City and that looters, from which army I have no idea, got away with much of the decoration from the tombs. So, the Vietnamese have a dilemma—to restore or not to restore the city. On the one hand, Hue has huge potential for tourism with the imperial city as the big draw. On the other hand, Hue honors a dynasty nobody in Viet Nam has much interest in honoring. So far, the solution seems to be half-assed. Charge admission, fix up a little, but not too much (and not too well). Certainly don’t worry about authenticity: It’s often hard to tell what’s original and what’s reconstructed (not restored). Much of the tombs are in disrepair and much of the imperial city is in ruins—20th century ruins of 19th century buildings--but, at both, there are places where, for a few dollars, you can rent costumes and pose for pictures on either a throne (the imperial city) or an elephant (one of the tombs).