Things to do
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Dong Ba Market
Traders have worked this riverside market beside Trang Tien bridge since the nineteenth century, and it is still where the city buys its fish, rice and shrimp paste. An upper floor sells conical hats woven with poems that appear when the brim is held to the light. Stalls serve bun bo Hue from dawn, and the aisles narrow as trade picks up.
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Imperial City
Gia Long began the citadel in 1804, and ten emperors governed from behind its moat and brick walls until the dynasty ended. Fighting during the Tet Offensive flattened much of the inner Forbidden Purple City, and restoration has been running ever since under a UNESCO listing. The ground inside is wide and shadeless, so mornings suit it and three hours inside is a fair allowance.
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Perfume River
Named for a scent said to come off orchids washing down from the forests upstream, the Huong flows through the middle of the city, dividing the citadel on the north bank from the station and the hotels on the south. Dragon boats work the water up to Thien Mu pagoda and on towards the tombs. A wooden walkway along the south bank fills with walkers after dark.
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Thien Mu Pagoda
An octagonal brick tower of seven storeys, raised in the 1840s on a bluff above the Perfume River, stands over a monastery founded more than four centuries ago. Behind the main hall the monks keep the blue Austin car that carried Thich Quang Duc to Saigon in 1963, where he burned himself in protest. Boats from the city tie up at the landing steps below the tower.
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Tomb of Khai Dinh
Khai Dinh spent eleven years on his own hillside tomb and built it in concrete, blackened now by weather, with dragon balustrades climbing past terraces of stone mandarins. The burial hall inside is a shock of coloured glass and porcelain mosaic under a painted ceiling, a gilded statue of the emperor over his remains. The stairs are steep and the site is compact.
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Tomb of Minh Mang
Symmetry is the point here: one axis runs from the gate through courtyards, a stone honour guard, a crescent lake and three bridges to a sealed burial mound in a walled pine wood. Minh Mang chose the ground, and his successor finished the work in 1843. It lies furthest upriver of the three great tombs, which makes a boat the pleasant way to arrive.
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Tomb of Tu Duc
Tu Duc built this walled park while he was alive and wrote poetry in a pavilion over its lotus lake, so it reads as a retreat first and a grave second. Conscripted soldiers dug the ground, and their anger became a failed plot against him. Where the emperor was actually buried went unrecorded. Pine shade makes it the coolest walk among the royal tombs.