Hue

Wall and moat still enclose a whole quarter of the city. Inside, the Forbidden Purple City was wrecked in 1968 and is foundations now; Thai Hoa palace reopened in November 2024 after three years of work. Shade is scarce; a circuit takes two or three hours.

The seven-tier tower on the bluff went up in 1844, two centuries after the pagoda below it. In a shed behind stands the blue car that took the monk Thich Quang Duc to Saigon in 1963. Boats tie up where the steps begin, so the river lands you at the gate.

You climb 127 steps to reach it. Outside it is blackened concrete; inside, mosaic laid in broken porcelain and glass. Built between 1920 and 1931, it has no garden and no lake unlike the other tombs, only the hillside. The emperor lies under the bronze figure.

The emperor is not buried here. The walls hold a garden of lotus ponds, pavilions and pines where he wrote poetry in his lifetime, and he composed his own memorial text, cut into a stone of some 20 tonnes. Where he was actually put remains unknown.

Emperor Thanh Thai moved the market to this riverside site in 1899. A bell tower marks the middle of the long building, the deeper you go the more stalls of conical hats and sesame candy, and the eating alley at the back fills at lunchtime.

The bench under the roof was built to be sat on. Tran Thi Dao, a village woman, paid for it in 1776 and tiled it against rain and sun, and old men still nap along it in the afternoon. It is 8km east of the city, out among the rice fields.

Built in 1917, it wears a European front with Vietnamese ornament on it. Wall paintings under later overpaint were found and brought back, and what they show is six of the royal tombs. After the abdication of 1945 the Nguyen family moved into this house.

You come in through pine woods and past a half-moon pond. Palace eunuchs paid to enlarge it in 1848 and their graves fill a walled plot behind, the only eunuch cemetery left in Vietnam. Thich Nhat Hanh came back to this temple in 2018 and died here in 2022.

Flat wooden boats with a dragon head on the bow lie tied at the landing. It is about an hour upstream to Thien Mu and you either take a whole boat or buy a seat, and the families who run them live aboard, so souvenirs will be offered.

The court music is still played on the stage of Duyet Thi Duong inside the citadel, a royal theatre built in 1826. UNESCO listed it in 2003 and the ensemble includes a rack of hanging stone chimes; performances run at 10am and 3pm and last about 35 minutes.

The second emperor's tomb sits on the Perfume's western shore, upriver and south of town, its gates, halls and bridges strung on one straight axis. Ponds on both sides mirror the line. Crowds are thinner than at Khai Dinh or Tu Duc, suiting a quiet walk.

A mountain between Hue and Da Nang where the French built a hill station near the 1,450m summit. Ruined villas and waterfall trails remain. September to December brings very heavy rain, and the road is sometimes cut.

A lagoon along the coast northeast of Hue, counted as Southeast Asia's largest lagoon system. Fish traps of bamboo stakes and netting run across the water without end. The famous view is the nets in silhouette at sunset from the Chuon village embankment.

Tunnels in three levels dug by villagers of Quang Tri, a two-hour drive up the coast from Hue, to escape the bombing. The small family rooms and a birthing room survive. Ceilings are higher than at Cu Chi, so you walk less stooped.