The Only Hue To See Hue (Part 1)

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Today is all about Hue. Correctly pronounced “hway’. Until 1945, this was the capital of Vietnam. The seat of power of the Vietnamese royal family. That’s why an ancient Citadel complex can be found here known as the Purple Forbidden City. In many ways, it’s like the one in Beijing.

Today we will also be sampling an alternative form of transport. Just to mix things up a bit.

So it was yet another early start for our visit to Hue’s forbidden city. And to add to our excitement, we decided to go by cyclo. These are three-wheeled, pedal-powered contraptions invented by the French as an alternative to the rickshaw. They also add yet more insanity to the traffic mix in Vietnam. They are a languid form of transport that travel at no more than 5mph or so. The fact that you are sat forward of the driver and effectively become the bumper of the vehicle didn’t prevent the peddling pilot from mixing it with the rush hour chaos. Almost as if a cyclo is as impregnable as a Sherman Tank. They’ll take on all-comers be they buses, coaches or buzzing swarms of scooters. What do they care? They have a lovely plump tourist acting as a copiously stuffed airbag. All they have to do is point and pedal. The rest I suspect is left to fate.

And fate played us a winning hand delivering us safely to Hue’s forbidden city.

Known as the Citadel, it was the seat of power of the largely-ceremonial Vietnamese Nguyen Royal Family. The extensive network of buildings and structures housed and serviced a hermetically sealed society of royals, mandarins, eunuchs, concubines and courtiers.

Here they played out the elaborate rituals and strict royal protocols that made up the imperial admin’. This was a detailed set of laws, customs and codes designed to honour and serve the king who by the mid-twentieth century was little more than a totem under the administration of the French imperial machine.

After WW2, and the changes that ensued after that, the Royal‘s fate was sealed, and the forbidden city became a mere anachronism. A symbol of a past that would never return. The Citadel became an irrelevance.

Until 1968 that is. In January that year, the Viet Cong launched its most significant challenge so far to secure a victory in the ongoing war of attrition. It became known as the Tet offensive and saw some of the bloodiest battles of the American war.

The Citadel was an epicentre of brutal hand to hand fighting with frequent aerial bomb raids that destroyed many of the buildings reducing them to rubble. The offensive also saw many summary executions of collaborators of the ’puppet’ southern Vietnam republic making it a notorious war crimes black spot.

That's why Hue’s name will always live in infamy as a hotspot of some of the worst violence of the war.

Talking of hotspots, today was a scorcher. With the temperature moving into the mid-thirties it made our tourism hot and hard going. Our whole group was starting to wilt. I was feeling particularly crusty having used up my entire supply of T-shirts, Wendy, well on the mend, still felt a little weary and was ready for a lie-down. Mark was now taking on his distinctive ‘Wall’s sausage pink‘ colour, and Carolyn looked like she’d dressed for a Mancunian winter such was her desire to avoid the sun.

After a couple of hours wandering around It was time to get a taxi back to the Moonlight Hotel and enjoy a bit of air con, a spot of lunch and drop some clothes off at the local laundry.

You'd think that would be an entirely sufficient day of tourism, but that’s only the half of it. We still had lots to do and another form of transport to try. More on that tomorrow.

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