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WARNING: Long, rambly post that's a mix of personal experiences, historical summary and hot-take opinionating.
My first glimpses of China were surreal and desolate. The landscape looked positively Siberic in an almost hallucinatory way; dry, dusty fields smothered with snow and ice stretched to the horizon, only interrupted by groups of austere commieblock-filled xiaoqu that seemed almost copypasted, rising out of the surrounding countryside like strange alien monoliths. I was travelling from the international airport to downtown Beijing, and all the way to Dongzhimen the winter sun streamed in through the windows of the carriage, lighting up the interior with a wan glow. After some time spent navigating the Dongzhimen station trying to transfer to a new line (involving an encounter with a genuinely revolting public toilet), I was well and truly exhausted. I made it to the front desk of my hotel as soon as the sun started to set, stumbled my way through a conversation with a receptionist who knew just enough English for me to converse with, got my connection working for just enough time to check in, and dragged myself and all my luggage into the hotel room. I slotted my keycard into the holder just by the door, and every light began to turn on. Inside, it was exceptionally well-insulated to the point it actually felt hot, which was rather surprising considering how chilly it had been outside of the hotel.
Relieved, I spent some time showering and unpacking, then made my way down to the front desk again just to ask if the bottled water in the room was free. Once I got back to my room, the phone by the bed started to ring, and upon picking it up an automated message began to come through informing me that a delivery had been made to me. I opened the door, and found myself staring blankly at a small, kind of cute robot standing in front of the threshold to my room. There was a display on its head with a button that instructed me to "press to open", and upon touching it a panel on the robot slid open to reveal a large hollow space containing two water bottles.
One thing was for sure: I was not in Kansas anymore.
China is one of these rare destinations that's really hard to get any kind of remotely objective take on; it's such a polarising country that anything you read really needs to be taken with a 2 kg block of salt. There is no way to get a somewhat neutral, slice-of-life take on China; not even on YouTube where you might expect to see the equivalent of channels like Abroad In Japan, the country is just so polarising that everything either turns into a SerpentZA-like channel wherein everything in China is awful and nothing is ever allowed to be good, or outright China proselytising. Both sides are extremely committed to their worldviews, and both sides shout extremely loudly - though I will say the China detractors are considerably more loud in the West, which makes sense due to geopolitical anxieties surrounding its meteoric rise; the Place, China meme accurately summarises a whole lot of the discourse around the country. It's a place that has been sensationalised to hell and back, but oddly enough few international tourists actually seem to want to see what it's like for themselves.
I will say that it is not the easiest place to travel, though not for the reasons that other countries are challenging for travellers. Usually travel is difficult due to safety or infrastructure concerns when a country is significantly undeveloped, China is quite the opposite - infrastructure is mostly convenient and reliable and the country is very safe. Rather, the issue here is that the country is its own world that really doesn't seem to care about catering to any laowai not already entrenched within its ecosystem or way of doing things. While it's offered visa-free travel to many countries, reducing barriers for travel, at a minimum you will need to set up Alipay, WeChat and Gaode Maps on your phone and make sure you know how to use them beforehand (including the DiDi mini app on Alipay), get an esim that allows you to circumvent the Great Firewall, and make sure you have a good translate app and a cursory knowledge of phrases like "Hello, I don't speak Chinese", something that I'm sure you'll be using very often because it's rare to find even basic English comprehension in China. Note that Alipay and WeChat require a lot of account verification, including scanning your passport and your face, and it can only be properly set up and used when you are in China, so you will only know that it works once you touch down. And a lot of these apps are irritating bloatware that harvest your data. Your data plan can still be sluggish as hell at points, something that I think may be due to security measures creating extreme latency though I'm not fully sure what causes it (locals don't seem to have this problem, at least). Oh, and I've heard it's difficult to drive in China due to aggressive driving behaviours being common; the repeated refrain from travellers is that you should just use public transport and DiDi if you want to get where you want. And smoking is sometimes a noticeable issue. But the country is so old and so spectacular that the juice is well worth the squeeze. It may be my favourite place in Asia at this point, and I have plans to go again this December.
It goes without saying that China is just different, to the point that this has been the hardest trip report for me to write so far. And barely anyone has a correct view of what it is actually like. It is like looking at a barely-recognisable, funhouse-mirror, heavily sinified alternate history of the world where everything just turned out differently. There are a million and one notable aspects of travelling in China I could have mentioned when covering this country, ranging from everything from the very good to the very frustrating, and there are aspects which I genuinely barely even know how to make up my mind up on. It's a very ancient country with its own set of deeply ingrained norms that hugely conflicts with the party line (though there's a lot to say about how the state in practice is a lot less ideological or centralised than people tend to portray it as), it's ostensibly communist but on the ground seems hypercapitalist in a way that pretty much no Western country is, and it's recently experienced a rise that's nothing short of meteoric, having speedrun its way from being poorer than Sub-Saharan Africa in the 1980s to a world power today. The contradictions are blistering to the point it feels like being flashbanged, there are so many aspects of China that are just really difficult to properly synthesise.
I woke up early the next morning and headed down into the subway, tapped my international bank card at the turnstiles, sent my sling bag through the mandatory security scanner, and made my way to the platform. Beijing’s subway network is vast and impressively comprehensive, but I found navigating it to be very disorienting. The station was downright maze-like, with many long corridors and layered passageways that blurred together, and there was also a lot of security and surveillance; bag checks were routine, and cameras could be seen everywhere. But the system was efficient and the commuters moved very quickly, which I appreciated. After living in Sydney, where slow walkers have sometimes caused me to miss trains (seriously, people here walk at the speed of Roombas), I quite enjoyed the efficiency of movement in China. Admittedly this was a double-edged sword, since at times during the trip I felt like I couldn't relax because people there were always hustling.
Surprisingly enough, though, being in a crowd was never all too hard to handle, since people in China are actually more orderly than people tend to think; they push and shove far less than is usually imagined in the foreign public consciousness. In spite of the perception of Mainland Chinese as being notoriously selfish and opportunistic and incapable of maintaining order in situations that call for it, I didn't find it to be bad at all. Vietnam was an order of magnitude worse in this regard, the amount of people who just carelessly shoved straight through lines was almost unbelievable. I found Chinese people to be much more rule-abiding and pro-social; perhaps that wasn't the case a decade ago or so, but at this point China's not that much worse than everywhere else in this regard, it's just far more dense population-wise. Granted, other things such as people clearing their throat and spitting on the sidewalk still exists, though in my opinion it's really not that obstructive to you personally if you're not super picky about everyone around you conforming to strict norms of propriety. It is a different country and culture after all.
Once I disembarked, I made my way toward the Forbidden City, the largest preserved palace complex in existence (depending on how you define this, the Summer Palace and its gardens may be larger, though its grounds are mostly water). It's a veritable maze of halls that sits directly in the heart of Beijing, oriented on a north-south axis aligned with such precision that it deviates only one degree from geographic north. This axis extends far beyond the confines of the palace itself, continuing through a massive urban corridor approximately 7,500 meters in length which features several of the capital’s most significant monuments. These include the Drum and Bell Towers to the north and, to the south, the Temple of Heaven, the Temple of Agriculture, and the Zhengyangmen Gate Tower. It really only became the seat of power relatively recently (well, recent for Chinese standards, which basically means nothing) when the Yongle Emperor designated Beijing as a secondary capital in 1403, diminishing the previous capital of Nanjing in importance. Once it eventually became the principal capital, the Forbidden City would be the seat of political power for the rest of traditional Chinese history.
On my way to the palace, I noticed that every street seemed to go on forever, stretching into the distance in a manner that I found to be almost dizzying. There is something incredibly agoraphobia-inducing about how all of Beijing is designed, but it leans into it so much that it actually loops back around into making the city kind of distinctive in its own way. This isn't a consequence of modern Chinese city-planning either; when determining the layout of the new city, Ming Dynasty planners based it on ancient manuals going all the way back to the Zhou, specifically the Kaogong Ji (regulations of construction). The capital was always meant to be an expression of imperial power and cosmic order, and its stipulations included that the capital be "a square of nine li" criss-crossed by "nine lanes going north-south and east-west, each of the former being nine chariot tracks wide" that bisected the urban fabric into regular squares. Visitors to the city in the early 20th century described it as a maze of "walls, walls and more walls", something that can be easily seen in many of the old streets extant today. Beijing was designed to be monumental, not cosy, and much of the modern city actually is still somewhat built on the bones of the old one, with the nine thoroughfares of the old capital now expanded into staggering multi-lane highways that extend far beyond the borders of what used to be Ming Dynasty Beijing. Pretty much every artery in the urban core, whether it be modern or traditional, is laid out in the same symmetrical, rhythmic manner that has characterised the city for centuries. In other words, Beijing is very intimidating, and not because the government is extremely overbearing or people act particularly antisocially, rather it's because most of the city's vernacular constructions from every era of its history are inherently so monumental in size, so stately and so anonymised that you get this strange feeling of being dwarfed by its endless grid of streets.
I eventually found myself in a series of lanes lined with the archetypical grey-brick hutongs that Beijing is known for. Some lanes featured many vendors selling tanghulu, rice cakes, and other snacks; others were much quieter and very local, with older Beijingers wandering about, scooters buzzing past, and laundry strung up overhead. Before long I reached Donghuamen Gate (the eastern entrance that conveniently avoids the security at Tiananmen Square), and from there I wandered along the edge of the palace toward the southern entrance for ticket checks. As I walked, towering red abutments and pavilions loomed above me, mirrored in the partially frozen waters of the moat. Bare willow branches hung over the ice, and the path featured everyone from elderly locals to hanfu-clad Douyin girls stopping every few steps for photos against the crimson backdrop. When I finally reached the Meridian Gate, I joined a surprisingly short queue, handed over my passport, scanned my sling bag, and walked through the towering entrance.
The original Forbidden City built by the Ming Dynasty was an extremely luxurious palace, which used precious and rare Phoebe zhennan wood from the jungles of southwestern China to construct its halls (this was an extremely valuable timber in ancient China, and was even more so when fossilised; that was known as "black wood" and to this day it fetches prices of up to thousands upon thousands of dollars per cubic metre). Grand terraces and stone carvings were built by means of massive blocks of quarried stone, which were able to be transported only through covering the ground with a layer of ice in deep winter and then pulling the blocks along. Halls were paved with expertly crafted bricks, made with clay from multiple provinces; each batch took months to make. The interior pavings, seen today, are these very six-century old originals. But a good number of the wooden structures within the Forbidden City date back to the Qing, as the palace complex did not escape the end of the Ming Dynasty unscathed. After Li Zicheng and his rebel troops marched on Beijing in an attempt to overthrow the Ming Dynasty, after the Chongzhen Emperor hung himself in despair and ruin in the gardens of the palace, after the Manchus conquered China with the help of a Ming general who let them into the country, the three main halls in the central axis of the palace, among others, had burned to the ground. The Qing reconstructed the halls of the palace carefully with pinewood, and maintained the general layout rather faithfully (though they did make every plaque within the palace bilingual, featuring Chinese and Manchu scripts alike). Some parts of the palace, however, are still extant from the Ming Dynasty, such as the Wanchun Pavilion in the imperial garden.
I stepped into an immense courtyard bisected by a sinuous waterway (named the "Inner Gold Creek", or Nejinshui) with five stone bridges plunging over it. Two stone lions stood watch over the entire courtyard. At the northern edge rose another grand entrance beyond which lay an even larger square, which rewarded me with a striking view of the Hall of Supreme Harmony. Rebuilt most recently in 1695, it's a huge wooden structure built on a stone platform, used for everything from enthronment and wedding ceremonies to banquets for solstices. I couldn’t enter the vast interior, though; the front of the palace was crowded and I was only able to get distant glimpses of the imposing throne inside. As I tilted my head upward, I noticed rows of small glazed ceramic figures marching along the roof’s ridgelines which were believed to ward off misfortune in ancient China. Customarily, a man riding a phoenix would stand at the head of the procession while the tail terminated with a dragon. Between these two figures, there would be an odd number of mythological creatures, the total number of which signified the rank or importance of the building. Each ridge on the Hall of Supreme Harmony featured ten of them in total.
The Forbidden City is an absolute labyrinth of a palace, and I can confidently say that I got lost multiple times navigating the complex of nested courtyards that make up the Inner Court; it felt like being stranded in a maze of red walls and intricate yellow-roofed buildings. Out of everything I think my favourite part of the palace was the small Imperial Garden just north of the three main halls of the Outer Court, which is a finely-wrought park full of rock gardens, pavilions and other architectural elements that create a feeling of intimacy otherwise not found in other parts of the palace. The Wanchun Pavilion in the garden is probably the finest structure in the whole palace, featuring a spectacular domed caisson created by the successive layering of wooden brackets, the very top of which is adorned with a finely carved bas-relief of a dragon. Another structure that really caught my eye was the intricately glazed Nine-Dragon Screen in the northeastern part of the palace, a piece of auspicious iconography that appears only in palaces (there are only three of them extant today).
I left the Forbidden City through the northern gate and walked further to Nanluoguxiang, one of these trendy hutong streets that have been transformed into shopping districts; as I walked there I passed through a whole lot more of these authentic local hutongs. Honestly I was constantly surprised by just how extensive these hutong neighbourhoods were; at times, they seemed to stretch on endlessly, like a Backrooms-esque parallel dimension made entirely of these gridlike lanes. Before arriving, I’d seen people on travel forums wondering whether any "real" authentic hutongs were left at all, but after visiting Beijing, these questions seem borderline laughable - walk in any given direction from the Forbidden City and it almost seems as if you can't get out of the hutongs (and no, I'm not talking about the more old-style but obviously new constructions, I'm talking about local hutongs that barely seem renovated). In spite of Beijing's reputation as a modern city, a large portion of the urban sprawl is actually not like that; I'd even go as far as to say that Beijing is the most ancient-looking major city I've ever seen in East Asia. I honestly think the people bemoaning China's "lack of heritage" either haven't visited China, didn't make even a token attempt to go find any of it, or are generally unaware of how bad the situation regarding preservation can be in the rest of Asia (or are just repeating a canard they've heard without considering it that much). China is by far the most historically dense place I've visited in the entire continent, and despite the fact that my expectations were sky-high beforehand even I didn't expect so much history from the country.
I do want to temper this quite a bit, though. While I saw a lot of extant preserved old architecture, I don't want to overly glorify or romanticise these neighbourhoods, since many of them are obviously barely gentrified or modernised at all. China modernised very fast and very unevenly, and despite their status as a symbol of old Beijing, people in the hutongs often seem to live without a lot of infrastructure (such as proper plumbing systems). I can understand why the Chinese government has not precluded renovation of the hutongs, even after its announcement of a protection order on these neighbourhoods. They're not always very glamorous places to be, and personally I agree with an approach that introduces more modern amenities into these hutongs while still preserving its fundamental character; it would be nice to see improvements in the quality of life for the people living there.
The next day I woke up to a gloomy winter morning, with thick mist and fog hanging over all the streets of downtown Beijing. Everything looked almost colourless, like some kind of vintage grey filter had been placed over the entire city, and it was freezing. Northern China is climactically awful and is largely a cold, grey, arid wasteland in winter, to the point that Beijing actually boasts colder temperatures than Helsinki during this time of the year in spite of its lower latitude (due to the directional nature of the Coriolis effect, east coasts are generally far colder than west coasts; as a particularly stark example of this, Vladivostok, Russia is on the same latitude as Florence, Italy). The fact that any civilisation was able to flourish here in spite of the horrific climate and the Yellow River's constant catastrophic flooding is actually astonishing to me.
I pulled myself out of bed, descended into the subway again, trudged past a bunch of commieblocks which gave way to more of these local hutongs (seriously they are everywhere) and made my way to the first stop of the day: Zhihua Temple. It's an obscure but well-preserved Ming Dynasty wooden temple built in 1443, hidden within the backstreets of Beijing, painted in such a vivid crimson and adorned with such deeply black roof tiles that to my eyes it seemed to practically pop in the sea of fog and mist. Making my way towards the shanmen gate of the temple, I noticed a marble plaque above it with Chinese characters that stated "Gifted by the Imperial Court to Zhihua Temple". Entering the grounds revealed a courtyard of modest size, flanked by temple halls all around. A small number of robed men exited a room, and headed into the main hall to play traditional ritual music from the Ming Dynasty, which had been passed down for 27 generations in this very temple. They sat down in front of a modest altar featuring three wooden-lacquered Buddha statues on lotus pedestals, and in the cold dark Beijing winter I watched them play a very strange and sweet music.
After the music was over, I proceeded to see what the other halls had in store. To the west of the main hall, there was another wooden building housing an incredible wooden zhuanlunzang (sutra case) covered in intricate carvings of bodhisattvas, heavenly kings and warriors and topped with a small caisson that a tiny Vairocana Buddha sat in. A bit awestruck, I walked around the entire thing, just taking in the immense level of detail. Deeper to the back of the complex, there was a large two story pavilion featuring three huge statues, surrounded by walls covered in niches featuring what is said to be 9,999 tiny renderings of the Buddha. I later learned that this hall was, quite aptly, named the "Thousand Buddha Hall". I would have spent more time at this temple but the biting cold was beginning to get to me, so I ducked into a small teashop in the hutong and had some rather medicinal-tasting flower tea alongside a small rice cake as I decided on where to venture next.
I scrolled some possible destinations on my phone in the cosy warmth of the teahouse, and resolved to visit the Yonghe Temple towards the north of the city. Yet again, I was seemingly trapped in a parallel dimension full of hutongs the entire way, and had to use some extremely suspect communal toilets if I wanted to relieve myself. Note this is coming from someone who's probably better equipped to use Chinese toilets than most Westerners - they're mostly squat, and having grown up in Southeast Asia I'm used to squat toilets and generally prefer them (if you can't squat properly, that is your skill issue, it is objectively superior ergonomically and cleaner). But the toilets in these very old parts of Beijing are legitimately terrible and feature toilets with dividers instead of a dedicated stall, meaning everyone can see you defecate - and they are extremely dirty, I often found piss covering the floor and at least one squat toilet covered in diarrhoea. It is incredible to me how a country that's so obviously advanced in multiple important ways can be so undeveloped in others. Though I will grant that the hutongs are uniquely bad in this regard, having been barely modernised ever since the Qing; other parts of China are far better with this (though unless you find yourself in a shopping mall, they will still often lack essentials like soap and toilet paper; you must bring your own when going to China, this is non-negotiable).
Eventually I made it to a huge food street just ahead of the Yonghe Temple, featuring a large variety of snacks and congregations of people lining up in front of every shop. It's not uncommon at all in Asia to find bustling food-filled squares near popular temples, providing nourishment and a social space for templegoers. For now, I ignored the street and made my way to the temple, intending to grab some food on my way out. I approached the visitor counter, grabbed a ticket, and walked into the compound through some intricate yellow-and-blue entrance archways flanked by stele pavilions and stone lions on each side. The pathway opened up into a courtyard featuring sweeping views of a monolithic red-and-yellow hall named the Yonghegong (Hall of Harmony and Peace), which hosted a plaque displaying inscriptions in Tibetan, Chinese, Manchu and Mongolian. Masses of lay worshippers stood in prayer in front of a bronze burner, with wafts of warm, fragrant smoke rising up from the forest of incense sticks and mixing seamlessly with the mist and cloud overhead.
When Yonghe Temple was built in the 1690s, it was not initially conceived of as a temple but as a royal residence, and it would end up housing two future Qing emperors before they ascended the throne and moved into the Forbidden City. The residence was initially built for Prince Yong, who would eventually become the Yongzheng Emperor, and it was in its East Compound that his fourth son (the future Qianlong Emperor) would be born. After Yongzheng died there was a proposal for it to be converted into a residence for other royals, but Qianlong instead issued an edict legislating it be turned into a Tibetan lamasery, as he was a particularly large supporter of the religion. Although the Qing court generally patronised and funded Tibetan Buddhism pretty heavily as a method of gaining support from outlying territories such as Tibet and Mongolia (and in general bending Tibetan Buddhism to serve the empire's needs), Qianlong took this to another level; he practiced Yellow Hat Buddhism in his private life, and even had a guru who believed he was the reincarnation of Kublai Khan. After its consecration in 1745, Yonghe Temple rose to become the foremost Buddhist temple in China, hosting monks from across Tibet and Mongolia. Its turquoise roof tiles were replaced with lavish yellow ones to signify imperial status.
Inside the hall, a gleaming triad of bronze statues depicting the Buddhas of the Three Ages stood front and centre, each one backed by stunning nimbuses, auspicious iconography and mythical creatures. Here, even more worshippers could be found, prostrating themselves and praying in front of the deities. And the rest of the hall was just as sumptuous - the scene here can only be described as an explosion of colour, with the entire interior covered in floor-to-ceiling paintings and calligraphy inscribed onto every pillar. On the sides of the building, facing the central Buddhist triad, stood two rows of painted Qing arhats, all harbouring different expressions and poses. Next up along the main axis of the temple lay the Yongyoudian (Hall of Everlasting Protection), another extremely picturesque hall housing yet another Buddha triad; this one was perhaps even more intricately rendered than the last. After exploring some of the auxiliary buildings located to the left and right of the main halls, which were themselves filled to the brim with an insane concentration of Buddhist treasures and crowded with worshippers, I navigated to the next hall, named the Falundian (Hall of the Wheel of the Law), and immediately felt as if I was intruding on something sacred. Inside stood a monumental statue of the master Tsongkhapa surrounded by traditional Chukor banners, with a mass of red-robed Buddhist monks sitting cross-legged around his idol and chanting in an almost trance-like reverie. Masses of lay worshippers stood or sat to the side, their heads bowed penitently. It was quite a powerful atmosphere, and I lingered here for a while listening to the ceremony.
I had some reservations about this temple given its commonality on Beijing itineraries; I feared that it wouldn't be authentic, that it would just be a tourist trap, that perhaps it wouldn't even be old, but it was the polar opposite. This, and many other experiences like it, challenged a pretty big misconception about China: that the country lacks traditional culture or religion due to The Cultural Revolution or some other event in recent Chinese history. But there's a lot of extant tradition in Mainland China, much of which is based on a longstanding cultural meta that's imperfectly comprehensible to a Western visitor, though it's frustrating that a lot of outsiders barely even seem to acknowledge it exists. It’s not uncommon for people to suggest that traditional culture and history has been all but destroyed on the mainland and maintained only on the fringes of the diaspora in places like Taiwan or Southeast Asia, I've even heard people say that the Japanese preserved Chinese culture better than China (but, having read extensively about the aggressively iconoclastic nature of Meiji Japan, I’m not even certain Japanese culture itself can be said to be all that undisturbed).
To elaborate, I’m a Malaysian Chinese who spent 16 years of my life embedded in that community, and yet in the span of two weeks in China, I saw a large amount of religious activity and traditional rituals, similar to that of Chinese communities in Southeast Asia - in spite of what Straits Chinese like to say about themselves. To spoil parts of the remainder of this trip report, it wasn't just this temple where I encountered it, either. In Pingyao’s walled city, I walked the main thoroughfare while a massive crowd of men carried a dragon float down the street to a din of clanging drums. I stayed above a jade shop in Datong, and every morning woke up to the old jade craftsman quietly working on a new piece with a pot of fresh tea bubbling beside him. At the Ming Dynasty-era Great Mosque of Xi’an, I watched as hordes of Muslims assembled in front of the hall (off limits to me, since I’m not Muslim) and sat quietly in worship. If tradition is anywhere close to dead in China, then clearly my lying eyes deceive me.
I also don’t think that the level of religiousness of the Chinese population is properly captured in surveys. People in East Asia are generally not "religious" in any kind of organised way, sure, and will often describe themselves as atheist or nonaffiliated, but will often still engage in superstitious cultural rituals and rites that are ultimately rooted in a religious view of the world without fully adhering to or caring much about strict doctrine. In general, East Asian religion is just different, and China is no exception. There are plenty of religious and at least superstitious people who follow folk practices to some degree, but for the most part they don’t spray it around very conspicuously in public, and they don’t particularly care about specifically identifying as Part Of A Group. It’s just something they do, and is individual to them in a more understated and personal way. That’s true among virtually all Chinese communities, in my opinion, but on the mainland the Han constitute the vast demographic majority, and without any other point of comparison all this just gets perceived as the baseline societal meta; you typically don't recognise the water in which you swim. Hell, I’m in accounting and still work with a lot of people hailing from the mainland now, and I recall one of them couldn’t cook in the new house she bought until the old one had finished being sold and enough time had elapsed, or something similarly insanely ritualistic. In general, a very common theme throughout this trip report is me constantly finding the culture to be rather well-preserved, even more so considering the tumultuous and often catastrophic shifts that Mainland China experienced during the 20th century.
Eventually I left the monks behind, hearing the chanting echo behind me, and progressed to the final hall in the complex: the Wanfuge (Pavilion of Ten Thousand Happinesses). It was a towering structure, featuring a three-story wooden pavilion flanked by two side buildings and connected by overhead walkways - a somewhat unusual element to see in Chinese architecture. Fewer worshippers congregated here than in the front halls, and the relative quiet lent the space a more contemplative atmosphere. I paused briefly to take it in before stepping inside, and a titanic mass emerged out of the darkness of the hall. A colossal statue of the Maitreya Buddha, nearly twenty metres tall, dominated the centre of the pavilion; walkways on each level circled the immense figure, allowing it to be viewed from every height. Carved from a single piece of sandalwood, this was a gift from the Dalai Lama to the Qianlong Emperor, and it was so unwieldy that it took three years to transport to Beijing. It's in the Guinness Book of Records, it's an absolutely monumental piece of art, and if you ever come to Beijing this is one of the best things you can see. It's fucking awesome. In general, I highly recommend the Yonghe Temple, it would be my favourite temple in Asia if not for another unbelievable temple near Pingyao, later on in the trip.
I grabbed a snack after exiting the temple (this sinfully rich meat-filled flaky pastry, I think it was called niu rou bing) and made my way to the final stop of the day: the iconic Temple of Heaven. It's really only a component part of a larger-scale religious complex in Beijing, alongside the Temple of the Sun, Temple of Earth, and Temple of Moon, but the Temple of Heaven is by far the best-known of these ceremonial complexes. It sits in a massive tree-filled park bisected by a series of famous halls, the most recognisable of which is the Qiniandian (Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests), a massive triple-gabled circular hall on a square terrace reflecting the East Asian cosmological concept of a square Earth and round Heaven. This was an extremely important ceremonial site in ancient China, being the place where the Emperor made ceremonial sacrifices to Heaven for, well, good harvests. Twice a year, the Emperor and his retinue would set up camp within the complex and perform a very specific ritual which no member of the public could observe. The ceremony had to be performed perfectly, or it would signify a bad omen for the coming year.
The weather was still extremely foggy when I got there, which isn't particularly ideal for the Temple of Heaven, but I grabbed a ticket anyway and proceeded into the park down a long tree-lined path. Slowly the Hall of Prayer of Good Harvests came into view, and I climbed up the massive stone platform onto the main bulk of the structure alongside many other visitors. It seems I got there all too late, as it was extremely crowded and there were way too many hanfu-clad girls posing in front of the temple in order to really enjoy it. But it was a very beautiful building; photos don't properly convey this, but the way the pavilion extrudes out from that huge circular stone pedestal induces a sense of vertigo akin to staring up into the night sky and almost makes it seem as if it's touching the heavens. It's an example of absolutely incredible Qing Dynasty design and architecture; I just wish I had better weather and less crowds for this one, and if I had to do this again I'd visit much earlier in the morning before the masses of Chinese tourists start pouring in. As it was, though, I personally preferred the parts of the park outside of the main complex of halls, where one could still see the recognisable peak of the hall protruding from far above the surrounding landscape. Here things were much more local and less touristy, with families bringing their children to play and performing activities in the park, and there were still some other historical buildings of note within the less-visited parts of the complex, which now mostly hosted museums and exhibitions.
The sun was beginning to set now, so I unfortunately had to rush through the remainder of the complex, and after I was satisfied with sightseeing I took the train to Qianmen station for dinner. At this point I was ravenous so I made my way to street level and was immediately met with the sight of the Zhengyangmen gate tower all spectacularly lit up at night, one of the quintessential icons of Old Beijing. After quickly snapping some pictures of the tower, I walked along the food street and located a relatively inconspicuous-looking eatery named Duyichu. This is one of the most acclaimed of Beijing's old restaurants, having originated in the 3rd year of Emperor Qianlong (for anyone that uses normal people dates, that's 1738); for context, at this time the US was still an imperial colony of the British, and Napoleon didn't even exist yet. But that year, this humble eatery popped up in front of the Imperial Quarter of Old Beijing and started specialising in the delicate steamed dumplings that we all now recognise as shaomai. This would spread south and become common throughout the Chinese diaspora, such that you can find it in Cantonese dim sum joints in Hong Kong and in many Chinese places in the Western world. It was here, at this very spot in Beijing, where the dish was first popularised and made into a staple of Chinese cuisine.
Surprisingly, there were no lines in front of the door considering the venerable nature of the establishment. I was able to get a table immediately, where I promptly ordered some assorted shaomai and Qianlong baicai (fresh cabbages with a thick sesame dressing, named after the titular emperor). The food came in no time at all, and I quickly discovered that Beijing's flavour profiles have a tendency to confound my tastebuds; the cabbage was tasty but a bit too acidic and heavy, though I enjoyed it nonetheless. In general, Beijingers seem to enjoy extremely heavy and simple flavours without much of the depth that I usually expect from Chinese food - food in China isn't at all one thing and the Chinese food most Westerners are accustomed to eating really primarily comes from one specific city in Canton (Taishan). The shaomai was the clear highlight to me; it was very succulent, though I can't say it was anything you couldn't get elsewhere in Asia. It's kind of been a victim of its own success I think, everybody seems to have copied the example it set, and now it's just one of the many shops that specialise in the popular dish. I polished off the meal in short order, grabbed some tea and returned to my hotel.
The next day, I found myself waiting for a bus in an aggressively nondescript Beijing street, one so crowded with towering identikit commieblocks they almost seemed to block out the dim sunlight. I was out so early that dawn hadn't broken yet, and the sky was still blanketed with fog, the poor weather from yesterday still not having abated. It was extremely humid and cold, and so I had just gotten jianbing (Chinese savoury crepes) alongside some doujiang (soy milk) from a nearby local stall, which were both comfortingly warm and tasty in the blistering Beijing winter. The doujiang in particular was incredible, and while I don't usually like soy milk, this one tasted so smooth that I wanted whatever crack cocaine they were putting in there. I sipped the drink slowly, huddling into my puffer jacket while the sun rose and the streetlights slowly flickered off. It was peaceful.
Standing there in the early morning silence, I couldn't help but think back to my limited experiences in North America; if you transplanted this place into the downtown core of many major North American cities, it would probably already be hosting a colourful, cosmopolitan, and vibrant cast of drug addicts and homeless people (this problem basically doesn’t exist in Asia, and was a major point of culture shock for me when visiting North America; you often don’t feel safe). In spite of the endless sneering about Third Worldism you can find on this forum, the biggest takeaway I’ve had in my travels throughout Asia is that very large swaths of it are starting to feel very not third world; granted, modernisation throughout the region (and even within Beijing) is uneven, infrastructure can be spotty, but many aspects of it are starting to feel more first world than even the first world. Now I'm not saying that Chinese average living standards are on par with the US yet, but its major urban areas and eastern coastal provinces are looking and feeling far more like Czechia than they are Cambodia. It’s the interior that drags this down hugely, and the state is quickly working to urbanise them all. They’re also pumping out STEM graduates en masse. From a personal standpoint, experiencing this change firsthand is quite the sight. I grew up in Asia and now large swaths of it are just unrecognisable to me; seeing the sheer pace of change in real time is just breathtaking and it’s a topic that deserves a post of its own. It’s something I’m grateful to have experienced myself, partially because living through it is incredibly existential, but also because you get the opportunity to see unique elements of local life that will soon be transformed forever as the continent charges headlong into gleaming industrial modernity, for better or for worse.
I got onto the bus alongside a number of other tourists, and it promptly pulled out of the lot, barreling down the misty roads into the suburbs of Beijing. The sun continued to inch higher and higher in the sky as we passed further into the countryside, casting a wan, diffuse glow that illuminated a barren landscape smothered in snow and fog. Before long, our bus was winding up into the mountains, where the mist began to thin out, and eventually sunshine could be seen streaming through the gradually-parting clouds. The sky slowly but surely turned blue, and after tolerating the intensely grey and foggy weather of Beijing for a good day and a half, it was refreshing to see colour again. Our bus stopped at a large tourist centre for the Mutianyu Great Wall featuring a metric fuckton of cafes and souvenir shops and weird ass VR experiences, where we went on to buy tickets for a cable car then went our own separate ways.
The legacy of the Great Wall of China stretches all the way back to the Spring and Autumn period, but this history was highly discontinuous and fractured, with there not even being a recognisable "wall" during many dynasties. Most of the extant masonry that you can see today dates from the Ming Dynasty (15th/16th centuries); granted they were built roughly along the path that the earlier Qin/Han Dynasty earthen fortifications followed, but the Ming wall was essentially a new structure since the previous dynasties' walls had almost entirely eroded and fallen into disuse. This means that there was essentially no real Great Wall during the time of the Mongols, and in fact at the time building a wall was actually considered an admission of diplomatic failure to be avoided whenever possible. Even the Ming Dynasty's wall building program was not a systematic building of fortifications to keep the invaders out wholesale, rather it was an accumulative series of defences which were constructed on an ad hoc basis in response to evolving needs, and the disparate sections of the wall were never linked up.
This was a feature, too, not a bug. For context, the main problem the Chinese encountered when defending their northern border was that attacks could come from any direction, and the enemy could also retreat in any direction. The point of building a wall was not to prevent enemies from entering China per se; rather it made sure that attacks could be confined to regular, predictable areas that could be militarised, and forced the enemy to retreat using the same avenue through which they entered. This ended up being a major issue that faced many northern invaders, such as with Hong Taiji's raids into Hebei. In addition, the wall acted as a communicative and transport structure, with any observed raids triggering a large string of warning beacons that would be funnelled all the way back to Beijing. The main point I want to stress here is that the wall itself was not meant to be the primary obstacle for an enemy, but rather as only one component of a layered defence strategy ultimately centred around the army that lay beyond it. This concept of a Great Wall is a Western concept not introduced until later in Chinese history once the walls no longer had any purpose - at the time, the Ming would instead have referred to its defence system as the Nine Garrisons (placing foremost importance on the manpower that the fortification was ultimately built to serve), rather than any kind of unified Wall.
I passed through the tourist centre and boarded a cable car that carried me further up the mountain. Below, slopes lined with leafless trees unfurled in every direction, while the sunlight grew steadily harsher as I ascended. At last, the crest of the range revealed itself, with its summit crowned by a formidable masonry wall that stretched endlessly across the horizon. I was deposited unceremoniously at a platform near the wall, where I walked past a row of vendors and stepped onto the structure. The bulk of the edifice came into view, and I watched as the ridges of innumerable mountains faded one after another into the distant haze, with the wall snaking over every single twist and turn. It was absolutely breathtaking, and at this time of year I had it largely to myself - the further I walked from the chairlift, the more the crowds thinned out, to the point where I was alone on large sections of the wall. From time to time, a vendor would call out from the margins of the wall, peering through one of the many crenellations that had now been repurposed as makeshift counters for offering snacks and drinks to weary travellers.
I eventually reached the very western end of the accessible wall and found myself faced with a particularly steep section called the "Hero Slope", which featured 600+ steps at a brutal incline of 70 degrees. Within minutes I was gasping, legs trembling as the strain built with every step, until I found myself nearly collapsing against the side. By the time I reached the highest accessible watchtower, my legs had turned to jelly and my breathing had become ragged and uncontrollable. Then I turned around, and was greeted with one of the most arresting scenes I have ever seen in my life: an endless panorama of mountains rising from a sea of mist, fine tendrils of fog curling through distant, faded peaks, and the wall itself winding and folding over the ridgelines until it vanished from sight entirely. The view was so poetic and dreamlike that it felt like stepping into a Chinese ink painting, and it really warrants every superlative people have lavished upon it, to the point I'd say that the wall alone is worth the trip to China. There's absolutely nothing else in the world like this.
After soaking in the view for a long while, I turned around and made my way back to the chairlift, this time hiking down a path that adjoined the wall. From this angle, I caught sight of a vendor on the wall from a completely different perspective; he was standing on a plank precariously buried in the side of the wall and suspended far above the surrounding mountains, just so he could take advantage of the crenellations to sell food and drink to tourists. He reached for a plastic bag of goods that sat just beyond his grasp, then calmly balanced on one leg and stretched out his arm to retrieve it, as if the dizzying drop below barely registered to him. I gaped at him for a moment, then continued down the trail and down the mountain.
Once back down at the tourist centre, I had more time to spare, so I transferred onto a chairlift that took me to the more commercialised eastern portion of the wall. My photo was taken while I was on it so they could sell a printed version of the image to me back down at the base of the mountain; tourism with Chinese characteristics is very extra. This part of the wall was more crowded and less spectacular than the western end, but was still incredibly interesting with the largest and most complex watchtower I'd seen yet. This one featured a main masonry structure flanked by two corner towers which is probably the most iconic structure on the Mutianyu Great Wall, featuring quite prominently in photographs of the area. There was also a toboggan leading down from this section of the wall which I lined up for, and I'm well aware this is clear tourist bait, but I will defend it wholeheartedly because it was extremely fun to slide down to the bottom of the mountain. I haven't tobogganed before, but the fact that the first time I've ever done so was from the fucking Great Wall is going to mean that any subsequent adventures in tobogganing are gonna struggle to top it.
By the time I returned to the urban sprawl, the thick fog had parted and the once-grey city was bathed in deep sunset hues. I passed by the Yonghe Temple again, watching its yellow rooflines glow in the warm light as I made my way to Fangzhuanchang No.69, a popular zhajiangmian restaurant just across the street from it. I seated myself at one of the tables, and ordered a bowl of their signature black bean noodles alongside a Chinese yoghurt known by the name of nai pi zi. The noodles came with massive sides of toppings ranging from edamame to bean sprouts, all of which I scraped into my bowl and ate together. It was good but I would've enjoyed a stronger flavour, for some reason a huge amount of Beijing's savoury dishes don't tickle my fancy. But the nai pi zi, on the other hand, was delicious and beats Western yoghurts any day. The texture was so creamy and far less curdy than your bog-standard yoghurt, and had a milder, sweeter flavour that I really jived with.
On my final day in Beijing, the skies at last cleared to a deep, cloudless blue. This was my last chance to visit a site I had been anticipating since arriving in China: the Yiheyuan, or Garden of Nurturing Harmony, better known in English as the Summer Palace. Much of what stands today is a late-Qing reconstruction commissioned by Empress Dowager Cixi after both it and the Old Summer Palace (Yuanmingyuan) were destroyed during the Opium War. The complex unfolds across a vast landscape of some 3,000 structures, organised around a monumental lake that dominates most of the grounds. To its north, the principal sequence of palatial buildings cascades over the slopes of Longevity Hill, supported by a series of expansive artificial terraces.
While China thinks of the original destruction of the Summer Palace as a ghastly and undue act by European colonial powers (being extremely sore about that is somewhat warranted, to be fair, and the Opium Wars are generally hard to defend), the history of how that happened is a lot more nuanced and a lot more interesting than simply "Britain bad". The inciting incident that led to the destruction was an act of aggression conducted during peace talks between an Anglo-French delegation and the Qing Dynasty. The Allied powers detained the Qing prefect of Tianjin claiming they were regrouping and staging an ambush; whether this is true or not has likely been lost to history. In retaliation, the Qing detained the delegation and its envoys, and this escalated into further conflict as forces advanced on the delegation's last location in an attempt to free them. The Qing managed to procure thirty-eight captives in total, and due to execution or torture during imprisonment twenty-one died. As news of this treatment spread throughout the British forces, there was strong support for some kind of punitive action to be taken, and Lord Elgin and Baron Gros (respectively spearheading the British and French military action) were tasked with deciding what this retaliation should be. Neither party was particularly interested in causing further harm to Chinese civilians during the war, and there wasn't much support among the European populace for that either.
Something that occasionally gets overlooked in highly nationalist tellings of the event is that the primarily ethnically-Manchu ruling elite and the ethnically-Han majority did not necessarily see themselves as the same peoples with the same interests. The Qing was a colonial power itself that practiced a form of imperial and ethnic segregation; Beijing's inner city was designated as a place for Manchu bannermen, and across the empire similar segregated cities such as this existed - in fact the entire region of Manchuria was largely off-limits to most Han (this relaxed later in the Qing though). They imposed the queue hairstyle upon Han Chinese men specifically as a sign of submission to the Manchu-led state, with sizeable executions of men following upon disobedience in the early stages of Qing conquest. Burning and sacking the Summer Palace, which only the Manchu ruling elite would have had access to, was seen as less destructive than a wholesale sack of Beijing, and so this was the course of action Elgin and Gros settled on. It was both an act of retaliation and a signal to the public that their war was not with the Chinese people, but the Qing state. Keep in mind, there were certain contemporary segments of the Han populace who may not have thought of the destruction of the Summer Palace as a bad thing.
Despite all this turbulent history, the current late-Qing iteration of the Summer Palace is ridiculously lovely and ethereal. As I entered through the back gate, I was met with a stunning Tibetan-inspired palace named Sidabuzhou (Four Great Regions) that dominated the north end of Longevity Hill, yet another example of the Qing's support for Tibetan Buddhism. It was painted in a deep red and adorned with a litany of finely glazed tiles and bricks, with chimes hanging from every eave; they shimmered and tinkled quietly as the winter wind blew. Climbing the palace steps led me into an intimate rock garden threaded with pavilions, shaded with still-green trees and punctuated by small viewing towers, which I found myself exploring in a tactile, almost playful way as I wove between stones from one structure to the next. As I continued my ascent, the view constantly changed and morphed and shifted, and it struck me just how different Chinese landscaping philosophy was from the Western tradition. While European palatial gardens are often formal, geometric and open, Chinese gardens are the very opposite, being based on the philosophy of bu yi jing yi. This roughly translates to "scenes change as steps move", with the goal here being to creatively conceal aspects of the garden to create a constant sense of progression and unveiling and make a small space feel much larger than it really is. You can never get a full view of a properly designed Chinese garden from any vantage point.
I finally reached the top of the hill, and found myself gazing upon a two-story beamless hall crafted entirely from yellow-and-green glazed bricks. Each brick housed a niche with a mediating Buddha inside; in total there must have been over a thousand of these niches all over the building. The hall was framed by beautiful lush vegetation that was honestly refreshing to see after spending time in the generally grey metropolis of Beijing, where most trees had already dropped their leaves. From here the path bifurcated into a deep forest covering the ridgeline of the hill, and I took the path that went around its eastern side, all the while catching glimpses of what lay on the other side of the ridge through the leaves and branches. At certain vantage points, I could get a good view of Kunming Lake, the vast body of water that occupied about three-quarters of the Summer Palace. It was a striking sight made even more impressive by its origins: the lake was manually excavated across some 2.2 square kilometres, with the displaced earth piled up over time until it swelled into what is now Longevity Hill.
As I made my way down to the other side of the hill, I came across a series of palace buildings that led into a grand covered wooden walkway called the Changlang, or Long Corridor. I strolled along it for what felt like forever; the winding corridor traced the edge of Kunming Lake for some 728 metres, with nearly every beam in the structure adorned with vivid caihua murals. My gaze stayed fixed on the ceilings and rafters as I walked, taking in a cascade of scenes - Sun Wukong battling Nezha, Zhang Fei’s exploits from Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the Battle of Zhuxian County between the Song and Jin dynasties, and countless others. The sheer number and density of murals here was staggering to witness; around 14,000 paintings, no two alike, every single one illustrating scenes from classical Chinese novels, myths, and landscapes. I loved this place, it's a seriously stunning piece of architecture and probably the finest collection of mural paintings I've seen anywhere.
The corridor opened up into a large palatial complex that spilled down the south-facing end of the hill. In its centre sat the Foxiang Ge (Tower of Buddhist Incense), a lovely 3-story, 41-metre tall pagoda jutting out from a 20-metre stone platform built straight into the slope of Longevity Hill, surrounded by a rambling complex of palace buildings, courtyards and steles. I laboriously ascended the over 400 steps leading to the tower, and was rewarded with increasingly gorgeous views over the palatial complex and Kunming Lake as I went. The top of the stone platform was occupied by a small courtyard overwhelmingly dominated by the bulk of the pagoda; through some opened windows I could see into the interior of the structure, where a finely-wrought bronze sculpture of the Thousand-Hand Guanyin Bodhisattva stood surrounded by religious polychrome paintings. This would have been Empress Dowager Cixi's private place of worship back in the days of the Qing Dynasty, but considering how many steps there are and how crotchety that woman looks I can only assume she could only access the pagoda by being carried.
There's a lot more I could discuss about the Summer Palace since the grounds are huge, but I assume you're tired of my superlatives by now so I'll just say that I really liked this palace, far more than I did the Forbidden City. Personally I think Asian palaces are at their most beautiful when they look naturalistic and follow the contours of the landscape on which they're built (another good example is Changdeokgung in downtown Seoul). The Forbidden City, with all its strict symmetry and rigid layout, felt a bit regular and repetitive after a while. The Summer Palace, though, is the complete opposite; more relaxed, more varied, and just a lot nicer to wander through. It blends imperial architecture with Tibetan influences and takes a lot of cues from classical Chinese gardens south of the Yangtze, and the whole place ends up feeling surprisingly natural and intimate. It's an amazing place.
At the end of the day, as I got onto the high-speed train leading out of the old imperial capital (that's a really good word to describe the city in general: "imperial"), I left feeling like I had only seen a small portion of what there was to see; the city in many places is practically overrun with interesting old buildings and monuments from the Ming and Qing dynasty. But that's all juxtaposed against a backdrop of increasing modernity - throughout my visit I couldn't help but notice that the contrast between the old and the new was extremely stark, with towering skyscrapers and ten-lane thoroughfares giving way to authentic lived-in temples from the Qing dynasty and backstreets of old hutongs that barely even seemed modernised, where an increasingly elderly demographic still lived like they would have in an earlier era even as the city mutated around them. You can be delivered lunch by an automated system one second and be surrounded by deteriorating communist-era infrastructure the next. It's a really strange mix. As cliche as it is, the Anthony Bourdain quote about China is true: "The one thing I know for sure about China is I will never know China. It’s too big, too old, too diverse, too deep. There’s simply not enough time."
The suburbs of Beijing gradually faded away, and before long the train slipped into the night.
DISCLAIMER: This is a very long post, it is the length of a novelette. I've edited the post to break it up into sections, hopefully that makes it easier to get through.
Hanoi:
It was 11pm, and my sister and I had just exited the airport into what felt like a more spacious, open-air version of Kowloon Walled City. The noise and chaos at the exit was palpable, and rows of people stood in front of the doors clutching handwritten placards bearing names of loved ones or clients they hoped to meet, all while touts amassed just outside, aggressively pitching taxi rides to any unfortunate travellers who wandered too close. Intense humidity pressed down on us, and a thick, choking smog permeated the air, almost as if cigarette smoke were blanketing the entire city. We had made it. At long last, after several flight delays and a long layover at Tan Son Nhat international airport, we were in Hanoi.
We booked a Grab to our hotel. The app gave us a vehicle number, but finding the actual car was another matter entirely, since the road outside the airport was a churning sea of cars and motorbikes. Our driver sent a photo of his location, and after several minutes of weaving between vehicles, clutching our backpacks and trying not to get flattened, we finally spotted his car. As we slowly pulled away from the airport, we noticed him quietly tapping out a message on his phone, and a moment later he ran it through a translator and handed it to us. It was a request in Vietnamese to cancel the ride in the app and pay him directly, presumably so he could avoid Grab's commission. We declined so as to not give up the reassurance of the app’s tracking, at least not five minutes into our first ride. He said nothing in response and drove us across the Red River, past rows of shacks and eateries, and into the winding alleys of the Old Quarter, where he finally dropped us off at our hotel. We collapsed onto the bed in our room upon arrival.
This was our very first proper experience in Vietnam, and it is probably the most intense culture shock I have ever felt. It goes without saying that travelling here without the help of a guide to arrange things on your behalf can be very stressful, and if you are sensitive to smells, sounds, crowds, heat, humidity, have terrible executive functioning or are generally easily made overwhelmed and uncomfortable, Vietnam is not for you. It's by far the craziest travel experience I have ever had - in both good and bad ways - and I certainly don't recommend it for anyone looking for a typical relaxing vacation. If anything, you'll need a vacation to relax after your vacation. But if you're willing to stick through the intense sensory overload, you'll see and do some of the coolest things you'll ever experience, stuff that you will be talking about for years after you've done them.
Hanoi has a storied history as the capital of Vietnam. In 1010, Emperor Ly Thai To relocated the capital from Hoa Lu to the location of the modern-day city, calling the new city Thang Long ("Rising Dragon"). It has remained the capital throughout Vietnamese history, excepting a brief period in the late 18th to early 20th century when the Tay Son Dynasty moved the capital south to Hue. During French rule, Hanoi was the capital of all of Indochina, and it has a large concentration of historic Vietnamese and French-style architecture as a result, as well as many spectacular and eclectic amalgamations of the two architectural styles. The city has developed over the years into an anarchic mish-mash of churches, temples, shacks and skyscrapers that barely seem to fit together, but somehow work to create a coherent and characterful urban fabric.
The Old Quarter is probably the most famous and recognisable part of the city, taking all of these aspects of the city and turbocharging them to an extreme. Established during the very inception of Thang Long, it is a historic district of 36 streets where craftsmen from villages around the city would assemble to sell goods, and even now each street is still named after a specific trade or guild, often starting with the word "Háng", the word for "wares" in Vietnamese. Many of these bustling streets continue to specialise in the same crafts they did centuries ago, but the area has modernised in a wonderfully haphazard way. Ancient temples packed with priceless relics sit shoulder to shoulder with crumbling French colonial facades, wedged between quirky little shops and cafes that look like they’ve been stacked on top of each other with zero planning. The Old Quarter practically invites you to check out every little nook and cranny, and large trees festooned with colourful lanterns cast some much-welcome shade over the pavements and roads while you wander around the maze of craft streets.
Of course, exploring is easier said than done. Sidewalks in Hanoi are virtually unusable - not only will restaurants and cafes arrange dinky little plastic tables and chairs on the pavement as an unofficial extension of their seating area, people will park their mopeds in rows on the sidewalk and even do their washing there while watching the world pass by. As a pedestrian, you're forced onto the very sides of the roads, alongside a veritable cornucopia of motorcycles and cars and bikes and rickshaws that endlessly jostle for space while honking loudly at each other. There is a lot of honking, too, since the road is so crowded that people honk not necessarily out of irritation and impatience, but simply use them in the same way one would a bicycle bell to let others know where they are. Crossing the road is much like playing a real-life version of Frogger - no one will stop for you, not even at pedestrian crossings; you just have to pick your moment, step out with confidence, and trust that the swarm of motorbikes will weave around you as you go (note: wait for cars, they will not stop). This can raise your blood pressure to dangerous levels at first, but you get used to it; by the second day I found myself crossing the street without stressing too much. There is always a base-line sense of anxiety, though - it's possible to encounter a motorcyclist that will not bother to move aside or account for where you're going, and things can occasionally get terrifying. If in doubt, just shadow a local. They move through the street with the nonchalance of someone who's done this a thousand times - because they have.
On our first day, we mainly just passed through the Old Quarter's buzzy streets while on our way to the complex of sites in and around Ba Dinh Square, the place where Ho Chi Minh first read the Declaration of Independence. Probably the most recognisable of these sites is the HCM mausoleum, a grey granite structure that serves as the resting place of the famous revolutionary, with his embalmed body entombed within a coffin inside a marble chamber. It's a hilariously extra thing to do, especially considering that his wish was to be cremated and to have his ashes placed within three urns in the north, centre and south of the country, but they preferred to follow in the footsteps of the USSR than honour the wishes of their beloved leader I suppose. The entire complex and much of the city surrounding the mausoleum can only be described as a weird communist fever dream, with screens playing videos of revolutionary material, big posters of "Uncle Ho" plastered everywhere, propaganda shops selling pamphlets of his face and viciously anti-American slogans meant to promote his surreal cult of personality, and so on. They’ve even enshrined the cars he used. I'll grant that the mausoleum itself is quite impressive, though we didn't do much in it - we basically stood in a line and moved slowly towards the mausoleum under the watchful eyes of soldiers, saw the embalmed body of the man himself, and left. Nearby we also visited the bright yellow Presidential Palace and the stilt house in which he lived from 1958 to 1969, yet another closely guarded relic which we were allowed just enough freedom to examine for less than a minute.
Frankly, it is such a weird place to be. We left with the strange sense that Ho Chi Minh was more than just a leader; rather, the man was the equivalent of Vietnamese Jesus. What made it even more uncanny is that there are apparently rumours that the body inside the coffin might not even be real, and some who were inside the Vietnamese military report that the actual body looks a lot less spry than the possible wax figure contained inside the mausoleum. I don't have an opinion on this, but I recommend it just for what a fascinating look it is into an extant modern-day cult of personality; one that's still in the process of being shaped.
We popped into a cafe outside the mausoleum and grabbed a coconut coffee (which was excellent, by the way), then moved on. The next place we decided to hit up was the ancient Temple of Literature, a Confucian temple founded by Ly Thanh Tong in 1070. It's a historic site of serious importance in that it hosted the country's first national university, one that continuously ran for 700 years straight and educated many bureaucrats, nobility and other elite members of Vietnamese society. We entered the temple through a beautiful white stone gate, and passed through five exquisitely landscaped courtyards filled to the brim with Confucian statuary and historic turtle steles honouring those who passed the royal exams. The temple was bustling with both tourists and graduating children when we visited; I suppose there's an informal tradition of bringing those who have passed their exams here to honour them.
We then headed northeast so we could visit the remains of the Thang Long imperial citadel, established during the very founding of the city in the 11th century. It was built on the former remains of a Chinese fortress dating back to the 7th century and was the seat of the Vietnamese court for centuries before it was moved to Hue. Initially, it was built in three concentric circles consisting of a defensive fortification, an imperial city, and an inner forbidden city. The Ly and Tran court expanded and renovated the complex year upon year, and after the Le Dynasty expelled Ming China from Vietnam they renamed it Dong Kinh and ordered repairs to the citadel. Even after the tumult of the Mac Dynasty and the lengthy civil war between it and the Revival Le Dynasty, the structure of the citadel was largely preserved. After the destructive war between the Nguyen and Tay Son, Gia Long (the founder of the Nguyen Dynasty; more on him later) ordered a large-scale reconstruction of the Thang Long citadel, rebuilding much of it in their own syncretic Vauban-inspired style. Much of the extant structures in Thang Long date to this period, though we found not too much left when we visited since most of it was razed during French colonisation to make space for barracks. The remaining major structures were the impressive Doan Mon Gate, the Flag Tower, Hau Lau palace and the North Gate, with much of the site being an archeological complex containing many remnants from the previous dynasties. Large amounts of ceramics and other artefacts have been found during archeological digs, spanning many centuries of Vietnamese history. We visited all of the main areas, as well as a small museum within the complex meant to showcase some of the finds and describe the storied history of the former imperial centre.
After seeing the citadel, we walked northwards towards the West Lake and passed a scenic concentration of French-style architecture on our way there, including one of the most important and beautiful Catholic churches in Hanoi: Cua Bac Parish Church. It's a large custard-yellow church built in front of the North Gate, designed by French architect Ernest Hebrard in eclectic style with strong hints of art deco decoration. He also incorporated traditional Vietnamese stylistic elements into the design of the church, making it a fascinating example of French-Vietnamese syncretic architecture. It's situated in a nice tree-filled lane that's absolutely covered from top to toe with gorgeous villas; so much so that it almost feels like walking in a Wes Anderson movie.
There are a good number of important historic temples dotted around the shores of the West Lake. The first one we visited was Quan Thanh Temple, a relatively quiet 11th century Taoist religious site featuring a mammoth 9-tonne bronze statue of Tran Vu cast in 1677. It's a monumental piece of Vietnamese artistry; in my opinion the altar is the most spectacular one in Hanoi and it's my single favourite religious site in the entire city for that reason alone. The next temple we visited, Tran Quoc Pagoda, was a famous Buddhist temple situated on an island in the middle of the West Lake with a history dating back to the 6th century, making it the oldest temple in Hanoi (though, most of the extant structures date to the 17th century). It boasts a spectacular 11-story stupa that's 15 metres in height, with each story containing a gemstone statue of the Amitabha Buddha.
On our second night in Hanoi, we visited Thang Long Water Puppet Theatre. It's a theatre that specialises in water puppetry shows, a traditional Vietic performance art that boasts a history stretching all the way back to the 11th century. Such shows were originally conducted in wet rice farms, involving small groups of performers who moved beautiful lacquered puppets through the waist-deep paddies while musicians played Vietnamese orchestral music and sung chéo operatic folkstories, and these performances can still be found throughout the country in pagodas and theatres. For our part, we were highly impressed by how these performers used the watery setting to its fullest extent, complete with very creatively designed puppets capable of floating and bobbing through the pool and even spitting water out at each other. There was a small English audio guide to the show which we paid for, though in retrospect I don't think it was very necessary - the folk stories are mostly told through the puppetry itself, and the plots are simple enough that one can usually grasp it on their own. Most of these stories paint humorous and whimsical pictures of rural Vietnamese life, and unless you're a total cynic I think it's impossible not to be at least a little bit charmed by it.
We woke up the second day and ate complementary breakfast in the top floor of our hotel, then left to explore the Old Quarter properly. It quickly became one of my favourite places in Hanoi - there’s always something interesting to find within these streets, and it’s very worth ducking into little holes in the wall to see what’s inside. When we were there we visited many quiet temples nestled within the urban sprawl, the oldest of which was the 11th-century Bach Ma Temple, its gilded, dimly-lit halls still perfumed with the sweet aroma of incense. Other times we found charming little outlets like a cafe hailing from 1946 which was the first cafe to serve Vietnamese egg coffee, a strong Robusta coffee made sweet and rich with a whipped cream topping made from raw eggs and condensed milk (as an aside, Vietnamese coffee is generally amazing, unsurprisingly so for a country that produces so much of it). There were also many historic residences hidden within the scrawl of shacks such as 87 Ma May ancient house, a well-preserved Hanoian house from the late 19th century complete with a traditional store and household altar. I was pleasantly surprised by the Old Quarter, really; I've heard Vietnamese call it a "tourist ghetto" but it's popular for a good reason - there's a bottomless depth to these old craft streets that's truly unparalleled. It feels like you could live here for years and still keep discovering new things within it.
At the south end of the Old Quarter is Hoan Kiem Lake, a natural freshwater body surrounded by leafy, tree-filled lanes. According to a Vietnamese legend, Emperor Le Loi (the rebel leader who defeated Ming China and established the Later Le Dynasty, the longest running Vietnamese dynasty in history) was granted a magic sword by the Dragon King, which he used to wage his wars and reclaim Vietnamese sovereignty. Later on, a turtle god from the lake acting on behalf of its master asked for the sword back, which he graciously returned, and from then on he renamed the lake to its current title, which means "Lake of the Returned Sword". There are many towers and temples in and around the area, the most recognisable being Thap Rua (Turtle Tower), an iconic structure in the lake that's been rebuilt many times ever since its construction in the 1400s, with the current structure built in 1886 in honour of Le Loi.
There's also Ngoc Son Temple, a delightful little religious site on an island with a bright red bridge leading to it. It was built in the early 19th century and originally devoted to the Three Sages, but soon the Vietnamese national hero who repelled the Mongol invasions, Tran Hung Dao, was incorporated into the temple as well. We entered through a colourful gate that guarded the entrance to the complex, which led to a small but atmospheric collection of golden-red buildings with scenic views of the lake. There are many parts of Hanoi that are very beautiful, and they're like calm oases within the sheer chaos that typifies most of the city, though they can get weird at times. In one particularly strange temple hall, we managed to find the preserved remnants of giant turtles from Hoan Kiem Lake, meant to pay homage to Le Loi's heavenly encounter.
In Vietnam, it's never possible to get too comfortable: when walking around the lake there we came across a number of pushy touts that tried to sell us cyclo rides. This got irritating quick, but it was also interesting since I did notice they were not uncommon on the streets - they've long been phased out in many rapidly-modernising Southeast Asian countries where they're mostly considered a relic of the past, but apparently not in Vietnam - I suppose traffic in many Hanoian streets remains so congested and slow that using a rickshaw is still a viable method of transport, though it seems to be something tourists primarily use at this point. In general, we dealt with them by ignoring them and walking away; they'll take the hint and won't bother you after a short while.
However, an unpleasant aspect of Hanoi that's much harder to ignore (at least for those who are sensitive to noxious smells) is the at-times intense air pollution. Your experience probably depends on the time of year you visit, but it can get bad, and towards the end of our second day we were feeling very faint and needed to pop into Lotte Tower just for the filtered air. Seriously, if you can't take that, I suggest skipping Hanoi, or at most spending one day in the city just to see what it's like. There's a lot of beautiful historical buildings and artefacts in it as well as many charming streets, but the dense smog that often blankets the city can make one feel like all these priceless relics and bits of culture have somehow been cast into hell. So consider where your comfort level lies and decide accordingly.
Ultimately, my experience with Hanoi was one of blistering contradictions; it's a city that's packed to the brim with intoxicatingly rich heritage and culture, run by a highly propagandising communist government (on paper at least) that seems intent on promoting an intense cult of personality, but in spite of that the city itself can feel hilariously overwhelming, polluted and anarchic, without regard for any concept of "collective good". It’s almost like a Vietnamese version of Victorian London, except even stranger because it feels like a bunch of wet-rice farmers have been unceremoniously thrust into industrial modernity; many habits like washing dishes on the cramped sidewalks and using motorcycles as an automated extension of bikes seem to be directly cribbed from village culture, except they’re doing so in an overcrowded metropolis absolutely not suited for these practices. I have no idea how anything gets done in this ant farm of a city, but Vietnam is the fastest growing economy in Southeast Asia and has managed to monopolise a large amount of world manufacturing so clearly they're doing something right. I really wonder how they’ll continue to modernise as time goes on.
We returned to our hotel once we were done sightseeing (the sheer overload was seriously tiring us out by this point) and climbed into a bus booked for us by our accommodation; the driver promptly took us out of the crowded streets of Hanoi and turned into a country road that led deep into the rice farms of rural Vietnam. The ride took about two hours, and it was maybe the most bumpy and loud ride I've ever had on any vacation. Our driver drove into the night, all the while honking at motorcyclists and cars as he went, speaking loudly on his phone, and rolling down his window to talk to random people - at one point he stopped and repeatedly yelled something at us in Vietnamese; we had no clue what he was saying. He continued on to our destination anyway and we heaved a deep collective sigh of relief. When you're in the Southeast Asian countryside, you certainly don't want to be left stranded on the side of the road.
He stopped the car in an isolated, unpaved road in the middle of nowhere, and we stepped out into the darkness. A slight drizzle had begun, so we ducked into a small complex of lakeside bungalows and asked for our room. The man at the counter was very welcoming to us - maybe the first person in all of Vietnam so far that hadn't been completely and utterly incomprehensible - and made some friendly conversation before handing us the keys to our room and showing us how everything worked. We ate some food at the small dining area they provided, then hunkered down in the cosy wooden room and got ready to sleep. Before we turned off the lights in the bungalow, we heard an animal crawling on our roof.
Trang An:
The next morning, we woke up with sun shining on our faces; pulling down the blinds revealed large limestone peaks reflected in a shallow lake. We were now deep within the Trang An landscape complex, a stunning karst-filled region of the Red River Delta that looms large in the country's history, having been continuously inhabited for 30,000 years straight. Bowls of chicken pho came to us as soon as we sat down at the dining area, though it featured very light broth that was barely spiced.
Once we were done with breakfast we called a Grab car, which slowly made its way through a maze of bumpy, poorly maintained roads to drop us off at the entrance to Mua Caves, a site that's much more famous for its breathtaking lookout over the limestone mountains and rice paddies than it is for any of its caves. This is a popular site to visit, and the area around the mountain contains some overpriced amenities meant to gouge exhausted tourists. The route to the top involved a steep climb up 500 steps, and we did the trek in suffocating heat and humidity that made us feel like we were going to drop dead at any second - the final section of the climb leading to a dragon sculpture at the top of the mountain involved an unfenced scramble up steep rocks in blazing sun, it was so precarious that I'm surprised it hasn't killed someone yet. Though the views were well worth it; as we climbed the panoramic view over the landscape complex became ever more beautiful, and we witnessed a number of wild goats climbing the steep cliffs along the trail we were following. Upon reaching the bottom of the mountain we grudgingly dragged ourselves into one of these overpriced stalls and grabbed a drink. We were so parched that even after leaving the site a man in a shack hollered at us selling sugarcane juice and coconuts and we happily accepted. He hacked apart coconuts on the side of the road for us, which we polished off with gusto.
Note that very few Vietnamese restaurants or cafes have air-conditioning at all - they mostly just give you a cold drink and turn a fan on you, which is not sufficient to deal with the blazing heat and humidity that the entire country experiences in early summer. I can't imagine how it would feel during the hottest part of the year; according to one of our Grab drivers North Vietnam reaches 40+ degree temperatures at the height of summer, which would be absolutely debilitating especially considering how muggy the country is. We found ourselves soaked with sweat every single day of the trip, and it was necessary for us to grab a drink or two after every stop if we didn't want to collapse from exhaustion.
After recovering we grabbed another car to Thai Vi Temple at the south end of the landscape complex. It's a 13th century temple that was built on the site of the former Vu Lam Palace Complex, a military base constructed during the Tran Dynasty to prepare for attacks from the Mongols. The temple pays homage to the old Tran kings, and it's a serene, minimal complex with a front gate flanked by two stone horse statues. The courtyard is surrounded by symmetrically placed tropical ponds and bell towers, and it looks out to a main hall supported by many carved stone pillars. Its interior features many gilded idols of Vietnamese royalty, and when we visited there was an old man inside playing a traditional instrument that granted the temple a tranquil atmosphere. Thai Vi is not the most important temple in Vietnam nor is it the one with the most impressive artistry, it's in fact one of the smaller temples, but in a country where there are shrines around every corner this was one of the most atmospheric ones.
We walked out of Thai Vi on foot, past small little shrines and graves nestled deep within the limestone hills, and grabbed a coconut coffee as well as some spring rolls from a roadside cafe with a bucolic view of the paddy fields. This didn't satiate our hunger, so we also got ourselves a northern style banh mi from the nearby town of Tam Coc (it was tasty and enjoyable enough after a day of exploring, but was rather plain; as is most Northern Vietnamese food). After that we made our way to Bich Dong Pagoda, a set of cosy Buddhist temples nestled into a mountainside with a history dating back to 1428. We walked through a path that passed through a large gate surrounded by rainforest, leading into a series of lovely cave temple halls with a large array of Buddhist statuary tucked behind the stalactites and formations. I enjoyed this temple a lot as well; it was very ethereal and offered views of the forested limestone hills as we climbed up to the caves. The Trang An landscape complex in general has some of the most alluring temples in all of Vietnam, and Thai Vi and Bich Dong alike are no exception.
The next day we decided to take a boat tour around the rivers and waterways of Trang An. We got into a line to board the boats, and were surprised at the sheer insanity of Vietnamese queues - there was no sense of personal space whatsoever, and said queue felt less like a line and more like a competition to see who could cut in front of others the most successfully. To get anywhere in the queue, we had to be very aggressive, and even then it wasn't a smooth or quick experience. There was a woman behind me holding a child, and she stood so close that her kid was kicking me in the back. Every time we moved she would walk ahead so that the tip of her shoe was touching the back of mine; I attempted to compensate by placing my right foot far behind me but eventually just let her through the queue because I was so fed up with having to watch where I stood. This kind of Molochian tragedy of the commons is something that seems to be common in many parts of Vietnam, and while it's fascinating to witness it's also endlessly frustrating and isn't the easiest thing to get used to. Vietnamese aren't stupid about it either; they keenly understand that it isn't ideal, and many of the people we talked to mentioned these as problems.
Things were much more manageable once we actually went on the boat tour; the crowds dispersed and we had space to ourselves. Everyone went in groups of four, and since we were a bit apprehensive about what being in a small boat with Vietnamese would be like we picked up some foreigners for our group then climbed into a rickety boat with a local man who would be rowing us. He immediately tapped me on the shoulder, then passed me - the only guy on the boat - an oar. Apparently, I paid for the coveted experience of doing half (realistically less than a third) of the work of rowing myself, the guide, and three other women to our destination.
So we put on our lifejackets and I got to work. Some other members of the tour intermittently participated in rowing, but I was doing so for almost the entire three hours of the tour, to the point that my arms felt like they were going to fall off. The landscapes we saw were worth the effort, though; we rowed through lush little waterways flanked on each side by towering peaks, ventured into sinuous half-flooded caves decorated with small formations, and visited stunning isolated temples that could only be reached by boat. The Temple of Cao Son was the first one we came across, and what greeted us when we clambered onto shore was an impressive wooden three-story temple hall, complete with gold finishings and a towering statue of Cao Son, the god of the mountain. There were also many ancillary halls nearby, the most spectacular of which was festooned with intricate golden canopies and had a gleaming pagoda-like structure at its very core. Every single one of these temples were framed by breathtaking views of mountains and rainforests, and we spent so much time there that it irritated our guide, who firmly told us "Temple, 10 minute" once we got back into the boat.
We eventually stopped again at a picturesque pagoda jutting out from deep inside the waters of the channel, where he pointed at our cameras and said "Photo". The two French women who were accompanying us on the boat ride snapped a shot, and when it came to our turn we tried to say it wasn't necessary. In response he just turned the boat in a more favourable direction and pointed again. Throughout the tour he treated the entire affair in a doggedly prescriptive way, like he was ordered to check off items on a list; you will stop at this site and you will take the approved amount of time and you will take a photo. It's frankly a bizarre way to treat tourism, and one gets the sense that any kind of remotely responsive customer service culture does not exist in Vietnam at all. Again, it feels like a bunch of rural rice farmers discovering that tourists exist and you can make money off them, but without any real idea of how to cater to them. I'm actually inclined to say it adds to the authenticity of the experience.
The next place we docked at was Suoi Tien Temple, a tranquil complex with an elegant two-story main hall dedicated to Quy Minh, a god of land and water that features in Vietnamese legend. Conscious of how long we were taking this time, we timed ourselves while exploring the temple complex and even managed to grab a few pictures despite the time limit, though the deeper chambers of the temple containing heaps of sumptuous folk-religious Vietnamese artistry did not allow photos. We got back to our boat, without objection from our guide, and ventured into yet another narrow waterway shadowed by mountains.
Our last stop was the Vu Lam Royal Step-Over Palace, founded on yet another section of the Tran kings' military base when they were preparing for the Mongol invasion. This is one of the most picturesque sites in Trang An and is probably the largest temple complex we saw while on the boat tour. The many halls of this site enshrined many statues of what I believe to be Tran Dynasty monarchs, as well as large protector deities that stood guard at the temples' entrances. Probably my favourite temple interior of the whole trip was situated at the very back of the complex, featuring a colourful room with multiple ornate maroon and blue canopies draped around an idol. I can't find too much information about the history of the current modern-day complex, but I'm guessing it's not too old; there's Quoc Ngu writing on a number of the temples so it's likely these temple halls were built in commemoration of the old military base. I wouldn't imagine that wooden structures would persist very well in the muggy Vietnamese climate anyway; even stone and concrete tends to suffer damage quickly when exposed to these tropical conditions.
Once we left the boat, we bought some tea, desserts and pomelo from a shop nearby the ticket office. They offered us a small bag of spice and salt to dip the pomelo segments into, and eating it like that made it far more of a savoury affair. It's interesting! I'm actually not sure why this method of eating fruit hasn't caught on more outside of Southeast Asia, it scratches a strange itch I didn't even know existed. We polished off our meal then jumped into yet another Grab car which took us to the Hoa Lu Ancient Capital, the site of an early Vietnamese cultural, political and religious centre during the late 10th century which played host to some of Vietnam's first independent imperial dynasties; the Dinh, founded by Dinh Tien Hoang, and the Early Le, founded by Le Dai Hanh.
So, some historical context: Dinh Tien Hoang was born as Dinh Bo Linh in Hoa Lu, where he became a military leader at a young age. He saw the establishment of the first semi-independent Vietnamese dynasty (the short-lived Ngo Dynasty), but it was an unstable state, simultaneously unable to gain recognition from the Chinese state and unable to subdue its own regional chiefs. This led to a situation known as the "Anarchy of the Twelve Warlords", where all the regional Vietnamese warlords in practice ruled their own autonomous parts of the Red River Delta with the Ngo kings themselves holding little real power. Dinh Bo Linh effectively conquered his way through each regional warlord's territory one after another and paved the way for the first truly independent unified Vietnamese state, establishing the nation of Dai Co Viet and setting the capital at Hoa Lu. The mountainous limestone topography of the area was strategically chosen so as to make the capital impregnable to attack, with any gaps between the mountains covered by earthen walls ten metres high and fifteen metres thick. Some sections of the wall still exist, and have been excavated by archaeologists.
In 979, Dinh Tien Hoang and his son Dinh Lien were murdered in their sleep by Do Thich, a eunuch attempting to usurp the throne (subsequently, his body was cut into small pieces). After this, it seemed the natural successor would be his surviving six-year-old son Dinh Toan. However, Dinh Tien Hoang's wife and now empress dowager to Dinh Toan, Queen Duong Van Nga, wanted the regent Le Hoan (posthumously titled Le Dai Hanh) to become emperor instead so that Dai Co Viet could have an emperor capable of withstanding the Song invasion, who were trying to take advantage of the political tumult in Dai Viet to reassert control over the area (note Duong Van Nga later became his empress). So in 980 Dinh Toan was deposed and power was transferred from the Dinh clan to the Le clan, marking the beginning of the Early Le Dynasty. In early 981 Emperor Taizong ordered general Hou Renbao to advance into Dai Co Viet, who scored some early military victories over the Viet armies due to their overwhelming manpower, but the Song were decimated by malaria and started infighting. Le Dai Hanh staged an ambush at Chi Lang and managed to capture Hou Renbao and eradicate half of the remaining Song armies, forcing a retreat. Upon return, they were executed in Kaifeng for their military failures.
While all this was happening, Paramesvaravarman I of the southern Hindu-Buddhist state of Champa was also trying to capitalise on all the tumult. On the advice of Ngo Nhat Khanh, an exiled former Vietnamese warlord that ruled during the Ngo dynasty, he sent an expedition into Vietnam in late 979, but it was scuttled by a typhoon; Ngo Nhat Khanh drowned along with the fleet. After repelling the Song invasion, Le Dai Hanh attempted to send envoys to Champa, but Paramesvaravarman I detained them, which incited retaliation from Dai Co Viet. The Viets invaded Champa in 982, killed Parmesvaravarman, and sacked the capital of Indrapura, seizing much territory for themselves. Frankly, it's comical just how tumultuous and eventful Vietnamese history is. It reminds me of that gameplay/lore meme: Vietnam gameplay; rice farming. Vietnam lore; basically Game of Thrones.
We pulled up to the site of the ancient capital and noted there wasn't much left of the old political and ceremonial centre; most of what there was to see on the site were extant 17th century temples dedicated to Dinh Tien Hoang and Le Dai Hanh, along with their tombs (constructed later as well), which I would say is still of some historical interest. The temples had a particularly solemn vibe to them; Dinh Tien Hoang's temple was framed by a unique obelisk-like gate and featured a monumental stone pedestal of a royal throne at the front of the main hall. His tomb was situated on a hill which we had to climb, something that was excruciatingly unpleasant in the hot muggy weather. Le Dai Hanh's temple was just a short walk away and it was decorated with small courtyards and rock gardens, with stately banyans framing many of the temple halls. Behind Le Dai Hanh's temple stood a small and most importantly mildly chilly museum displaying some remnants from the old dynastic capital. There was a fenced-off hole in the floor showcasing an archeological site with some brickwork from what used to be a massive palace, which is pretty much all that's left of the original structure. Outside of the temples there were women aggressively marketing hand fans and hats to people, they came up to us and tried to offer products to alleviate the heat. It was boiling, so my sister actually did buy a hand fan which she used throughout the rest of the holiday.
That night, we visited the largest town in the area, also named Hoa Lu. We entered a janky local restaurant and ordered some bun cha and banh cuon, which came out in no time at all. The local style of bun cha featured cut up blocks of rice vermicelli, which we paired with some herbs and grilled pork and dipped into a zesty sauce. It was good, but we preferred the banh cuon, which used soft flat rice noodles instead and just had a better texture. After that we went for some che, a broad category of Vietnamese coconut milk-based dessert soups - the style we got included large heapings of durian and jellies and it was divine. We also had some durian crepes, which were unbelievably light and fluffy.
The next stop in Hoa Lu was the Ky Lan lake park, a series of walking streets centred around a lake festooned with glowing lanterns. There were many stores in the area selling snacks and paraphernalia, and while it was definitely tourist-oriented we didn't really mind. In the middle of the lake there were a number of modern pagoda-style temples full of intricate relief carvings which were crawling with people, and interestingly enough despite their recentness and lack of traditionality there were many people using them as active religious sites; I saw many locals standing in front of the idols and briefly praying to them. I think this is a fairly fun short excursion in Hoa Lu at night; it's not a main attraction but it's a buzzy and festive part of the town with some pleasant things to see.
We spent our last day at Trang An visiting Bai Dinh Pagoda, one of the most substantial Buddhist temple complexes in Southeast Asia. The old part of the temple is located 800 metres or so from the larger new temple, and features a collection of shrines dating back to the 11th century. The new part of the temple was built in 2003, and boasts multiple records such as the largest gilded bronze Buddha in Asia, the tallest stupa in Asia, the largest arhat corridor in Asia, and so on. It was built in traditional style by artisans from nearby craft villages, and it is gigantic. We travelled around the complex with the help of some electric buses, and it still took us the entire day to explore the whole thing. At some point, we were offered a herbal foot bath, which... involved us soaking our feet in warm herb water for twenty minutes; it did make our feet feel softer though I'm pretty certain the herbs had basically no effect. Probably my favourite part of Bai Dinh was the ancient pagoda towards the back of the complex - we entered the old temple through a gate surrounded by forest and walked up a large flight of stone steps towards two cave temples decorated with a large array of Buddhist statues. One of them contained a subterranean lake surrounded by carvings of dragons and draped cave formations, filled with smoke and incense and wreathed in a warm glow. It was very dreamy, I quite enjoyed my time there.
At this point we were rather templed out, so we returned to our accommodation. Our Grab driver took us past the limestone hills of Trang An one last time, stopping every now and then as cattle crossed the road, and when we got back we boarded a transfer which took us all the way past the centre of Hanoi to Noi Bai airport. We stayed for the night in the airport in a VATC sleep pod which was barely large enough for the two of us, mostly consisting of a bunkbed, a bedside table and an air conditioning unit. Every single time either of us needed to relieve ourselves, we had to take the keycard out of the slot and head to the airport toilets, which cut all power to the sleep pod and meant air conditioning, lights, etc would be shut off for the sibling who remained in the pod while the other was taking a piss. This was not a problem when both of us were awake, since we could leave the keycard in the pod and just knock on the door to get back in, but in the dead of night when everyone was asleep this wasn't a particularly good solution. So the pod would just be left without power, getting hotter and hotter by the second until the other member returned. This was probably the most claustrophobic accommodation we had the entire trip and I'm not sure I fully slept that night.
Phong Nha:
The next morning we boarded a flight to Dong Hoi in central Vietnam, and as soon as we landed we were picked up by a vehicle we'd arranged for beforehand. As we drove out of the city, the narrow strip of coastal plain that characterised most of Central Vietnam gradually gave way to dense, mountainous terrain near the border with Laos; along the way we passed seemingly endless streets lined with worn, crumbling stalls. Eventually our driver pulled into a small cluster of shacks along a tranquil river, framed by towering rainforest-covered peaks. Without a word, he left us there. We were now in Phong Nha, and this was the point when the trip transformed from "extremely fascinating if a bit jarring" into "once-in-a-lifetime experience". This place is one of the highlights not only of Vietnam, but of all of Southeast Asia.
In spite of its isolation, Phong Nha has a very tumultuous history. During the Vietnam War it was a staging point for the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the supply line that kept soldiers supplied with personnel, weapons and food in the US-occupied South Vietnam. Supplies would be stored in the caves of the area and reloaded onto vehicles or bicycles for the trip south below the DMZ; some of them were even used as hospitals, such as Phong Nha Cave which doubled as a hospital and munitions store. PAVN soldiers would spend a few weeks of final training at Phong Nha before heading to the front. Due to its critical nature for the North Vietnamese forces, the US conducted aggressive aerial bombings of the area and defoliated it with tons of Agent Orange so as to strip the trail of natural cover. Hell, it might have even been the most heavily bombed area in the entire country during the war, which is saying something considering just how much damage Vietnam generally suffered. Russia and China only amplified this chaos by supplying anti-aircraft artillery to counteract the American aggression. Unsurprisingly, this area contains some of the highest concentrations of unexploded ordnance in Vietnam.
Just from looking at the town now, one would never guess that anything at all had happened here (unless you wander into places like Bomb Crater Bar, which is exactly what it sounds like). For the most part we found a sleepy, picturesque hamlet with a main street that looked more like a cluster of shacks than any kind of town centre; most of the shops were basically deserted. We spent the first day in Phong Nha doing nothing but hopping between cafes in the area. Our first meal featured coconut coffee, mango smoothies, and tomato tofu, which we devoured at a table overlooking the Son River. As we ate, boats drifted by lazily, dwarfed by the towering mountains on either side. Later, we stopped at a small, tranquil restaurant for cocktails and smoothie bowls. To our surprise, it was run by a Latvian man who handled the bar while his Vietnamese girlfriend handled the kitchen. He was friendly and talkative, sharing stories of his travels through countless countries and his time with a circus, and at some point he opened a bar in this quiet corner of Vietnam. He admitted he wasn’t sure if the business would succeed, since it was still early days.
As we walked through the town, we encountered cattle randomly lazing in the sun and chickens pecking their way through the weeds near the streets. Children returning from school rode home on bikes and waved at us as they passed. Not a single trace of the sheer carnage that transpired here seemed to remain. We slept soundly that night in a small cabin surrounded with the sounds of crickets, rather winded from all the travel we'd done.
The next day, we were picked up from our accommodation by Oxalis Adventures, our adventure tour operator that would bring us deep into the jungles and caves of Phong Nha. In order to even be accepted for the tour, we had to describe our trekking history, send photos of ourselves on a trail as proof of prior trekking experience, provide documentation that showed we were able to run three kilometres in thirty minutes by means of a fitness app, and more. Before going to Vietnam, we were scrambling to buy the required apparel, which included items like quick-dry long-sleeved T-shirts and pants and socks, as well as shoes that would be able to dry out easily once submerged in water (so, no Gore-Tex).
We climbed into their bus, and inside was our Vietnamese tour guide, some safety professionals and six other people who were also going on the tour. They dropped us off at their office, where they ran us over the basics and provided us with backpacks, helmets and water bottles as well as waterproof containers which our phones, power banks, etc were supposed to go into every time there was a wet section. In addition they also provided us with a blue bag where we could place anything we needed for the campsite, so items like extra clothing, toothbrushes and so on would be put inside the bag and left in their office, and porters would separately carry them to the camp for us (we later learned that, before they came to Oxalis, these porters were actually ex-smugglers who transported illicit goods across the Vietnam-Laos border). After the briefing was over, we assembled at the entrance of their office and introduced ourselves to the rest of the group. Everyone there was a couple except for us, and almost everyone (save for one person) was German. I won't share everyone's names, instead I'll refer to them by their jobs - the relevant people involved were Male Statistician and Female Therapist, Male IT Project Manager and Female Art Curator, and finally Male and Female Chemical Biologists. This would be our group for the next two days.
Having completed all the preliminaries, we were then taken deep into the jungles of the Phong Nha-Ke Bang National Park. Our tour guide pointed out various points of interest along the way and told us a bit about the history of the region - according to him, there was a point in time where Phong Nha was bombed for twenty days straight by the US. Later on in the drive he pointed out a barren patch on one of the mountains where an American plane was shot down by a surface-to-air missile; it turned out that the plane was full of concentrated Agent Orange and from then on nothing had grown there. He also offered some facts about the ecology and climate of the area, and took some pains to illustrate to us how severe floods were during the wet season - we passed over a huge bridge suspended dozens of metres above the forest floor which he said could get fully submerged at certain points of the year. In addition, he also noted we would not be able to come here on our own without a permit, since the VCP engaged in covert activities within the jungle, the nature of which nobody really seemed to know. Our driver pulled up at an unassuming point on the side of the road, and we grabbed our backpacks and headed into an untamed jungle alongside a tour guide, some safety professionals, and a cadre of ex-smugglers. A jungle that played host to classified Vietnamese government operations and was likely filled to the brim with unexploded ordnance.
The first sections of the trail leading to the mouth of Nuoc Nut Cave were rather leisurely. It was flat and shaded with rainforest, and there were little white butterflies fluttering everywhere along the length of the trail. It looked a bit like a scene from a Disney movie. Our guide stopped at the base of a large trunk he called "sau"; it's a tree in the Dracontomelon genus that produces sour fruit, which the Vietnamese pair with sugar and use in drinks and desserts during summer. I spoke a bit to Male Statistician during this leg of the hike, from whom I solicited opinions on academia, the peer review process and the replication crisis.
After approximately 40 minutes of walking, we made our way across a dry riverbed and climbed around some rocks to reach a gaping cave mouth, with a spread of food laid out on a blanket inside the cavern. We clustered around the blanket to see what they were offering; it was make-your-own spring rolls and banh mi. I took a thin piece of rice paper and stuffed it with herbs and meat and tomatoes, taking care not to overfill, and ate it with some sauce. The group discussed over lunch where they'd come from, where they were going to in Vietnam next, their prior travel experiences before this, and what they did as a job. I liked these people a lot. They were quite an interesting bunch; talking to them didn't make my brain want to shut down like it usually does in group settings where the level of conversation gets dragged down to the lowest common denominator. I felt like pretty much all of them actually touched on topics I wanted to hear about, the conversation at one point even delved into CRISPR-Cas9 and pharmaceutical research because of Male Chemical Biologist.
Once we'd finished eating, we ventured deeper into the cavern. Getting any further than the massive cave mouth required us to crouch down and crawl our way through a relatively tight passage; according to our tour guide you could at one point walk into the cave but floods had clogged the deeper passages with debris over time. The ceiling was covered in small mucus tendrils from predatory larvae, which we were told was a relative of the Australian Arachnocampa glow-worms, except these ones did not emit light. Eventually the passage opened up into a sizeable cavern dominated by rimstone and flowstone formations, and on the ceiling of the cave there was a small opening which only let in a trace amount of light; it had mostly been filled in by rocks ever since its formation. Our guide stated that this might be the original entrance to the cave, since it was the highest known entrance and the cave would have formed from the top down.
We clambered further into the cavern over fairly easy terrain. At one point, we turned off all our headlamps just so we could see how utterly pitch-black the entire cave actually was; it looked the same regardless of whether our eyes were open or closed. Then we progressed to the wet section of the cave, where we moved our phones, chargers, and power banks into the waterproof case, and eased ourselves into the cold water (which was a welcome break from the heat). I braced myself for the shock of submerging my entire body in the water, then proceeded to swim through the dark flooded passage with only my headlamp illuminating the water ahead. There were a couple of these wet sections, they were extremely fun to navigate. I'd never swam in a cave before this, and I can easily say that I would do it again.
Troglofauna seemed to be everywhere in Nuoc Nut Cave. It wasn't just the "glow worms"; cave crickets scuttled under our feet and bats could be found in many chambers. We had been told about a specific cave-dweller that locals called the "Hairy Scary Mary", a species of cave fauna that predated on spiders within the cave and possessed the body of a centipede atop the legs of a spider, and at some point apparently some members of our group did see it. Our guide also pointed out a fern that had been swept into the cave months ago, and in spite of the lack of light or nutrition in the cave it was still green; slowly dying, but somehow still green.
Eventually we reached a remote chamber deep within the cave, where a waterfall cascaded into a secluded pool, and the guide invited us to clamber down the rocks into the water. I removed my slingbag and carefully made my way down, trying not to slip. And... I swam under a cave waterfall. I've travelled through four continents, and out of everything I’ve done in all my years of travel, this moment stands out as the biggest rush I’ve ever experienced.
Somewhat giddily, we climbed out of the pool and ducked into a crawlspace, where we had to crouch down and sometimes pull ourselves through crevices in the rock. This led to the most extensive wet section of the cave yet, which required us to swim against the current of the subterranean river through a series of sinuous passages; we eventually found ourselves in a chamber with a massive vertical opening we would have to climb out of. So we strapped on harnesses, connected it to a rope via carabiners, and began climbing out of the cave on slippery, water-eroded rocks. There were a number of times I almost lost my footing doing this, and I think if we had tried to do it unassisted it would have been a disaster. Even with the security of a harness there was always a way to slip and hit an unprotected part of our heads on a large slab of rock. Worse, there was the lingering fear that we would accidentally disconnect ourselves; we were provided with two carabiners (one red, one black) and we were only supposed to disconnect one at a time when trying to progress to a new section of the rope, but there was a yellow clasp further down the line that could disconnect both carabiners from the harness at once.
Our group pulled ourselves out of the cave and were met with the sight of a campsite. The porters were waiting for us alongside the blue bags we'd left with them, and we quickly stripped off our wet clothes. We enjoyed some tea around a warm fire and made casual conversation as the chefs cooked up some dinner at a portable kitchen, and after our journey the aroma of the food was almost overwhelming. As soon as the dishes were laid out, we crowded around the table and dug in.
After dinner, we returned to the site of the campfire and made conversation until nightfall. These little white butterflies from earlier were absolutely everywhere in the day, but things got even more picturesque once it got dark. Since it was approaching their mating season, fireflies started making their way into our camp, their small flashing lights occasionally zipping through the air around us as we talked and enjoyed platters of peanuts and roasted sweet potatoes around the fire. It was a very cosy experience, surprisingly so considering where we were.
Probably the most interesting campfire stories came from our guide himself, who talked about how Oxalis' tours developed - it seems most of their existing process accreted through trial and error. They originally didn't use to have toilets, rather, they invited visitors to dig a hole in the ground and cover it up once they were done. But Westerners weren't able to Asian-squat, and so they often fell into the hole and ended up sitting in their own poop. In order to rectify this, Oxalis provided sticks that visitors could hammer into the ground so they could hang onto it while squatting, but too often people didn't hammer them in deep enough and the sticks would get yanked out of the ground, which sent them tumbling into the hole anyway. It was a Belgian guy who first proposed that they introduce toilets at their campsites, and he did so because he was sitting in his own shit. He sent them mockups of toilet designs once he was back in Belgium, it appears it haunted him so much he had to rectify the problem no matter what.
The changing rooms were yet another part of the tour they had to iron out early on. Their tours involved a lot of campsites inside dark cave chambers, and so they offered a light for use within their changing rooms. However, it turned out that when they switched on the light their naked silhouette would be visible to everyone. On one particularly memorable trip to Son Doong Cave, there was a woman who turned on a light inside a changing room - one that happened to be situated right in front of a cavern wall, causing a massive silhouette of her body to be projected onto the side of the cave. The second this happened, everybody fell quiet in an instant. Suffice to say that when we were there, they were no longer providing lights.
Our guide also shared stories from his time in Northern Vietnam, particularly around Ha Giang, where he discovered that they eat extremely weird shit. Almost literally shit, in some cases. There's a culture in northern Vietnam, the Nung, that eats half-digested poop cut out of an animal's small intestine. He once ate it unknowingly and noted that it had a bitter taste; after learning what it was, he lost his appetite for days. With a laugh, Female Chemical Biologist joked about how so many of these bizarre tales always seemed to involve things like poop, bodily functions or nudity.
The next day, we changed back into our still-damp clothes and descended through the same narrow opening we had climbed out of the day before, using our harnesses. If anything, going down that infernal fissure was even more difficult than the ascent. It felt far less controlled, since moving with gravity made it easier to lose footing and slip. At long last we all made it back down to the cave floor, and headed into another part of the cave known as Va Cave through a cramped, waterlogged passage. We all stopped to rest in a large room with many flowstone formations draped from the ceiling, with water surging around the small outcrop we were standing on.
Once we had regained our energy we pressed on further into the cave, through waist-deep water and some precarious scrambles. Eventually, we reached an enormous, multi-tiered flowstone formation that seemed to stretch endlessly upward. We were informed that we needed to climb it. So we connected ourselves to the rope provided, and began to precariously scale the formation, which was extremely vertical and offered little in the way of hand- or foot-holds. The most effective method of traversing this formation turned out to be leaning back, letting the rope hold our weight, and carefully shimmying along the slick wall using only our feet. If any of us had accidentally disconnected the carabiners at this point, we would have fallen quite a long distance to the cave floor. After that technical climb we had to undertake an arduous walk on the top of rimstone terraces, which was caked with mud that made it easy to slip.
We made our way to the lip of one of the terraces, and beyond that we could see a surreal forest of ghostly tower cones, each one the size of a human. These formations, by the way, are extremely rare and exist only in two caves in the world (the other one being in Thailand). They're not stalactites and aren't formed by dripping water, and it's not exactly clear how they form - the current working theory is that the standing water within each terrace pool creates small calcite rafts which sink as soon as they become too heavy, and the accretion process over time forms cones about as high as the lip of the pool. Climbing over the lip of the terrace, we found ourselves in the midst of these cones, standing solemnly in the darkness of the cave like a natural terracotta army. Special ladders and metal steps had been placed across the interior of the terrace so as to not disturb the fragile cones, and we followed them to two platforms where we could get a good look at these formations. It is by far one of the most otherworldly things I have ever seen in my life.
At this point we were all exhausted, so we retraced our path to the campsite again, performing three climbs along the way. We ate lunch, then walked back to the bus through a much tougher path through the forest, which involved us scrambling over a hill that seemed more like a tangle of roots and soil - at one point Female Chemical Biologist got a photosensitivity-induced migraine during an aggressively difficult part of the scramble and needed to stop. But eventually we reached the bus which took us back to the Oxalis Adventures office. Every member of the group was granted a medal for finishing the adventure tour (which grants a discount for any other Oxalis tour), and we took a shower at their office so we could scrub off all the muck and grime from our caving expedition. It was from there that we took our transfer to our final location.
Hue:
Our driver continued deep into the night. He dropped us off at an alley where we walked to our homestay, and it was here that we were greeted by a friendly-but-overly-effusive woman behind the counter who gave us some passionfruit juice. She presented us with many maps of Hue and provided a huge number of recommendations on where to go. Initially we thought she might have received commissions from the places she was recommending, but later it became clear she really just wanted us to see her city. We politely nodded at everything, then went to our room (which we had to walk up four flights of stairs to reach) and collapsed.
Hue is a city that has perhaps seen even more carnage than Phong Nha, having been the site of a massacre perpetrated by the Viet Cong and PAVN during the Tet Offensive; 5-10% of the entire population of Hue was killed via methods like torture and entombment, and mass graves continued to be found around the city for years after. It's considered the worst massacre of the Vietnam War, and it happened during a mere four-week period where they occupied the city - it's honestly incredible to me that Hue isn't more of a hellish shithole after an event like that. Central Vietnam has repeatedly been a border zone throughout the country's history and as a result many of the cities and towns there have rather tumultuous stories. It's also a city that experienced an unexpected ascendancy during the late 18th century, becoming the very last imperial capital of Vietnam before the Viet Minh intervened and forced the last emperor of the Nguyen Dynasty to abdicate.
So, some later Vietnamese history: During the 18th century, the Later Le Dynasty was in a tailspin, with the Le kings only holding a ceremonial role. The Trinh lords of the north, who ruled from their capital of Thang Long, and the Nguyen lords of the south, who ruled from Hue, fought for control of the country. These lords were referred to in Vietnam as "Chua"; a title comparable to that of Shogun in Japan, and they played similar roles as de facto ruler of their respective territories. Eventually a peace was brokered between the two families, and a treaty was drawn up formally establishing the Trinh and Nguyen territories... which was broken by the Tay Son peasant revolution. The years leading up to it had been characterised by natural disasters, famines and the collapse of foreign trade, which led to a major social crisis and lots of instability across Dai Viet. The Nguyen lords were forced to abandon some of their southwards expansionary conquests by the Siamese king who launched a war to regain control of Cambodia, and there were several political crises within the Nguyen court during the time as well. Heavy taxes and local corruption during this period spurred three peasant brothers in Central Vietnam to self-style as champions of the people and incite a rebellion against the Nguyen lords. The Trinh saw that the Nguyen were weak, and entered into the affray; it ended with a massacre of the Nguyen lords. One nephew, Nguyen Anh, managed to escape into Siam. The Tay Son then conquered the Trinh, and consolidated their power over all of Vietnam, the capital of the newly unified country now being Hue.
Meanwhile, Nguyen Anh had seen his entire family be killed by the Tay Son and was amassing power in an attempt to reclaim his lands. He rebuilt his support base in the south and befriended a French bishop, Pigneau de Behaine, who believed that supporting Nguyen Anh in his retaliation might help him gain concessions for Catholics in Vietnam and help its expansion in Southeast Asia. Pigneau helped him assemble additional French forces, and Nguyen Anh eventually managed to gain control over Saigon. When the most notable of the Tay Son brothers died, he took advantage of the situation to attack northwards, and gained support from the Qing state (who were reacting to a Tay Son massacre of ethnic Chinese). He quickly conquered all of Vietnam in the early 19th century, overran the Tay Son, and in an act of sweet revenge murdered the surviving Tay Son leadership and their families. Nguyen Anh crowned himself emperor of the newly established Nguyen Dynasty, under the reign name Gia Long, and built a large citadel in Hue on top of the old city used by the Tay Son. As I said, Vietnam gameplay; rice farming. Vietnam lore; basically Game of Thrones.
On our first day in Hue, we made it a priority to visit the city's historic citadel. As our Grab car made its way through the streets, we saw that much of Hue was still enclosed by the original Vauban-style walls and moat (note: apparently this citadel has an absolutely mammoth perimeter of 10 kilometres), with motorcycles and cars having to pass through the original fortress gates in order to gain access to the inside of the citadel. Inside lay the old Imperial City, which we were planning to visit. We stepped out of the car and walked into the grounds of the citadel, where we were greeted by a spectacular gate that marked the entrance to the imperial city. It was called the Ngo Mon, or Meridian Gate, and it was very visually striking; an elaborate red-and-yellow pavilion stood above a series of gigantic stone arches that seemed to tower over virtually everything else in the area. We bought our ticket at a small office just outside of the imperial city, and walked through the imposing gate.
Within the walls of the imperial city lay a stunning palace complex filled with landscaped ponds and frangipanis. We were staring at a courtyard that led straight to the historic Thai Hoa Palace (Throne Palace), considered the pinnacle of Vietnamese imperial architecture. It was a single story building designed in traditional Asian style, boasting a roof adorned with intricate filigreed artwork and finely wrought sculptures of dragons. Inside lay a red-and-gold throne hall, wreathed in endless golden canopies; the walls and pillars were covered with carvings of Vietnamese poetry alongside depictions of dragons and clouds. Hue possesses by far the best historic architecture in the entire country, and the citadel is probably the most recognisable and famous of these sites.
The Imperial City was massive, and we traversed it until we were worn out and couldn't explore anymore. We visited big red temples dedicated to the thirteen emperors of the Nguyen Dynasty, saw elegant rock gardens framed by bonsai and graceful wooden pavilions, and more. There was even an original Vietnamese royal theatre within the complex (Nguyen Dynasty court music is still played there to this day, but unfortunately they weren't performing when we visited the citadel). To the back of the complex stood the reconstructed Kien Trung Palace, a stately palace built in a mix of Vietnamese, French and Italian Renaissance styles. Its overall architectural structure almost looked like something one might find in Europe, except it was covered from top to toe in intricate mosaics in the shape of dragons and other Asian iconography. Much of the architecture in the city does this - it syncretises traditional Vietnamese aesthetics with French elements, and forms quite a unique style I can easily say I've never seen anywhere else.
Outside the city, we grabbed a ridiculously sweet and fresh pineapple on a stick (yet again we were given a spice mixture to dip the pineapple into, this time we opted not to use it) and made our way to the Hue Museum of Royal Antiquities. It featured many artefacts from the Nguyen Dynasty, from ceramics to thrones to artwork. The museum was fairly small and we were absolutely exhausted by this point, so we took a Grab to a restaurant in downtown Hue where we were served some great food. We ordered some bun thit nuong (vermicelli and grilled pork with fish sauce), banh khoai (seafood pancake wraps) as well as banh bot loc (tapioca dumplings) and found them to be very tasty - in general we tended to like Central Vietnamese cuisine far more than we did the food in the North. The North seems to have a tendency to underflavour things, perhaps this fits Western palates more but as Southeast Asians ourselves who are more used to heavily spiced flavour profiles we found it to be a bit plain.
We found walking around Hue a bit more relaxing than Hanoi. There were an unbelievable number of temples in the city, with every street seeming to have at least one, and virtually every dilapidated shack we came across possessed small altars for people to pray to. It's not like there were no jarring parts to it - it was still Vietnam, motorcycles were still common, but the air was much better in this city, and crossing the street was far less hassling (apart from one time we accidentally stumbled into a firework display celebrating the 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon; motorcycles were clustered in the street there and it was insane). People also seemed nicer and less cold to us in Central Vietnam in spite of all the shit that had happened to them in recent history, sometimes to the point of being a little overbearing. One thing that didn't change - there were still touts around downtown Hue who would pester us to take their rickshaw rides; it seems this occurs in all of Vietnam. Ignoring them continued to be the best policy.
On our second day in Hue we hit up the mausoleums of the Nguyen Dynasty emperors, situated south of the city centre. The first mausoleum we visited was the Mausoleum of Emperor Tu Duc, the last and longest-reigning pre-colonial emperor of the Nguyen Dynasty. It was built in 1867 and is considered one of the best examples of a royal tomb in Vietnam; it used to be a palatial retreat for the royal family, and its construction required so much corvee labour and extra taxation of the populace that it formented a coup. Upon entering, we were welcomed by a leafy, landscaped pond teeming with koi fish and adorned with many elegant pavilions; I thought this was a very finely wrought garden that rivalled virtually any other in East Asia. Situated up a flight of stairs was a simple temple complex, and to the north of the gardens and temples was the site of the actual mausoleum. This section was the most striking, with a grand stele housed in an ornate pavilion, flanked by statues of mandarins and elephants. Behind the stele stood a gate that marked the entrance to Tu Duc’s tomb where his sarcophagus lay.
Just 11 minutes' walk from the Mausoleum of Emperor Tu Duc was the Mausoleum of Emperor Dong Khanh, which I actually liked even better than Tu Duc's. It was a smaller complex, but it was far less touristed and actually possessed even more spectacular architecture, at least in my estimation. The interior of the Ngung Hy Dien, the main temple hall, was decorated in red and gold architecture similar to that of the Imperial City's throne room - but it also had colourful stained glass windows which filtered all light that entered the temple. The tomb site was incredible as well, featuring many gates and stele pavilions decorated with intricate mosaics. I do think anyone who visits Tu Duc's tomb should also visit Dong Khanh's tomb, I wouldn't recommend doing only one. They're very close together and they complement each other very well.
After visiting both these mausoleums, we were rather fatigued from the perennial heat and humidity in Hue - the city seems to have awfully bad weather even for Vietnamese standards, being deathly hot in the dry season and flooding often in the wet season. So we took a break and ducked into a number of cafes where we grabbed some salt coffee, and visited a restaurant that served us a spread of traditional Hue cuisine; the banh beo (steamed rice cakes with shrimp and crispy pork rind) in particular were amazing. We spooned some fish sauce over it and ate it as is.
The next stop was the Mausoleum of Emperor Khai Dinh, which was the smallest mausoleum we visited that day, but also the most unique and spectacular. It's also by far the most recent of these mausoleums, having been built over a period of 11 years from 1920-1931 by two monarchs that reigned during a period of French indirect rule, and it used modern construction methods to achieve a traditional feel. The architecture is a strange syncretic blend of Vietnamese and French influence that seamlessly incorporates the two styles into something completely unrecognisable, and it is incredible to witness. We pulled up and gawked at the exterior of the tomb, which was a multi-level structure made from darkened, weathered concrete in a surprisingly Gothic manner, but it would only get stranger from here. Once we entered the interior of the tomb we found an explosion of colourful ceramic mosaics and canopies, alongside an impressive painted ceiling featuring iconography of dragons and clouds. In the very centre of the tomb stood a gilt-bronze statue of Khai Dinh, with his actual remains interred eighteen metres below the statue. It's really something. Many of the historic sites in Hue represent the best 19th and early 20th century architecture I've seen anywhere in the world (feudalism lasted for a long time in Vietnam), and if you are ever in the country and are interested in history or architecture at all you can't skip Hue.
Finally, we ended our day at the Mausoleum of Emperor Minh Mang, probably the most accomplished of the Nguyen emperors aside from Gia Long. He expanded Vietnam's borders to its greatest extent in history, annexing large parts of Cambodia and Laos as well as completely extinguishing the southern Champa kingdom (really Vietnam owes much of its current borders to the Nguyen). His mausoleum is probably the most simple and elegant of all of them, with all the monuments aligned on a east-west axis surrounded by large landscaped ponds. There's a lot of finely wrought pavilion architecture in this one that's framed by large frangipani gardens and yawning courtyards, I enjoyed it a lot but unfortunately his actual tomb to the back is blocked off from the public. Still, there's a lot there to chew on.
We were a bit mausoleumed out by then, so on our final proper day in Vietnam we decided to visit some of the traditional garden houses and temples north of the Perfume (Huong) River running through Hue. We took a Grab ride to An Hien Garden House, built in the late 19th century for a daughter of Emperor Duc Duc. The entrance to the garden house featured a small gate that framed an intimate forested path; it led to a tranquil house fronted by a tropical pond covered in water lilies. There was a small Asian orchestra on the site playing traditional Vietnamese music in a pavilion, and we sat and listened to them for as long as they would play - it was a very peaceful vibe. Once they finished their performance, we tipped them and left the garden house for our next destination.
The streets north of the Perfume River are probably the most pleasant part of Hue. As we strolled along the banks of the river, we came across endless temples and garden houses - there is really no shortage of temples in Hue, but even in a place filled to the brim with them this part of the city had a uniquely high concentration of historical and cultural sites. At one point, we saw a small ceramic museum along the road, called the "Huong River Antique Pottery Museum", and decided to pop in. Inside, we saw yet another old garden house adorned by tropical plants, complete with many household Buddhist and ancestral altars. We visited the museum towards the back, and saw lots of small rooms and hallways filled with antique ceramics.
In a gesture of hospitality, we were offered tea and a selection of cookies (apparently all homemade using traditional recipes). The man who operated the pottery museum joined us for a friendly conversation. As it turned out, his grandfather was a mandarin from the Nguyen Dynasty, which explained how he had come to inherit the garden house. The pottery found in the museum had all been dredged up from the depths of the Perfume River, and at some point an archaeologist had visited to date and catalogue all the items they had discovered. We then asked him what he thought the best places to visit in Hue were and what his favourite royal tombs were, and he quickly responded "Gia Long Mausoleum". Now we absolutely had to go there. After enjoying most of the tea and cookies, we got up to head to our next destination. Before we left, he invited us to take the remaining cookies with us for the road.
We walked further west to the next stop: Thien Mu Pagoda. This pagoda, built on a small hill overlooking the Perfume River, actually predates the citadel itself. It was established in 1601, built on the spot where a legend states that a "celestial lady" appeared and asked the local lord to build a pagoda to control underground forces and dominate the region. The most recognisable thing about this temple is the Phuoc Duyen, an imposing 21-metre seven story tower built in the 1800s which we saw as soon as we approached the temple complex. The pagoda also had a pretty stripped-back main hall where a monk was striking a big bronze bowl, juxtaposed against very ornate and lush rock gardens populated with koi. Probably the most unexpected thing we found in the temple was the enshrined car of Thich Quang Duc, the monk who self-immolated in protest of Ngo Dinh Diem's anti-Buddhist policies; it was just sitting there innocuously in a small alcove within the temple.
Our final stop of the whole trip was Gia Long Mausoleum, located in the countryside to the far south of Hue. It was initially built for his first wife Thua Thien, but eventually was expanded after his death to include Gia Long and other family members of his. The complex was huge and rather empty when we visited, and most of it looked like a scene from an impressionist painting - big green rolling hills draped around a landscaped lake, dotted with obelisk-like pillars, monolithic stone monuments and incense-filled shrines. It was a highly surreal place to be; it just did not look real. The tomb that contained Gia Long and his wife featured an absolutely mammoth stone pedestal surrounded by statues and adorned with a whole flight of dragon-lined stairs; walking inside revealed an austere and minimal complex centred around two sarcophagi. This is a very dreamlike place, and would have been even more so if it weren't so hot. I think this is probably my favourite mausoleum alongside Khai Dinh's.
We woke up the next day and went to a small island in the middle of the Perfume River known for com hen (baby clam rice). It was served to us in a dirty shack with plastic chairs and tables that were far too low for comfort, alongside a bowl of clam soup made from the water it was boiled in. The com hen itself was tangy and light, whereas the soup was surprisingly strong and packed a lot of seafood flavour. Good stuff, in my opinion. Once we finished, we made our way to the airport nearby and prepared to fly off from Vietnam. Our flights had been moved around and now we had a very long layover at Tan Son Nhat airport in Saigon, so we took the opportunity to try some Southern Vietnamese cuisine. Taking a Grab to the city centre, we tried some Southern Vietnamese banh mi and... yeah, this was it. Much better than the one we had in Northern Vietnam. It was juicier, tastier and displayed a far greater variety of fillings. It was also noticeable how much more modern Saigon seemed compared to the rest of Vietnam, and there was a lot less chaos on the streets, unfortunately we couldn't spend too much time there since we were on a time limit. We returned to our airport, went through customs, and boarded our flight back to Sydney.
Conclusion:
That was a long post, it was probably quite rambly at points, so thanks for sticking through to the end. I'll provide some concluding thoughts here for people who didn't bother to read it all - do I recommend Vietnam? It depends on your level of comfort. If you can tank some overwhelm and discomfort, you'll find a lot to like as long as you are willing to take the good with the bad. Would I travel to Vietnam again? The answer's "absolutely yes, but not soon". Vietnam is a place that boasts a large amount of rich history and culture, as well as some very impressive natural sites that offer many opportunities for once-in-a-lifetime experiences. Hell, even the roughness and the abundant culture shock is an element that gives it its character - it's very fascinating to see a country in the process of transition from a largely agrarian society to industrial modernity, and to see these two worlds rub up against each other in strange ways. But it can also be jarring and overwhelming, and it takes a lot out of you when you travel there. It's a country that doesn't offer a smooth experience and doesn't try to, and in that sense, it's not a manicured tourist trap; it feels like a real, raw place where people live and sleep and shit.
To close off, I'm reminded somewhat of the Fun Scale, a metric developed by the mountain climbing community to describe their trips: Type 1 fun is stuff that's fun in the moment and fun in retrospect, Type 2 fun characterises experiences that are not enjoyable in the moment but are fun to recall afterward, and Type 3 fun is stuff that's not enjoyable at all, not when it's happening and not in retrospect. I feel like in Vietnam, I experienced all of the above at different points on the trip.
You will, however, come away with a fuckton of stories, that's a promise.