Vietnam slowly restores imperial city with a grim past
HUE - In "Dispatches," the book that captured the Vietnam War like few others, Michael Herr describes the "damp gloom," and the "cold and dark" that hung over this city as American troops fought house-to-house after the surprise 1968 Tet offensive by the North Vietnamese.
Dead bodies bobbed in the moat of the old imperial city and littered all its approaches, Mr. Herr wrote. When the battle for Hue, in what was then South Vietnam, was over, "70 percent of Vietnam's one lovely city was destroyed, and if the landscape seemed desolate, imagine how the figures in that landscape looked."
Now, in the Lunar New Year season 36 years later, the spitting rain that curdled the troops' spirits persists, the wintry sky remains a fixed gray.
But life in the city returned long ago, and its appeal as Vietnam's cultural center has been revived with a gradual makeover of the imperial citadel that was damaged when France, the colonial power, forcibly returned to Vietnam in 1947. It was damaged again in 1968 when the North Vietnamese were holed up inside the citadel's massive walls. According to Mr. Herr's book, the Americans suffered "roughly one casualty for every meter taken."
Tourists now pass peacefully through the gates of the 19th-century fortress. They wander around an imperial enclave that was modeled after Beijing's Forbidden City and occupied from 1802 to 1945 by the often sybaritic Vietnamese kings of the Nguyen dynasty.
Inside, visitors find a patchwork of temples and pagodas, and at the very center, the Purple Forbidden City that was the exclusive domain of the emperor, his wives, his concubines and the eunuchs who served them. Hue's citizens report with a mixture of pride and amusement that the second Nguyen king, Minh Mang, who ruled from 1820 to 1841, had 300 wives and concubines, and fathered 142 children.
Polish workers recently restored a main temple that was ruined by the fighting and the effects of humid weather. Now, Vietnamese artisans are applying the finishing touches of red lacquer and gilt trim.
An old palace that survived intact has been turned into a museum displaying elaborate imperial gowns, weapons and housewares. A large photograph shows the last emperor, Bao Dai, as a man caught between two cultures — he wears a traditional costume with a pair of wrap-around sunglasses. (Bao Dai ended up fleeing to France; he died there in the late 1990's.)
But the important buildings in the epicenter were burned in 1947 when most of the damage to the imperial city was done, conservationists say.
The ground where the most elaborate palace stood is now a barren grassy square and will probably remain so, said Nguyen Van Phuc, the deputy director of the international cooperation department of Hue's Monuments Conservation Center.
"We want to maintain the old as much as possible and to avoid rebuilding completely new monuments," Mr. Phuc said. "One of the palaces will be rebuilt but it will take a long time because we need to do the research." So far, Vietnamese researchers have not found photographs of the palace interiors, and documents from the imperial era were scattered in archives in Europe and the United States, he said.
The restoration of the Hue citadel has progressed in fits and starts, largely because of disagreements about how to go about it. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, or Unesco, designated the Hue citadel a World Heritage Site, but divisions over whether the citadel should be completely rebuilt or allowed to remain more as-is have left the restoration efforts in limbo.
Some heritage experts like William S. Logan, who is a consultant to Unesco, worry that if the restoration is overdone, the citadel could risk becoming a theme park. But Japanese experts favor rebuilding some temples from scratch.
"The Japanese have a proposal to rebuild a pavilion on the green field in the center, and Unesco has said not to do it," Mr. Logan said. "It is an argument between those who want to do more and those who want to do less."
While the politics of restoration may be fierce, it appears that the politics of responsibility for what happened at Hue have subsided.
People in the residential quarters on the south side of the Pearl River, where the 1968 urban fighting took place, shrug off the war as history.
Asked which side inflicted the most damage on the citadel in this century, Mr. Phuc, who at 33 was born after the 1968 offensive, was diplomatic.
Of the 1947 episode, he said: "It's difficult to lay blame about who were the main destroyers. Both sides did not take consideration. We just say it was because of the war, we don't say French or Vietnamese." And 1968? "Both sides made the mistake of using this as a military target."
But little doubt remains about who rules.
A huge Vietnamese national flag — a yellow star on a scarlet field — flies triumphantly from the flagpole atop the brick tower where the Vietcong flag was hoisted in the early weeks of 1968, an act that some historians say was the turning point of American opinion against the war.
By Jane Perlez - The New York Times - February 16, 2004.
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