Hue Imperial City

About this audio guide

This guide to the Imperial City in Hue centers on one afternoon at its Meridian Gate: the thirtieth of August, nineteen forty-five, when Vietnam's last emperor climbed a wooden platform above the crowd in his ceremonial robes. It follows the objects and gestures that closed out the Nguyễn dynasty, founded here more than a century earlier, and the ordinary people, a poet and a young revolutionary among them, who stood on the other side of that handover. Stand at the gate itself and look up at the platform where it happened.