The Old House of Tan Ky, Hoi An | Vietnam

Built in 1741, the old house of Tan Ky is a grand example of the traditional merchant houses of Hoi An, arising at the zenith of the town’s importance as a commercial port. It incorporates elements of traditional Vietnamese, Chinese, and Japanese wooden houses.

Japanese influence shows in the main roof of the front house, constructed in the triangular five rafter style, and the layout of connected small rooms that can either be shuttered or left open to form a larger space. The tubular townhouse design, with two story front and back houses, divided by a courtyard, and opening onto parallel streets, is uniquely Vietnamese. And of course, the whole place was constructed by local Kim Bong carpenters.

The paneled ceilings of the small halls are in the Chinese crabshell style. The “two swords” decorative rafters on the side walls are also Chinese, as are the yin-yang roof tiles. There are many symbolic carvings throughout, including pumpkins (fertility), ribbons (10,000), batwings (good luck, especially in finance), a lute with ribbons (harmony in marriage), protective “eyes”, and clouds (the mode of transport of the gods) among others. A specialist in Chinese decorative arts could spend hours or days here deciphering everything; there are artistic references to generational continuity, material prosperity, marital harmony, Buddhism and Confucianism.

In addition to the architectural details, there are hundreds of valuable antiques to study. These are mostly the personal effects and treasured belongings of the ancestors of the home’s current occupants. Tan Ky means “great progress”; the founding patriarch, Le Tan Ky, earned the honorific by beginning life as a neighborhood orphan named Cong, and becoming one of the richest traders in the city. He purchased the house around 1850, and it has remained in the family for seven generations so far. Currently the family lives upstairs, and downstairs is a house museum. Small antiques are displayed in cases and larger furniture and objects are left where they’ve always been.

Of the many antiques, the two most famous are the Hundred Birds panels and the Confucius cup. The Hundred Birds panels depict 100 Chinese characters as unique mother of pearl birds inlaid in lacquer. In traditional Chinese art, the Hundred Birds motif symbolizes fame, mastery, perfection and leadership. And of course, any sailor knows that seeing birds means your long voyage is all but over.

The Confucius cup is from the 16th century, and demonstrates a story wherein Confucius (thirsty after roaming a desert) was given a special cup of water that emptied itself when filled to the brim, but held water when only partially filled. The lesson is about not getting too greedy, and not letting the desire to be great overrule the habit of being good.

The back house is open to the Hoai river. There are old manual rice hullers, stoves and other items once used by servants, plus parking for the family’s scooters. There’s also a dumb waiter to the second floor, once used to haul down purchases from an upstairs warehouse, for loading onto waiting boats.

Hoi An has always flooded in the winter, and some years are worse than others. Locals like to nostalgically mark the water height in these years, the same way some parents mark their children’s height and age on a door frame. It seems the flooding in the old town has become much worse since the 1990s, when the island opposite the old town was built out. The worst year recorded at Tan Ky house is 1964, but the remaining 8 catastrophic floods were all between 1999 and 2017.

Of all the old houses in Hoi An, this one is absolutely the best. I could have spent much more time eyeing their antiques. I would go back!

The Museum of Traditional Medicine, Hoi An | Vietnam

There’s quite a bit I couldn’t get from the Museum of Traditional Medicine in Hoi An, because English signage is poor. However, I’ll outline the basic elements of the practice as best I can.

First, it’s important to know that Vietnamese Traditional Medicine is still practiced today. In the richest cities and the poorest hamlets, there are shops and stalls filled with innumerable dried herbs for the purpose. In Western countries, ‘traditional medicine’ has a reputation as snake oil, sold to hopeless old men with erectile dysfunction or gout. In Vietnam it is respected, studied alongside Western medicine in medical and pharmacy schools; there’s even a government sponsored Institute of Traditional Medicine. While some cures are demonstrably false (chewing betel preventing tooth decay, for example), others are still wholeheartedly believed in. The 66 volume encyclopedia of medicine written by Hai Thuong Lan Ong in the 18th century is still referenced today.

Around 2500 years ago, VTM began developing with some influence from Chinese Traditional Medicine, but some notable differences: first, VTM features very few animal products, apart from medicinal wines; second, in VTM recipes of fresh or dried and ground herbs consumed in the right proportions are meant to do the trick; there are none of the elaborate brewing and concocting processes common in CTM; lastly, and most obvious, different herbs grow in the warmer, wetter Vietnamese climates than the colder, northerly Chinese climates.

In Sino-Vietnamese, VTM has been called ‘the Southern herbology’, and CTM ‘the Northern herbology.’ In the 1100 years China colonized or dominated Vietnam, the colonizers respected the Southern herbology and would demand various taxes be paid in the form of VTM medicines. CTM and VTM share the concepts of chi, yin and yang, the five elements; they also share auxiliary therapeutic practices like massage and acupuncture.

From the 15th to 19th centuries, Hoi An became home to many Chinese traders who built their fortunes on spices and traditional medicines. The size and arrangement of this house shows how it was used less as a home and more as a small factory: store in the front; private appointments in the back; drying in the courtyard and on the balconies; grinding, mixing and packing prescriptions upstairs.

The artifacts, by their nature, aren’t much to look at: foot grinders, mortar and pestles, chopping knives, teapots, bowls. The museum does a great job of memorializing famous TVM doctors, so if it’s a topic that interests you, you can read succinct biographies. I can’t imagine myself trying TVM but never say never.

Hội An Museum of Folk Culture, Hoi An | Vietnam

Hoi An’s Museum of Folklore is located on the river, in the biggest old house in the town, which dates from the 1850s. Nevermind the mistranslated name; the focus here is on the city’s traditions, not myths or legends.

Though the history of the area goes back over a thousand years, the town was completely razed in 1775 during the Tay Son rebellion, and the harbor silted up completely by the end of the 19th century. So, while there are some structures dating from the 17th century, and some from as recently as the 1940s, most buildings here are either early to mid 19th century (in a traditional Viet style with heavy Japanese and Chinese influence),or French colonials built between 1900 and 1920.

This is a wonderfully preserved example of a rather grand Sino-Viet house of the era, built with ironwood and featuring a front, middle and back house, inner courtyard, 2 stories with balconies indoors and outdoors, and paneled wooden rooms carved out of the main space and dedicated as stores, bedrooms, worship rooms, etc. The family who built the house was in the spice trade, which built many fortunes in Hoi An.

Downstairs focuses on traditional trades in Hoi An: weaving, tailoring, lantern making, woodworking, and boatbuilding. There are antique looms, sometimes the sole surviving examples for once-popular techniques. There are also antique examples of rice hulling machines and farming implements. The row of shutter doors in the back house faces directly onto the river, reminding visitors how easy it must have been for traders to conduct their business here.

The upstairs of the front house has displays focusing on special architectural elements specific to the old town (like the Japanese style crab roofs), religious statuary, basket weaving, lacquer work, and festivals. The upstairs of the back house has antique personal effects of generations past: clothes worn by the wealthy and poor, wooden beds and tables, an altar with its accoutrements, a Chinese marriage contract, various tea and wine accessories, oil lamps, lacquered betel boxes, inlaid tea trays, old embroidered silk odds and ends, tiny leather baby boots, lottery tickets.

The array of items shows not only how heavily Chinese immigrants influenced the local lifestyle, but also how far the reach of these traders really went; many of the things didn’t strike me as particularly exotic because they were readily available to wealthy New Yorkers in the the Victorian/Edwardian eras, and still abound in antique shops (if you haven’t been with me long, I’m a Manhattanite).

Probably my favorite thing in the museum was the above lacquer painting, a reproduction of a 17th century original extant in Japan. It’s a map made by Japanese traders showing the Hoi An harbor and surrounds. How different things were 400 years ago! I absolutely love this style of architecture, and truly enjoyed my visit.

The Three Đà Lạt Palaces of Emperor Bảo Đại: Palace 1 | Vietnam

Palace 1 was built between 1929 and 1933 by a member of the French colonial elite, Robert Clément Bourgery. Bourgery was almost 60 when construction began, and had already spent 30 years in the Far East, primarily in the French concession outside Beijing (Tien Tsin 天津). The son of an engineer, he also trained as a mechanical engineer and joined the French Expeditionary Force, determined to make his fortune abroad.

In Tien Tsin, he met Li Tin Chu, recently a highly ranked mandarin in the court of notorious Empress Cixi. Li Tin Chu was a diplomat and interpreter who had been converted to Catholicism by his French/English/Latin teacher, a Jesuit priest. This was considered treachery by the anti-foreign dowager empress; he was banished from court, and living at the French consulate as a refugee. Anti-foreign sentiment would reach a boiling point in 1900, when Bourgery defended Tien Tsin during the Boxer Rebellion.

With the rebellion firmly put down, Bourgery and Li were determined to build their fortunes together, combining Li’s connections, language and negotiation skills with Bourgery’s engineering abilities. They formed the Electric Energy Company, and made their first millions bringing electric light to Tien Tsin. They continued building hydroelectric plants in Shanghai and Vietnam and self-sufficient buildings like the Grand Hotel in Beijing (Beijing itself wouldn’t install an electric grid until 1943).

In traditional mandarin fashion, Bourgery married both of Li’s daughters, and their children in turn married French officers, half English/half Chinese girls, etc. The common thread in their family was Catholicism, and they were deeply embedded in the European colonial elite. According to remembrances written by their friends, Bourgery’s grandchildren were so assimilated in China and Vietnam that they didn’t really speak French when they arrived in France as children to attend school.

Bảo Đại bought the house from Bourgery in 1949, when he returned to Vietnam (post-abdication) as its Head of State. Having been exiled in France and Hong Kong, perhaps he was aware of the Bourgery clan before re-entering the social swirl of Dalat and declaring it Vietnam’s new capital. Doubtless he made Bourgery an offer he couldn’t refuse, which conveniently coincided with communist China nationalizing the Bourgery family’s utility companies, and failing to grant them exit visas without substantial bribes. When able, Bourgery family members returned to France, or first decamped to Vietnam, but then were forced to France in short order as the Indochina Wars began.

Perhaps Bảo Đại felt some kinship with Bourgery; his own first wife was Catholic, French reared, and of Chinese descent. In his interview, he tears up speaking about her, and refers to her as the Queen. He discusses visiting the Pope with his family, and letting his children choose their religious beliefs for themselves. And like Bourgery, his brand of devoted Catholicism did not preclude having multiple wives and mistresses (and children by each), requiring all the outhouses conveniently preexisting on the property!

The architecture of the house and its outbuildings is entirely European. Some elements, like the type of roof tiles, wooden shutters, and stone walls, closely resemble houses in le Gard, where Bourgery grew up. Others, like the proportions of the houses, gabled roofs with hanging brackets and decorative mouldings, reflect the Swiss chalet style trendy in the ‘30s. The current view is of ramshackle buildings filling the valley, but at the time, the view was onto Bảo Đại’s own park (apparently he enjoyed hunting with a bow and arrow).

After Bảo Đại’s permanent exile in 1954, the house was used by Ngô Đình Diệm until his assassination in 1963, and then by various other South Vietnamese leaders until 1975. Diệm added a hidden helipad, connected to the house via a secret tunnel behind a bookshelf. After reunification, the house was left to rot for 25 years or so, and then renovated for use as a tourist destination.

As in the other Bảo Đại palaces, the furniture here is a real mismatch for the house, far too cheap and common for men as wealthy as Bourgery, Bảo Đại, and Diệm. And of course, the grounds have been horrifically altered for photo ops, with a Hollywood-style sign, giant chess set, tree of lanterns, allée with a hundred primary color empty birdcages, tacky fountains, and horses pulling Victorian style carriages. The worst/best thing of this sort are mannequins of Bảo Đại and his wife sprinkled throughout the upstairs rooms, that visitors pay extra to take pictures with!

So what transpired in this house? In his interview, Bảo Đại depicts sweeping geopolitical changes as more or less a clash of personalities well known to him.

For example, he speaks of Ngô Đình Diệm (the first president of South Vietnam, his rival and replacement in house and history books alike), as more or less an uppity mandarin he trusted too much as a very young man. Bảo Đại describes Diệm as rather young himself when they first met, from a Catholic family but mandarin caste. He admired Diệm’s intelligence, agreed with his nationalist ambitions for independence, and was shocked when he quit as Minister of the Interior after only 3 months.

Bảo Đại characterizes his own unwillingness to strain against French rule as the fulfillment of his duty to maintain harmony for his people. He says the country was calm and unchanged for many years, which he didn’t think was necessarily a problem, though he desperately wanted to modernize. It was so obvious to him the French would refuse Diệm’s proposals for radical reforms, he found Diệm’s dramatic resignation disingenuous. He was insulted by Diệm’s publicly proclaiming him a French puppet, and returning his seal and honors.

Bảo Đại was only 20 years old, and literally just returned from Paris the year before; he did not understand the urgency of revolutionary fervor in Vietnam, wasn’t clear on exactly how bad French oversight was, and thought gradual change was the way forward. He preferred explicit agreement with the French, and saw subversion as beneath his office.

Diệm was supposedly exiled from political life and surveilled in Huế for the next ten years, but in reality started building his base for “the third way” (non-colonial, non-communist) immediately. It should be noted that Ngô Đình Diệm was likely not imprisoned or exiled because his sister-in-law, Madame Nhu, was Bảo Đại’s first cousin once removed; Bảo Đại was a grandson of Emperor Đồng Khánh, and she a great-granddaughter. Was Bảo Đại playing checkers while Ngô Đình Diệm played chess, or was he proposing a long game that Diệm had no patience for? Did Bảo Đại slowly come to see things Diệm’s way, or was his hand forced by opportunism and greed alone? We’ll never really know.

Both Bảo Đại and Diệm sided with Japan against France during the 1940 axis occupation of Vietnam. Though the Vichy government provided administrative continuity, Japanese officials called the shots. Bảo Đại says both he and Diệm admired the modernity and economic dominance of Japan. Bảo Đại was personally impressed by the mikado, who was not only genteel and charismatic, but worshipped as a god by his people. Diệm was eager to ally with non-European anti-communists. He even secretly cultivated a friendship with anti-colonialist Prince Cường Để (long exiled in Japan), and intended to install him in Bảo Đại’s place, should Bảo Đại not collaborate with him and the Japanese.

Bảo Đại notes that the Japanese forced the kings of Laos and Cambodia to sign declarations of independence as well, and that he held out longer than them (until 1944) so as not to betray Indochinese colonial troops, many of whom were Vietnamese. He mentions that despite his fondness for France, under French rule even the word ‘independence’ was taboo. Meanwhile, the Japanese were handing it to him in name and maybe practice. He claims to have signed only once he realized both French and Japanese forces were spent, and thought an independent Vietnam might have a chance to survive. When Vichy France was liberated by the Allies, and then when Japan surrendered, he felt his dream of sovereignty was secure.

What he didn’t expect was how quickly the Việt Minh were able to fill the power vacuum once Japan surrendered. After Trần Trọng Kim failed to gain popular support as Bảo Đại’s Prime Minister, Diệm rushed northwards to fill the position. However, he was captured by the Việt Minh, exiled to a rural village, and temporarily struck down by malaria. Without an immediately available alternative president and no army of his own, Bảo Đại agreed to abdicate his throne in favor of Hồ Chí Minh, famously offering the communist-friendly rhetoric that he “would prefer to be a citizen of a free country than the king of a slave country”, and agreeing to serve as Hồ’s ‘Supreme Advisor.’

Bảo Đại seemed to evaluate Hồ Chí Minh by the same arrogant, superficial criteria as he did Diệm, saying he trusted Hồ because Hồ was from a mandarin family, and treated him with the extreme deference expected of a mandarin by an emperor. He miscalculated that Hồ’s nationalism was more important to him than his communism, thinking Hồ might be persuaded to accept Vietnam as a department of France, if full French citizenship was granted for all Vietnamese people, especially if that meant alleviating poverty and preventing a war for independence. He believed Hồ signed the Fontainebleau agreements in good faith.

Of course, Hồ wouldn’t be satisfied with anything less than complete independence, and hoped Bảo Đại could negotiate a better deal with his French familiars. Between 1946 and 1947 Bảo Đại signed three successive agreements, each with increasingly strong verbiage about self-rule, but no outright declared grant of independence. Bảo Đại said that with Hồ’s rejection of each agreement, he began to see the Việt Minh not as nationalists, but as communist rebels. Hồ fired and exiled Bảo Đại; Bảo Đại didn’t seem to think he, as the son of heaven, could be fired, and started sarcastically calling Hồ “l’empereur rouge.” He blamed Hồ for plunging Vietnam into war, and passed his next two years in exile as a playboy in Hong Kong and France.

In 1949, the French installed Bảo Đại and his government in this house, and offered them to the Vietnamese people as acceptable leaders in exchange for peace. Naturally, this didn’t inspire enough Vietnamese nationalists to stop fighting, and the war dragged on. Bảo Đại says French awareness of the American desire to fight communism in the region caused France to hold on longer in Vietnam than in the rest of Indochina. Apparently, the French believed they would win with American backup that never arrived.

Going into the Geneva talks in 1953, Bảo Đại had agreed with the French to be named South Vietnam’s ceremonial Head of State, with his old acquaintance Diệm as President, and some limited French oversight or privilege. Just as in the past, Bảo Đại didn’t really see the problem with the French, while Diệm saw them as an obstacle at worst and a stepping stone at best. Again, just as in the past, Bảo Đại took the agreement at face value, and Diệm operated behind the scenes.

Bảo Đại didn’t even attend the peace talks, allowing the French to represent him while he split his time between his chateaux in Cannes and Alsace, making occasional ceremonial visits to Đà Lạt and Huế. This selfish behavior earned him his own nickname, “the emperor of the West.” And then, even as the Geneva peace talks were progressing in 1954, the Việt Minh completely and finally defeated the French at Điện Biên Phủ.

When Bảo Đại learned that France had agreed to withdraw troops, divide Vietnam at the 17th parallel, and hold a national referendum in two years’ time to determine leadership, he initially refused to be the emperor of the South. Why should he lead half of Vietnam when the whole had been his just seven years prior? He also didn’t want to preside over a nation embroiled in civil war.

Of course, Diệm was willing to fill the power void, and continued to build military and diplomatic relations, particularly with America. Just a month after Điện Biên Phủ, Diệm visited Bảo Đại in France with a new deal, offering to be Prime Minister of South Vietnam only if Bảo Đại relinquished all military and civilian control. Bảo Đại agreed, and Diệm and his cabinet were installed in the house.

In 1956, a supposedly fair vote with international observers was held in Saigon, to fulfill the Geneva accords. However, it was blatantly and distastefully rigged for Diệm. Hồ and leaders of other political parties were not on the ballot, allowing the people to vote only for Diệm or Bảo Đại. Witnesses wrote that the Diệm ballots were red (the color of good fortune), while the Bảo Đại ballots were green (the color of bad luck), in a crass effort to sway the illiterate, indifferent and superstitious. Furthermore, voters were explicitly instructed to put the red ballot in the box, and the green ballot in the waste bin; some of those who disobeyed were beaten in the streets by policemen. Most egregiously, over 600,000 votes were supposedly tallied for Diệm, when there were only 450,000 registered voters in Saigon.

Bảo Đại wasn’t present and didn’t campaign. He was accused of simply preferring his extremely luxurious life in France to working for his people; the Vietnamese public didn’t know he had already privately agreed to stay out of it, and was only on offer as a straw man candidate. Having ostensibly lost the popular vote, after 1956 Bảo Đại considered himself formally, officially, and totally released from his inherited duty of service to the Vietnamese people, and never returned to Vietnam.

Bảo Đại says he hoped that once each political group had their own sovereign territory and chosen leader, the fighting would stop. Needless to say, it didn’t. Diệm would rule as the first President of South Vietnam for the next seven years, subduing or absorbing countless political factions and powerful families by force, and amassing untold private armies and secret police. He was able to build incredible wealth for his family through not only overt political means, but through the black market trade in rice (to the starving North and China) and opium (to Laos and Cambodia). On a personal level, war was very profitable for Diệm.

Diệm wasn’t all bad; he founded several universities, negotiated $49 million in reparations from Japan, began a process of land reform and resettlement far more humane than Hồ Chí Minh’s land redistribution system, closed opium dens and brothels, and established diplomatic relations with many first-tier nations. However, his corruption, nepotism, greed, and ego were such that he also suppressed all dissidence in the South with cruel efficiency, executing and disappearing many and allowing his clique to do the same.

Oddly, it was not the persecution of actual dissidents, communists, or spies that led to Diệm’s downfall, but Buddhists. Under his rule, all the old French laws privileging Catholics were maintained. These laws, which exempted Catholics from corvée labor, agricultural contributions, and other types of taxes, had served to stratify and skew colonial society in favor of French culture and business. Diệm increased this Catholic favoritism, going so far as to only give self-defense weapons to Catholic villages. Sons of established families had to join up or lose everything; once in the army or government, they had to convert to Catholicism to qualify for promotions.

With his older brother Pierre Martin Ngô Đình Thục serving as an archbishop, Diệm corruptly acquired enough urban and agricultural real estate to make the Catholic Church the largest landowner in the country . . . disenfranchising enemies, rewarding accomplices, and enriching the Ngô family in the process. Under the French, Buddhists were able to seek and gain permission to worship, and their role in education and community life was mostly ignored. Under Diệm, Buddhists were no longer allowed to publicly perform their rites or fly their flags, their lands were confiscated, and new, heavy taxes were imposed.

In 1963, conflicts over Buddhist repression came to a head. In June, Thích Quảng Đức, a protesting Buddhist monk, publicly burned himself alive in Saigon, attracting international criticism to Diệm’s oppressive regime. Diệm retaliated by ordering Catholic troops to raid and loot pagodas, confiscate and trash religious artifacts, and beat Buddhist monks in the streets.

Between 70 and 90% of South Vietnamese people were Buddhist, and monks, nuns, and laypeople alike took to the streets in protest. They were tear-gassed, chemically poisoned by airplanes flying overhead, and attacked by police dogs; soldiers threw grenades and shot into crowds. In Saigon, over 200 people were hospitalized and over 1000 monks arrested. In Huế, eight children were killed, and throughout the country more monks self-immolated. The Kennedy administration communicated through diplomatic channels that they would replace Diệm if the “Buddhist crisis” wasn’t quickly resolved.

Though Diệm signed an agreement with Buddhist leaders, it quickly became clear that he wouldn’t honor it. He claimed the Viet Cong were actually responsible for the attacks on protestors, not him; he also said the agreement did not include any privileges Buddhists didn’t already enjoy, so no practical changes would be necessary. In a statement to the press, Bảo Đại’s cousin, the notoriously unpopular First Lady Madame Nhu, told a reporter she thought Kennedy himself was behind the Buddhist problem, and defined her legacy with the appalling suggestion that she’d “be happy to provide foreign gasoline and a match if Buddhists want to have a barbecue.”

JFK, America’s first Catholic president, was duly insulted: first, that Diệm’s sister-in-law would libel him; second, that all this was purportedly done in the name of the Catholic Church. When he publicly denounced the treatment of Buddhists in South Vietnam, Madame Nhu doubled down, telling the press she had overheard an American officer saying the barbecue thing and assumed it was the party line.

While Madame Nhu was muckraking, her father was serving as the Republic of Vietnam’s ambassador to the US, living in Washington, D.C. Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., the ambassador to South Vietnam, told Nhu, Diệm, and her father that she needed to shut up; they responded that it was very un-American to not let a lady use her freedom of speech.

Meanwhile, unbeknownst to the Americans, France was attempting to negotiate a cease-fire between the North and South, in exchange for the return of some privately owned French property. The North, suffering from terrible famine, wanted to trade their coal for Southern rice, and were willing to temporarily put down their weapons to do so. Nhu leaked key details of one of these secret meetings to the Washington Post.

Though the story was superficially about a potential ceasefire, the easily grasped subtext was that the Kennedy administration wasn’t privy to important dealings of the RVN, the RVN was ready, willing, and able to broker peace with North Vietnam on their own or with alternate allies, and (most damningly) the situation in Vietnam was not as the American public had been led to believe.

The underlying message, confirmed through diplomatic channels, was that in Diệm’s opinion, the US needed South Vietnam as a regional bulwark against communism more than South Vietnam needed the US to continue fighting; so if Kennedy embarrassed them again by further criticizing their treatment of Buddhists, Diệm might go farther than blaming and defaming Kennedy, and really make his own separate peace with the communists.

Displeased with the rampant corruption under Diệm, different generals had been pitching coup plots to the Americans for years, but wouldn’t move forward without their support, which had never been granted. Now, many in both the Kennedy administration and Diệm’s own government felt Diệm was not only wasting time, weapons, and credibility in his vendetta against the Buddhists, but that his greed and ego were being prioritized over their victory.

Diệm’s suggestion that he would allow North Vietnam to persist as a communist state was the tipping point. The CIA immediately recruited three RVN generals and two corps commanders to an assassination plot. Less than two months after the Washington Post article was published, Diệm and Nhu were shot in the back of a car.

Madame Nhu and her oldest daughter were shopping in Beverly Hills when her husband was murdered; her younger children were helicoptered out of this Dalat house and flown to Rome to stay with Thục, who happened to be there for a Vatican conference. Three weeks later, Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. He is on record as having called Madame Nhu “a goddamn bitch,” and blamed her for instigating the murder of her own husband and turning the tide against the entire Diệm government with her nasty remarks.

The house, already rarely used, was used even less by the new administration. The Bourgerys, Bảo Đại, and Madame Nhu all lived their lives out in exile. The war went on for another 15 years; obviously, the communists won.

The Three Đà Lạt Palaces of Emperor Bảo Đại: Palace 2 | Dalat, Vietnam

Like Palace 3, Palace 2 is a degraded Deco mess of a mansion. Palace 2 was built at the same time as Palace 3, but with the explicit intention of being a conference center/guest house for grandees, rather than a residence for the emperor. It’s not open to the public; apparently it’s used occasionally by the local and regional government, and can be rented out for company parties or weddings if you have the right connections. Day to day, it’s locked up, with the odd wedding photographer or instagrammer coming by to make use of the unkempt gardening.

Getting so little out of visiting these places inspired me to learn more about Bao Dai and his tumultuous reign. In 1980 he wrote an autobiography, Le Dragon d’Annam, which I’d like to read. Unfortunately, the single copy on Amazon was beyond my budget, so I hope to pick it up in a tourist gift shop or foreign language bookstore on some lucky day. I settled for watching his hour and a half long interview on Frédéric Mitterand’s talk show, circa 1990, which is free on YouTube (in French).

They spoke exclusively of politics; I learned nothing of Bao Dai’s personal life, but a lot about the origins of the Indochina Wars and the relationships between Dai, Ngo Dinh Diem and Ho Chi Minh as they jockeyed for control, and tried to use different foreign interests to accomplish their own ends. Filmed just seven or eight years before his death, these represent Bao Dai’s final reflections on the topic.

If you’re interested, I’ll cover his upbringing and understanding of his role in this blog, and the political maneuverings of the 40s and 50s that removed him from his throne in the next blog (Palace 1).

Bao Dai explains his role as being the first among equals; perhaps the son of heaven in the eyes of Vietnamese peasants, but really more of a rubber stamp for a court of mandarins who ruled by committee. Selected by both merit and caste, and often coming from multigenerational families of mandarins, his court ensured his job wasn’t particularly difficult, his responsibilities were few, and he was only aware of the issues they presented him with. Traditionally, each village and commune in Vietnam functioned more or less as its own republic, basing laws on Confucian principles. Moreover, his family’s power base was central Vietnam, making him the King of Annam, an area now strictly defined by the French; he didn’t understand himself as the governor of Tonkin and Cochinchine, just their spiritual leader.

He says his father always had a good relationship with their French handlers, and given that his formative years were spent in France, and his education was French, he considered himself equal parts occidental and oriental. The Vietnamese people, however, called him “The Emperor from the West.” He says he was a lonely child, with no siblings and no company save his Confucius tutor. Although he doesn’t tell it, the backstory here is that his father was gay, his parentage was questioned, and so he was shipped off to a boarding school in France with his tutor, mother and some servants at just nine years old. When his father died just 4 years later, Bao Dai briefly visited Hue for his enthronement ceremony, but returned to France immediately after, letting the mandarins and French rule Vietnam for the next ten years. One odd thing he says in the interview is that he visited Vietnam as frequently as possible, which is objectively and demonstrably false.

He credits his paternal grandmother with teaching both him and his father how to rule. Said grandmother started out as a sixth rank lady and was promoted up to third rank concubine, high enough to honor the heir’s mother without upsetting the power balance among regional ruling families represented by first and second rank concubines. This grandmother was Vietnam’s last dowager empress, dying in the forbidden city in 1944. (Incidentally, Bao Dai’s own mother also lived and died in Hue as late as 1980, but due to his abdication was never ranked a dowager empress.) He says that returning to Vietnam and realizing his powerlessness, he busied himself with little upgrades around Hue: building an imperial library and tennis court; retiring some of the ancient mandarins and replacing them with younger, French educated ones. When asked his first impressions of Vietnam upon his return, he actually begins to quietly cry, bemoaning the “lack of modernization”. Of course, anyone who’s seen pictures of Vietnam in the 30s knows that most Vietnamese lived in truly medieval conditions. He says he decided his goal as emperor would be raising the standard of living.

Stay tuned for Palace 1!

The Three Đà Lạt Palaces of Emperor Bảo Đại: Palace 3 | Vietnam

There are three ‘palaces’ of Bao Dai, Vietnam’s last emperor, in Da Lat; each is worse than the last. I put the word ‘palace’ in quotes because these aren’t palaces in the sense I understand; they’re mansions perhaps.

Of the three (called by their number) Palace 3 is the best. Inside there’s some sense that the family lived there for at least a short while: there’s a pink bedroom for the girls, blue for the boys, a single for the then-teenaged crown prince. I can’t imagine the furniture in the house is original, because while it seems vintage, it also seems cheap and lacks style. Bao Dai was known for demanding the best, and had beautifully appointed homes in France; maybe his real furniture was shipped back with him, or distributed among his detractors after his abdication, or maybe his family spent little to no time here and considered it a rustic hotel of sorts.

The same is true of the books in the emperor’s office; I found them maddening in their total lack of personality and relevance. They are the books of a schoolboy: Shakespeare, Marot, Brontë, Voltaire. The sole book indicating any self-awareness whatsoever is a 1953 paperback biography of General de Lattre, the French Commander in Chief of Indochina in 1951 and 1952.

I hope these books were not his, and just gathered when turning this place into a museum; maybe some other scenario explains why this library is not reflection of him. If this is a true reflection, it’s not a good look. Though, like any royal, he was not admitted on merit, he did attend Sciences Po; one would expect to see books on military and colonial history, strategy, diplomacy, psychology, etc. The miniature flags on the desk annoy me as well. Are they trying to make him look like an idiot?

The building itself was designed by a no-name French architect in the Art Deco style and built between 1933 and 1939. There’s lots of tiles and cement; it’s not impressive. I was almost insulted to be asked to wear dust booties over my shoes to protect the worthless floors. The request did match my first impression, though; the place has the look and feel of a suburban mansion no one wants, converted into suites of doctor’s offices.

The garden is nicely laid out and terraced, though the plantings are certainly not original: they’re not laid out symmetrically or successively in the French manner, but randomly applied, with potted trees or beds of cheap flowers here and there. The pines are pretty, though the view of modern Dalat must be so much uglier than it was in the ‘40s. To top it off, there’s a tacky children/instagram statuary feature of zoo animals.

At the bottom of the hill, there’s a lovely restaurant/café. That was the highlight of my visit!

Famous Houses of Worship on Phú Quốc | Vietnam

1. Sùng Hưng Cổ Tự

This is the oldest site of worship on the island, with two temples and a graveyard here stretching back to time immemorial. The current pagoda dates from the late 1800s, though it’s so well kept that nothing here is actually old; I think every single tile and piece of furniture has been replaced, one by one, over time. It’s still a very active place of worship, but honestly not worth a visit unless you happen to pop by on the way to something else.

2. Cao Dai Temple

I was never aware of Cao Dai until visiting Vietnam. Cao Dai is a modern syncretic religion, founded in southern Vietnam in 1921, with the central tenet that all religions are timely, topical manifestations of one great power on high, Cao Dai. Of course, the Cao Dai religion is the third and final revelation from Cao Dai. In temples, Cao Dai is represented by the all-seeing eye.

In combining Buddhist, Hindu, Confucian, Daoist, Muslim and Catholic beliefs, Cao Daiists have come to worship a pantheon of immortals and saints, from Guan Yin to Joan of Arc. And because the Vietnamese founders were themselves mediums receiving psychic messages from ever more immortals as to how best expand their church, these immortals tend to be literary and political figures they would have encountered in their education or during their lifetimes: Shakespeare, Victor Hugo, Lenin, Sun Yat-Sen, Winston Churchill, etc.

The idea of psychically contacting Lenin and Churchill during a séance to brainstorm how to draw more congregants tickles me! Yet Cao Dai is the third largest religion in Vietnam, following omnipresent Buddhism and a small but old Catholic minority. Most of its growth happened extremely quickly, with a million followers joining in the twenty years between its founding and the end of World War 2/beginning of the First Indochina War. Cao Dai sided with the French, then Americans, and were consequently banned following reunification in 1975, but allowed again during the capitalist shift in 1997. Today there are around 3 million Cao Daiists worldwide, due to the emigration of Vietnamese worshippers following those wars.

I swear I was told multiple times that Cao Dai began on Phu Quoc, and that’s why it was important to visit the temple. Of course, a quick google dispels that notion. Perhaps one of the founders was born here? Or maybe the religion is dominant here, where elsewhere it’s a tiny minority?

Graham Greene described Cao Dai temples as “the full Asiatic splendor of a Walt Disney fantasy,” and I found that to be true. I don’t believe this one to be a particularly compelling example, but it is steps from the market, so not much effort is required to look.

3. Dinh Cậu

There has been some sort of worship site here since the 17th century, but the current small temple was built in 1937. This is where fisherman about to leave for long trips come to pray to the goddess of the sea, as well as Cau Tải and Cau Quy, the two Buddhist protectors of fisherman and other seafarers.

The surrounds have been built up a lot over the past ten years or so, with a long jetty, big parking lot, and paved street where there was once just a beach and some rocks. Comparing what I saw to old photos, the expansions have made the place far less picturesque. It’s still worth checking out because it’s a good view and in the center of town.

So, in my opinion, none of these are worth going out of your way to see, but, due to their convenient locations, you might as well.

Lan Hạ Bay’s Floating Fishing Village off Cát Bà| Vietnam

Everyone cruising out of Ben Beo harbor on the ubiquitous Cat Ba boat tour has the same thought: how do people live in this floating village?If you take a close look at Lan Ha bay on google maps, you’ll see several floating guest houses! I was curious enough to arrange a stay at one.

To be quite honest, I was miserable; the experience really highlighted all the conveniences I love and rely on. There’s no air conditioning, and a fan doesn’t help much under a corrugated metal roof in the summer heat; WiFi is nonexistent and phone service is spotty; water pressure is absolutely nonexistent, they bathe by rinsing with rainwater collected in barrels; all electricity comes from a big rechargeable battery, so sometimes there isn’t even enough to charge your phone; food is limited to the fish they farm, the veggies and herbs they can grow seasonally, and instant noodles.

If you are prepared to endure this for a couple days, you can enjoy peaceful unlimited solo swimming and kayaking. Everything you buy at the homestays will be low quality and incredibly expensive, and you obviously can’t prepare food yourself. It’s hard to learn much about their lifestyle because their English is extremely limited, so if you are interested in how and what they farm you must stay a while and be very observant.

If you are looking for authentic experiences where you can live like a local, this is definitely it.

Việt Hải Village, Cát Bà | Vietnam

Viet Hai village is an agricultural hamlet located in a valley amongst Cat Ba’s mountains. It’s picturesque, but literally the only thing to do here is walk or bike the single U-shaped road to the foot of the mountains, and back. It’s only accessible by boat or by hiking through the national park, so it’s very small and peaceful.

It is physically possible to do the whole route (Cat Ba town —> the national park —> Viet Hai Village —> Ban Beo harbor —> Cat Ba town; or the reverse) in a day, but it would be tiring verging on miserable. Either a taxi or a 3 hour walk is required to get from Cat Ba Town to the park entrance; the trek through the park to the village is is 4-6 hours if you don’t climb to the peak, an extra 2-3 hours if you do; it takes perhaps 40 minutes to explore Viet Hai village; the ride or walk to the harbor near the village is a further 5km, so a quick ride but a long walk; you must hire a boat in advance to bring you back to Ban Beo harbor because the ferry only leaves once per day at 1PM and boats there belong to locals who turn in early, no one is expecting tourists to turn up; finally, from Ben Beo harbor to Cat Ba town is another motorbike ride or quite long walk. Walking the whole thing, even if you are an incredibly fit trekker, would be a 12-16 hour hike with no breaks. Even benefitting from taxis or benevolent motorbikers when possible, it’s still a 7-8 hour round trip at best.

It’s far nicer to hike through the national park to Viet Hai, stay in one of the lovely homestays overnight, explore the village the next morning and take the ferry back to Ban Beo harbor at 1PM. You can also do the reverse: hire a taxi from Cat Ba town to Ban Beo harbor, hire a boat at Ban Beo Harbor to get you to the harbor near Viet Hai village, trek the 5km from the harbor to the village, stay there overnight, and trek through the park and make your way back to Cat Ba town the next day. More people do the first option because it’s cheaper, more convenient in terms of arranging transportation, and more time efficient. Also, the village is super relaxing, a much nicer place to rest after a long day!

If I would do it again, I would have rested an extra day at my comfy village homestay. I wouldn’t seek Viet Hai village out as a destination, but as a respite after a very long hike, it’s excellent.

A Sunset Walk Along the Harbor and Beaches of Cát Bà | Vietnam

To be honest, Cat Ba is far from my first choice for a beach vacation in Vietnam. During low season, it’s too cold for the beach; in high season, it’s absolutely crawling with families with young children. There are only 3 swimmable beaches, and in high season the sole road to access them is overrun 4x/day by hotel shuttles ready and willing to mow down pedestrians (I saw them hit a person and a motorcycle!)

The beaches are not accessible by bike; there are plenty of stairs to go from beach to beach. When I was there in high season, Cat Co 2 (the beaches are named 1,2, and 3) was covered with construction debris and inaccessible; the combination of construction noise and hundreds of screaming children made it undesirable to visit the beaches at all.

These photos and videos were taken during low season, in sweater weather. A few brave locals dared swim, but the hotel beach bars weren’t even open. Even so, it’s worth spending an evening walking from the main strip, along the harbor, up the hill to the beaches, along the elevated walkway, and back. On a sunny day the scenery is beautiful, and the sunsets are really pretty too.