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!