TRAVERSE 80
Nguyen imperial landscape. The royal tombs, Thien Mu Pagoda, Nam Giao Esplanade and other monuments around Hue were deliberately connected to the capital through geography, ritual and imperial symbolism.
The result is one of Vietnam ' s most significant historical landscapes. The Citadel survives not as a completely intact imperial city, but as a combination of walls, palaces, temples, gardens, archaeological remains and reconstructed structures.
Its importance lies in that combination. The walls reveal the military ambitions of the Nguyen dynasty; the palaces demonstrate the hierarchy of the imperial court; the temples reflect the importance of ancestry and ritual; and the surrounding landscape shows how the capital was conceived as part of a much larger system.
More than two centuries after its construction, Hue ' s Walled City remains the clearest physical expression of the Nguyen dynasty ' s attempt to create an imperial capital that combined power, ceremony, defence, religion and landscape into a single carefully ordered whole. TRAVERSE
the Hue Citadel is much more than a collection of buildings and monuments
TRAVERSE 80