WHERE EMPIRES MEET:
POWER, IDENTITY, & CULTURAL NEGOTIATION IN HUE GARDENS
Research | Hue, Vietnam | Paper presented at Gardens & Empires Conference by English Heritage, Kew, & British Library - June 2025
I arrived in Huế early one morning in May 2025, tired and irritable, having spent the night at Tân Sơn Nhất airport after multiple flight delays. It was the beginning of the rainy season. The rain had yet to break, and the air was thick with moisture. And yet, as my cab turned onto Le Lợi street, my mood lifted when the Hương (Perfume) River and the old Citadel came into view. In contrast to the bustling, restless energy of Hà Nội and Hồ Chí Minh City, there seems to be a pleasant nostalgia about Huế that eases one’s spirit, the city and its time-worn stone walls, its snaking waterways, its ancient gardens and century-old trees, the monuments with their sweeping eaves, the veil cloud wrapping around the hills surrounding the city.
Vietnam sits on the eastern edge of mainland Southeast Asia. Its liminal geography--with China to the north, Laos and Cambodia to the west, South China Sea along its extended eastern coastline--has long made the country a crossroads for trade, migration, and competing empires. In their edited collection Vietnam: Borderless Histories, Nhung Tuyết Trần and Anthony Reid noted that the country and its culture were shaped by thousands years of interactions with, and if I might add, occupation by, Chinese, Cham, Khmer, French, and stateless peoples of the peninsula and wider exchanges with East and Southeast Asian worlds. Located in the middle of Vietnam, Huế itself was built on a palimpsest landscape that belonged to former Cham polities before its incorporation into the expanding Vietnamese state in the 14th century. Centuries of Chinese rule, subsequent Sino-Confucian Vietnamese courts, and later French colonization produced a cultural identity that is continuously shifting and hybridizing.
The mausoleum gardens of the Nguyễn Dynasty, Vietnam’s last imperial dynasty (1802-1945) are cultural landscapes embodying this evolving identity and the court’s changing relationship with nature, power, and identity being constructed across a century of immense change in Vietnamese history, from the early days of the Nguyễn’s territorial consolidation and Confucian state-building to the introduction of Western influences and entrenchment of French colonial rule. Successive emperors reassembled a shared landscape grammar—geomantic siting, composition and sequence, water and topography, vegetation and material, architecture and ornamentation—to construct their own final resting and veneration sites.
Through a comparative analysis of five imperial mausoleum gardens in Huế--those of Gia Long, Minh Mạng, Tự Đức, Đồng Khánh, and Khải Định--this paper reveals the Nguyễn court’s continuing capacity to hybridize and adapt an inherited practice, local environmental knowledge, foreign references, and new technologies to develop an evolving garden tradition. Read alongside the historical circumstances of their construction, the gardens emerged as active instruments employed by Nguyễn royals to construct political legitimacy and reimagine their, and the nation’s, shifting cultural identities.
*Full paper to be published as Conference Proceeding with Garden History.
*A huge thank you to researchers at Hue University and Hue Department of Culture and Sports for all their help and support throughout this work: Tran Van Dung, Nguyen Quang Huy, and Ho Dac Thai Hoang
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