Frommer's Review
Set in an old picturesque Chinese temple (you're asked to wear shoe covers at the entry in order to preserve the wood), the Hue Monuments Conservation Center is the Imperial Museum of the old capital, displaying all the treasures (or what's left over) from the Nguyen kings. Precious coins, stone carvings, and Ming dynasty pottery from China are just a few of the gifts in this repository of courtly finery presented to Vietnam's 19th-century leaders by visiting dignitaries. Unique is the lacquer-framed gong made of stone from China. At the back you'll find lacquered palanquins and furnishings for the royal court and procession, and farther back look for the very embroidered finery donned by Nguyen kings on parade.
Next door is the Exhibition of the Resistance Against the American Invader, which doesn't mince words. The courtyard out front displays some captured war machines. Inside is a rhetorical parade of faded photos and artifacts that tell the story of American aggression from the July 1954 Geneva Agreement to the North Vietnamese Army's jubilant liberation of Saigon, with images of the hard fighting in Hue city in 1968. The exhibition is propagandistic, with captions telling of the "lackey" government of "puppet" rulers in the south, and selections of photos depicting Americans as torturers who disemboweled their North Vietnamese captors, but that very rhetoric is what's so interesting. History is told by the victors, and the Vietnamese are proud of their victory and of what they had to endure to survive as a sovereign nation. Elsewhere, as with the War Museum in Saigon, which changed its name from "Museum of the American War Crimes," Vietnamese rhetoric about their own recent history is softening, or disappearing altogether.
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