Forbidden city

Christmas day we took a tour of the citadel and the forbidden city. It was pouring rain most of the time, so I wasn't able to get all the great pictures that were there.

This was the palace were many of the emperors held court. On the outskirts were the public buildings while the inside consisted of the forbidden city where the royal family and concubines lived. There is a ton of Vietnamese royal history that I'm not going to go into here, but I'll post some descriptions at the end of my trip.

The grounds are just gorgeous and you can almost feel the energy of the old courtiers whirling around you. The architecture has very clear Japanese, Chinese, and french influences. It sort of puts versaille to shame. On much of the architecture are the four sacred animals: the dragon, the unicorn, the turtle, and the phoenix. It is a world heritage site and they are restoring many of the buildings that were destroyed by wars, typhoons and termites....however in some cases they've "restored" columns using plastic which personally I'd prefer that they do nothing if that don't plan on using the original materials!

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