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Almost at the dividing line between North and South Vietnam sits the city of Hue, once the imperial capital of the first dynasty to unite the country and Vietnam's last emperor. 142 years before Emperor Bao-Dai abdicated - after Ho Chi Minh's declaration of Independence in 1945 - his predecessor and Nguyen dynasty founder, Gia Long, finally brought 200 years of civil war to an end.
He united the two disparate ends of his kingdom with the construction of the Mandarin Highway (now Highway 1), connecting the North with the South, and decreed that a magnificent royal capital would be built at the point where the two cultures met - Hue
Rivalling - and somewhat modeled upon - the Forbidden City in Beijing, the three enclosures of the Royal Citadel spread across six square kilometres. The compound is enclosed within walls ten metres thick, which took 20,000 men to complete. At the Citadel's centre is the lavish Imperial Palace where once no-one but the emperor, his concubines and eunuchs were admitted.
 The Citadel has since fallen on hard times, floods in the 19th century caused severe damage to many of the wooden structures, which have also suffered the ravages of termites and dry rot. The massive exterior walls and ornate gateways - as well as many of the buildings within the Citadel - were casualties of a pitched battle between US and NVA forces during the 1968 Tet Offensive. Those wounds are now slowly being repaired, with financial aid and technical support from UNESCO, which declared Hue a World Heritage Site in 1993.
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