Fred Frederikse: Flooding draws attention to millisphere of Hue, Vietnam

At Thien Mu, in the shade of Dalat pine trees, beside the Perfume River, I sketched the 21m-high tower built in 1844. Image / Fred Frederikse

Hue

Millisphere: a discrete region inhabited by roughly one-thousandth of the world population - coming up for eight million people.

I sometimes refer to these millisphere columns as a post-millennium travel story which goes at random from millisphere to millisphere - some of which I've been to and some not.

A recent news item about flooding in Vietnam drew my attention to the millisphere I call Hue (north-central Vietnam). Previously I had written up the millisphere of Danang (south-central Vietnam) when Jacinda Ardern and Winston Peters went to the 2017 APEC conference there.

The millisphere of Hue (11 million) includes the six Vietnamese provinces north of Danang. Before the French arrived in Indo-China, Hue was the capital of the Nguyen dynasty which at the time ruled all of Vietnam and parts of Cambodia.

In 1885 (according to my counterfeit Vietnam Lonely Planet) the French encircled the Hue Citadel; the outnumbered Vietnamese fought back and the French responded mercilessly. It took the French three days to burn the imperial library and remove from the palace every single object of value - from gold and silver ornaments to mosquito nets and toothpicks.

During the Vietnam war (which the Vietnamese call the American war) the Viet Cong captured and held Hue for three weeks during the 1968 Tet offensive.

General Westmoreland ordered US troops to "destroy Hue in order to save it" and most of the Hue Citadel was bombed and the imperial palace was napalmed. The Americans lost 150 US marines and 10,000 (mostly civilian) Vietnamese died. In 1993 Unesco designated what was left of the Hue Citadel a World Heritage site.

In 2010 my travel companion and I visited the battered citadel. The grounds lacked much shade (most of the roofs were gone) and I have a memory of blinding light, humidity and heat. In a cafe by the back gate an entrepreneurial waitress organised two of her relatives to take us somewhere.

Sometimes it pays to go with the flow and soon we were on the back of motorbikes. The breeze was pleasant as we followed the Perfume River to the Thien Mu Pagoda, built in 1601 by a Nyuyen lord.

The temple itself is a humble building in the inner courtyard, past the triple-gated entrance where three statues of Buddhist guardians stand. Behind the Pagoda stands a 1950s Austin which transported the monk Thich Quang Doc to Saigon to his self-immolation in 1963. A famous image of this protest, with the A105 with its bonnet up in the background, was printed on the front page of newspapers around the world.

Sometimes when travelling I stop to sketch. At the citadel it had been too hot. At Thien Mu, in the shade of Dalat pine trees, beside the Perfume River, I sketched the 21m-high tower built in 1844. A group of elderly Buddhist nuns in brown tunics came and looked over my shoulder. "Better than photo, look more," one said.

Through the millisphere lens I look for regions and boundaries as well as empires and independence movements. Travelling south by bus we had crossed the DMZ (demilitarised zone), once the border between North and South Vietnam until the Americans left in 1975. In the DMZ was a large war cemetery, a visible reminder of the effects of borders imposed by the Yankee Empire.

According to the Asia New Zealand Foundation, 40,000 New Zealanders visited Vietnam in 2019. When we visited in 2010 we dodged one typhoon and we experienced flooding in Hoi An but nothing like the typhoons that hit Hue in October 2020. On October 6, 600mm of rain fell on the Hue Citadel followed by 2290mm near Hue over three days on October 9-12.

On average the Hue millisphere got between 2000mm and 2500mm of rain in October. Some localities got over three metres over nine days. To put that into perspective, the November 2020 flooding in Napier, New Zealand, was caused by 200mm of rain over one day.

Climate scientists are speculating that the increasing severity of, and frequency of, typhoons are caused by global warming.

Not only have tourists stopped coming to Hue because of Covid, this year's typhoon season has caused NZ$2 billion of damage to infrastructure and crops.