After the Royal Palace in Bangkok and Cambodia's Angkor Wat, I hadn't set a particularly high level of expectation for Vietnam's version of a royal city.
What could possibly compete with what we'd already seen?
The answer?
The Imperial capital of Vietnam's Nguyen Dynasty, which was created in 1802 and occupied until Vietnam's last Emperor abdicated and fled to Paris in 1945.
I was fascinated and at times, overwhelmed, by the sights and stories we encountered on our tour of the enormous Vietnamese Emperor's outer estate, the Citadel (a component of which is pictured above), and his inner sanctuary, The Forbidden City; the remains of which are pictured below.
Many portions of the imperial estate were damaged or destroyed French and later American invasions.
But more recently, the Communist government in Hanoi has begun a serious and concerted effort to repair the extensive compound, including the rebuilding of entirely razed buildings like the library.
Our blisteringly hot morning tour was replete with tales of mandarins (high ranking officers), eunuchs and concubines, and we found ourselves entirely transported to another time and a truly alien, to us, way of life..
Emperors, like the one captured in this extraordinary early photograph above, lived a God-like existence that sheltered them almost entirely from normal everyday affairs and even the glances of their peasant population.
So segregated were they, in fact, that only eunuchs were permitted to live in the "inner sanctum" Forbidden City, along with the Emperor and his hundreds of concubines.
The Emperor ruled over an incredibly vast compound of assorted buildings whose functions included housing of various levels of the elite, a library, a treasury, temples of various types and even theaters, like the superbly preserved one below.
Interesting stories and anecdotes were shared by our knowledgeable and attractive tour guide.
From her, for example, we learned that those boys selected to become eunuchs were ones who were already typically exhibiting feminine behavior.
These boys would be identified by the leaders in the local, surrounding villages and castrated.
The townspeople would then benefit via not having to pay taxes for a period of three years in exchange for this "gift", then presented to the Emperor.
On second thought, maybe that abdication wasn't such an unfortunate occurrence after all....
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