Day 10: Hue

Today we visited the Hue Citadel, very beautiful place, see some photos:

The palace of supreme harmony:

Cool statue of a lion:

Dragon ornaments on top of the citadel buildings:

Later on we went to visit the tomb of emperor Tu Duc, he was the forth ruler of the Nguyen dynasty, and regined from 1848 to 1883.

Here's a little lizard:

In this photo you can see four mandarin statues (the mandarin are officers working for the emperor), two civilian mandarin and two military mandarin. You can also see a horse and elephant. These are ment to go with the emperor to the next world:

In this building you can see his autobiography (since he didn't have any children, he wrote his own biography...):

The autobiography is written on a 20ton piece of stone as you can see here:

In the autobiography he speaks about his childhood (how he got smallpox, which is why he has no children..., etc...) and he mentions the three mistakes he made in his life:

1. Having no children
2. His brother tried to kill him when he became king after their father died (he was the younger one, but his brother wasn't fit for ruling, so his father picked him instead), after arresting his brother, the brother hanged himself in prison and people started saying that he killed his brother (he regrets the way he dealt with the whole thing).
3. He regrets that he didn't live a modest life (around 1,000 people died while building his tomb...).

This is where the emperor is buried:

He is buried somewhere under that area (there's a tunnel maze there), nobody knows exactly where the body is because those who buried him were killed right after the burial.