perched on the banks of the Perfume River.
The Ngoc Son garden house was built by Emperor Dong Khanh for his daughter Princess Ngoc Son. It is still occupied by one of his descendants.
The Y Thao garden-house is a good example of a recent development. Its owners, Mrs Cuc and Mr Hoa (in Vietnam, married women keep their maiden names) wanted to build a place to house their collections and to create a garden that testifies to their love of Hue’s traditions. Their house, built on a 14,000 sq ft (1300 sq m) plot of land, is a harmonious mixture of Vietnamese and French traditions. Inside is a beautiful collection of Hue ceramics (Hue has been a ceramic and porcelain production center for centuries and its blue-and-white pieces are famous worldwide) and a number of traditional paintings, either on glass or silk or made of wooden panels inlaid with mother-of-pearl (an art still alive in Hue). Outside, the garden is a combination of seven different smaller gardens, which symbolize either famous mountains or the five notes of the Vietnamese musical scale.
The one-story An Hien house, built in the late 1880s, was the residence of Emperor Duc Duc’s (Tu Duc’s nephew) eighteenth daughter. Although it has changed hands several times, its traditional features have been retained. The river-facing entrance, with an arch topped by a tiger head and the Chinese characters for An Hien, resembles an old temple entrance. The main area of the house, devoted to the ancestor’s altar, is divided into three parts. The living quarters, on each side of the altar, are small and are bare of furniture except for beds. The walls are made of wood, the only concession to contemporary needs being electricity and a few chairs. Most of the 43,800 sq ft (4068 sq m) plot is taken up by the garden, which has the most beautiful orchard in Hue.
The interior has changed little in a hundred years and is well preserved by its current owner, historian Phan Thuan An, the author of several books on the culture and architecture of Hue.
The house is divided into three bays. In the middle is An’s impressive library and an altar dedicated to Buddha as well as to ancestor worship.
The Y Thao house contains an impressive collection of antiques, including Hue blue-and-white ceramics, traditional glass and silk paintings and wooden panels inlaid with mother-of-pearl. The collection is laid out to delineate between pieces used by the imperial family and those used by the mandarins.
The large stone rocks in the garden symbolize the mountain ranges around Hue and act as a screen against the wind. Tropical plants, bonsai and small rockeries are all typical of Hue’s garden houses.
Compared to many of the garden houses in Hue, the Y Thao house is comparatively modern and was built by its present owners as a place for their collection of antiques. The garden is a combination of seven small gardens, each symbolizing different characteristics of the Vietnamese countryside.
The entrance to the An Hien garden house is from the road which runs alongside the Perfume River. Through the archway, topped by a tiger’s head and the name An Hien in Chinese characters, is a broad path leading visitors through the garden to the house.
Originally the residence of Emperor Duc Duc’s eighteenth daughter, the one-story house was built around 1880 and is a classic example of traditional Vietnamese architecture. An expansive ceramic-tiled roof is supported by large wooden pillars with richly carved beams and doorways. The lily pond in front is to ward off bad spirits.
The main area inside the house is devoted to the ancestor’s altar, while the rest of the interior is sparsely furnished. The ceramic-tiled floor is typical of this style of building in Hue. All the tiles, including the roof tiles, were manufactured locally.
chinese houses of hoi an
Successive generations of the same family have lived in the Phung Hung house since it was first built in 1780. The ground floor was originally used for storage and has an opening in the ceiling to enable goods to be hoisted upstairs during floods. Flooding remains a problem for such merchant houses in Hue.
Traditional wooden furniture inlaid with mother-of-pearl was used to welcome traders to this merchant’s home. The house is supported by eighty ironwood columns set in marble bases. All the materials used in the house’s construction, including the wood and marble, were sourced locally and are still being used in today’s buildings.
FROM THE SIXTEENTH to the nineteenth centuries, the harbor town of Hoi An, not far from Danang, attracted merchants from all over Asia. Although they comprised mainly Japanese and Chinese, they also included Portuguese, Dutch, French and British. All came to trade in cinnamon, pepper, paper, ceramics, medicinal plants and, above all, the silk that was – and still is – the region’s main glory.
Sailing requires good winds that are not always blowing at the right time, and trading companies like to have people they trust in harbors. Thus, foreign merchants began to settle in the city. Even if it never had more than a few hundred permanent residents, it often housed thousands of foreigners, especially Chinese and Japanese (until 1637), each living in their own areas, with their own rules. They built their own dwellings, temples and congregation halls. By the end of the sixteenth century, the town was split between a Chinese district and Japanese one.
The Chinese district, where scores of merchant houses have been preserved, is a must for any art and architecture lover. The ground floors of the long, thin houses were devoted to trading, while the second floors housed altars of the ancestors and Taoist deities – customarily just below the ceiling.
One particularly noteworthy example of a Hoi An merchant house is the Phung Hung house. Built in 1780, to date it has been inhabited by eight generations of the same family. The house has kept its original structure because it was built with fine materials and has been very well maintained over the years. Its eighty ironwood columns and their marble bases, all the wooden rafters and shutters, both interior and exterior balconies, and its yin and yang roof tiles are exactly as they were the year the house was built. The structure combines Chinese (architecture), Vietnamese (furniture) and Japanese (roof) design styles but is actually quite simple in layout and structure. The ground floor formerly stored merchandise, although a square opening in the ceiling allowed goods to be lifted upstairs during frequent flooding. A sitting room decked out with gu (wooden furniture inlaid with mother-of-pearl) welcomed fellow traders. Today, that sitting room, which dates from the nineteenth century, is on the second floor, as is the altar room, the most important space in the house.
Opposite the Phung Hung house stands a dwelling that offers a beautiful succession of rooms, the second one being
