Dynastic History | Điện Thái Hòa 太和殿, Huế — The Yard Was Marked With Everyone's Rank

The hall was raised in February 1805, on the twenty-second day of the first lunar month of Gia Long's fourth year, and in 1833 Minh Mạng had it dismantled and rebuilt where it now stands, on the axis behind Ngọ Môn. Twice each lunar month, on the first and the fifteenth, the court held the Đại Triều there. The emperor sat inside; the officials stood outside in the courtyard, civil on one side and military on the other, each man at a low stone marker cut with his grade. The building is the smaller half of that arrangement. The yard is where the hierarchy was actually displayed, and anyone outside it did not stand in the yard at all.

What the hall is made of arrived the way most things in the new capital arrived. The citadel works began in 1804 and ran for a generation on labour and materials owed to the state rather than bought from it: ironwood columns, lacquer, glazed tile, and the earth of ramparts ten kilometres around, levied from provinces that had just been fought over.

The enclosure was fought over again in 1947, when a French counter-attack besieged the Việt Minh inside it, and once more in the Tết fighting of 1968. Only a small share of its buildings came through. Thái Hòa is one of them. It closed for restoration on 23 November 2021 under a budget of more than 128 billion đồng from central and provincial funds, and reopened in late November 2024, roughly a year ahead of the schedule set for it. Much of what a visitor sees is renewed fabric on an old plan, which is the ordinary condition of this site rather than a scandal about it. The courtyard markers are still where the mandarins stood.

📸 Cover: Điện Thái Hòa seen from the north side, photographed in 2018, before the 2021 to 2024 restoration, Christophe95, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons