Dynastic History | Ngọ Môn 午門, Huế — The Gate Where the Seal Changed Hands

Ngọ Môn is not the citadel's original south gate but Minh Mạng's replacement for one. In 1833, closing out a rebuilding of the palace's front, the court took down the Nam Khuyết platform and raised a stone-faced U-shaped base pierced by five passages, with the Ngũ Phụng pavilion above it on an ironwood frame of a hundred columns. The five passages were ranked, and the ranking was the point: the centre for the emperor, the pair beside it for civil and military mandarins, the outer two for troops, horses and elephants. Examination graduates heard their names called from here at the Truyền Lô. The year's calendar was handed down here at the Ban Sóc, which is how a farmer in a distant province learned when the court said the year began.

On 30 August 1945 the ranking stopped applying. Bảo Đại had signed his abdication five days earlier, from an edict drafted on the night of 22 August, and before a crowd reported at some fifty thousand he handed the imperial seal to Trần Huy Liệu and the state sword to Cù Huy Cận, who had come with Nguyễn Lương Bằng for the provisional government. The sentence quoted from the edict ever since, that he would rather be a citizen of a free country than the sovereign of an enslaved one, is the dynasty's last public statement about itself. The two objects were buried during the war that followed, recovered by French forces in February 1952 and returned to him that March, a gesture aimed at an audience rather than at him.

The gate is the visitor entrance to the Imperial City now, run by the Hue Monuments Conservation Centre, and everyone walks through whichever passage is open.

📸 Cover: Ngọ Môn and the Ngũ Phụng pavilion lit at night, Suicasmo, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons