104 Wives and Fifty Course Meals

Today we visited the Mausoleum of Tu Duc outside of Hue. Emperor Tu Duc was a romantic poet trying to rule Vietnam at a time when the Western world was challenging the country's independence. (I'll thank Rough Guides for that quote...) Tu Duc's mausoleum has been preserved and is peaceful and majestic and solemn. It has history swirling through its green fields, it's crumbling ruins and it's ancient halls. It rained the entire time we were there so we wandered through with our purple ponchos admiring the solemnity of the land.

Apparently Tu Duc was quite an indulgent man. Besides his ruling of the kingdom and his 4000 some poems that he wrote, he somehow managed to find time (and energy) to eat fifty course meals, marry 104 women and keep an entire village of concubines in his nearby park. With these statistics, he could've spent every day with a wife and still only have seen each one thirty times. And he could have donated a course from each meal to every week in the year. The irony is that every building in the mausoleum has "khiem" (meaning modest) incorporated in it's name. Hardly!!