offerings

Today we hired a boat to visit some garden pagodas and mausoleums on the poetically named Perfume River in the old imperial Vietnamese river city of Hue where we've been the last couple of days.

As we chugged up the river we passed several boats with shrines on their bow, flanked by bright yellow umbrellas. On each a women in an impossibly clean ao dai slowly fed imitation money (US dollars) into the river.

At Thien Mu Pagoda (c.1601), part of the impressive architecture of the Nguyen dynasty--but also from the 1930s and 40s a hotbed of Bhuddist activism against colonialism--you come across the powder-blue Austin in which the Venerable Thich Quang Duc drove in 1963 to Saigon where he then burned himself alive in a protest against then President Diem's regime, his action captured in the famous and haunting photograph on the wall.

 

Shop owners and street vendors make their nightly offerings at the close of business, sometimes just simply burning incense on the footpath where they park their cart.