One little-known episode of the ‘adventurous’ story of these imperial seals is that during the August 1945 Revolution, at the fall of the empire, after the imperial seals had become the property of a new Vietnamese government led by Ho Chi Minh, they spent decades In the depths of Hanoi’s Western Lake Ho Tay, surviving first the French and then the American wartime bombing, and the attempts of adventurers to acquire them.
This second issue contains another sensation, namely the presentation of imperial hats, whose fate has been no less adventurous than that of the imperial seals. A rare manifestation of their “legend” and the patriotism connected to them is the unravelling of the story of this headgear. Accordingly, the imperial hats were sold by the national revolutionaries to a Haiphong merchant family in the late 1940s to buy weapons for the war against French colonists.
Legend has it that the family who bought the imperial hats—later “alien, tolerated, and re-educated”—retained them, concealing them for decades, until at the end of the Vietnam War they finally donated them to the state, disassembled and broken, with the silk parts damaged by the tropical climate. These imperial relics and their restoration are commemorated and presented by two outstanding Vietnamese historians.
As in the first issue, the second presents a special architectural monument, this time the one-pillar Pagoda ( Chua Mot Cot ), a really special Buddhist shrine, and this second issue of the magazine also gives an insight into Vietnamese archeology, the world of museums, and modern and contemporary Vietnamese art.
Dear Reader, I hope you enjoy this extraordinary cultural and artistic adventure through Indochina, Vietnam, and the mysterious lost world of the Cham kingdom
Dr. István Zelnik
Editor, President of the Editorial Board