Le Duan Boulevard

The pace of life slows down considerably – and the odours of cut grass and frangipani blooms replace the smell of exhaust fumes – when you duck into the city’s Botanical Gardens, accessed by a gate at the far eastern end of Le Duan, and bounded to the east by the Thi Nghe Channel. Established in 1864 by the Frenchmen Germain and Pierre (respectively a vet and a botanist), the gardens’ social function has remained unchanged in decades, and their tree-shaded paths still attract as many courting couples and promenaders as when Norman Lewis followed the “clusters of Vietnamese beauties on bicycles” and headed there one Sunday morning in 1950 to find the gardens “full of these ethereal creatures, gliding in decorous groups, sometimes accompanied by gallants”. In its day, the gardens harboured an impressive collection of tropical flora, including many species of orchid. Post-liberation, the place went to seed but nowadays a bevy of gardeners keep it reasonably well tended again, and portrait photographers are once again lurking to take snaps of you framed by flowers.

Stray right inside and you’ll soon reach the zoo, home to camels, elephants, crocodiles and big cats, also komodo dragons – a gift from the government of Indonesia. Unfortunately, conditions are very poor and some animals look half-crazed, so it could be a harrowing experience if you’re an animal lover. There’s also an amusement park that is sometimes open, and you can get an ice cream or a coconut from one of the several cafés sprinkled around the grounds.

A pleasing, pagoda-style roof crowns the city’s History Museum, next to the Botanical Gardens. It houses fifteen galleries illuminating Vietnam’s past from primitive times to the end of French rule by means of a decent if unastonishing array of artefacts and pictures. Dioramas of defining moments in Vietnamese military history lend the collection some cohesion – included are Ngo Quyen’s 938 AD victory at Bach Dang, and the sinking of the Esperance. Should you tire of Vietnamese history, you might explore halls focusing on such disparate subjects as Buddha images from around Asia; seventh- and eighth-century Champa art; and the customs and crafts of the ethnic minorities of Vietnam. There’s also a room jam-packed with exquisite ceramics from Japan, Thailand and Vietnam, and you could round off your visit at the water-puppetry theatre.

A few blocks northwest of the Botanical Gardens, the Jade Emperor Pagoda, or Chua Phuoc Hai, was built by the city’s Cantonese community at the beginning of the twentieth century. If you visit just one temple in town, make it this one, with its exquisite panels of carved gilt woodwork, and its panoply of weird and wonderful deities, both Taoist and Buddhist, beneath a roof that groans under the weight of dragons, birds and animals.

To the right of the tree-lined courtyard out front is a grubby pond whose occupants have earned the temple its alternative moniker of Tortoise Pagoda. Once over the threshold, look up and you’ll see Chinese characters announcing: “the only enlightenment is in Heaven” – though only after your eyes have adjusted to the fug of joss-stick smoke. A statue of the Jade Emperor lords it over the main hall’s central altar, sporting an impressive moustache, and he’s surrounded by a retinue of similarly moustached followers.

A rickety flight of steps in the chamber to the right of the main hall runs up to a balcony looking out over the pagoda’s elaborate roof. Set behind the balcony, a neon-haloed statue of Quan Am stands on an altar. Left out of the main hall, meanwhile, you’re confronted by Kim Hua, to whom women pray for fertility; judging by the number of babies weighing down the female statues around her, her success rate is high. The Chief of Hell resides in the larger chamber behind Kim Hua’s niche. Given his job description, he doesn’t look particularly demonic, though his attendants, in sinister black garb, are certainly equipped to administer the sorts of punishments depicted in the ten dark-wood reliefs on the walls before them.