Nine Dynastic Urns

The Nine Dynastic Urns, or Cuu Dinh, stand in an even row in the courtyard of the The Mieu temple complex, in front of the Hien Lam Cac pavilion in the imperial citadel of Hue. They were cast in bronze in 1835-1837 by order of Emperor Minh Mang, and each is dedicated to one of the rulers of the Nguyen dynasty. The largest, Cao Dinh, weighs about two and a half tonnes and stands in the centre, opposite the main entrance to the temple of the ancestors. The sides of the vessels are covered with reliefs, seventeen images on each urn and a hundred and sixty-two in all. The masters chased the mountains and rivers of the country, seagoing ships, weapons, birds, beasts and plants, so that the whole row reads as a bronze encyclopaedia of nineteenth-century Vietnam. In 2024 these reliefs were entered in the UNESCO Memory of the World register for the Asia-Pacific region.

On the map