Forbidden purple city

No-one is about in the backstreets of antique Hue, yet ritual fires to the dead flare up here and there in the dark. Little fold-out tables massed with photos and food bits for the long-gone offer peace in a haze of joss-stick smoke: effects of memory, end and beginning for those gone in the Tet Offensive of 1968. On one verandah, where birdcages hang, is Ong Tao, a house-turned-evening-restaurant, next to a pond that throbs with bull frog and insect. They fall silent on approach, like someone’s turns off the tropical atmosphere’s CD or something, then presses ‘play’ as soon as you pass. I eat alone, happily digging into a refreshing shrimp cucumber salad; a plate of sticky chicken, donated by some lean but tasty bird; and ‘dipping squid’, a Vietnamese fondue-cum-hotpot, a broth afloat with a swirly-carpet of pineapple and garlic chive, with a platter of raw squid for poaching - booby-trapped with dangerously small chillies, armed to nuke lips and tongue.