Sit under a ceiling made of broken porcelain and stained glass
Nine dragons hidden in clouds
The last of the Nguyen imperial tombs, begun in 1920 and finished eleven years later. The smallest of the royal mausolea and by a wide margin the most expensive.
Why it's unique
Khai Dinh imported cement, iron and steel from France, and tiles, porcelain and stained glass from China and Japan. The interior of Thien Dinh palace is finished almost entirely in mosaic: hundreds of thousands of shards of broken porcelain and coloured glass set into the altar recesses, the columns and the walls.
The central hall carries Cuu Long An Van, nine dragons hidden in clouds, worked across the whole ceiling. It looks like nothing else in Vietnam because it is deliberately half-European, and it was resented for exactly that at the time.
Before you go
The exterior is blackened concrete and genuinely unlovely on the approach. That is the point: everything went inside.
Most visitors do three tombs in one day and reach this one tired. Do it first, while you can still stand and look up for twenty minutes.
Get close to the mosaics. What reads as pattern from the doorway resolves into individual glazed fragments at arm's length, and that is the whole experience.