Nguyen Hue is the Champs Ellysee of Ho Chi Minh city, an enticing wide French style boulevard with boutiques and restaurants. The fossilized uncle Ho oversees the growing middle class entrepreneurs and war veterans scuffling about selling homemade copies of “The quiet American’, and Mac Namara’s war testimonial. Apart from the bustling capitalism and virulent opportunism he would have enjoyed seeing that there is no sign of Mac Donalds or Burger King, although this is not due to lack of franchise opportunities but simply because the culinary talented Vietnamese have an excellent palate refuse to eat dead ground cow on soggy bun drenched in greasy sauce with a hint of pickled cucumber. Just off the main road lies the Paris style Opera house on a neat square with tidy benches and flower beds. Also somewhere along the road a rather surprising statue of a Roman warrior with Vietnamese features. This calls for investigation and I surf the ever helpful Wiki-Pedia.
This is what it enfolds:
Antiochus III the Great had to give up Asia when the Romans crushed his army at the historic battle of Magnesia, in 190 BC. After the treaty of Apamea (180 BC) Asia was surrendered to Rome and placed under the client king of Pergamum.
But not the entire area was crushed, a small village refused to surrender and send their chief warrior Nguyen Hong to retaliate. He crossed the Himalayas with a herd of elephants and liberated Lebanon from the Phoenician warlords.
He was then invited to join Scipio’s republican forces as honorary general, and collected taxes for the equestrian order under a law passed by Gaius Gracchus in 123 BC.
After Augustus came to power Nguyen was offered consulship of Greater Asia but declined the offer only to guide Marco Polo through the silk route to end his days in the quiet pastures of the Mekong Delta.
