The Mountain That Came With A Wedding

Drive north out of Da Nang and the road starts climbing. Twenty one kilometres of it, up to about 496 metres at the top, with the sea on your right the whole way and the cloud usually sitting somewhere on the road. Hai Van means ocean cloud, and on most days the name is just a description.

Jeremy Clarkson drove it for Top Gear in December 2008 and called it one of the best coast roads in the world, which is how a lot of people outside Vietnam first heard of it. That is the version most visitors know.

The older story is better.

For hundreds of years this ridge was a border. South of it was Champa, a Hindu kingdom with its temples at My Son and its ports along this coast. North of it was Dai Viet. Two different countries, two different religions, and a mountain in between that neither could easily cross.

Then in 1306 the border moved, and it moved because of a marriage.

A Vietnamese princess called Huyen Tran was married to the Cham king Jaya Simhavarman III, known in Vietnamese as Che Man. As the dowry, two provinces, O and Ly, were handed over to Dai Viet. That land ran from the Thach Han river in the north all the way down to this pass.

So the ground you are standing on when you stop at the top for a photograph changed hands as a wedding present. Not taken in a battle. Given, in a negotiation, along with a young woman who had no say in it.

The gate at the summit came much later. Hai Van Quan was built in 1826, the seventh year of Emperor Minh Mang, as a fortress watching the road between Hue and Da Nang. It still has its two inscriptions. The side facing Hue says simply Hai Van Quan, the Hai Van Gate. The side facing Da Nang says Thien ha de nhat hung quan, which translates as the most magnificent frontier under heaven.

Somebody carved that, on a wall, on a mountain, two hundred years ago, and then the cloud came in and covered it for most of the year.

There is one more thing about this ridge that has nothing to do with kings. It sits on the sixteenth parallel and it is a real weather border. The mountain blocks the cold air coming down from the north, which is why Da Nang can be dry and bright while Hue, an hour away, is grey and wet. It is not a saying. It is a wall.

That is also why the pass matters less than it used to. The Hai Van tunnel opened in June 2005, 6.28 kilometres long, the longest in Vietnam, and almost all the traffic went underneath. The old road emptied out.

Which turned out to be the best thing that could have happened to it. What was a dangerous national highway full of trucks became a quiet road with a view, and the only people on it now are the ones who chose to be.

Go on a clear morning, early, before the tour vans. Stop at the gate. Read the wall.