The Reunification Palace, frozen on one morning in 1975

The Reunification Palace is a 1960s modernist building that stopped being a working government on the morning of 30 April 1975. A tank came through the gate. It has been kept more or less as it was ever since.

What is the Reunification Palace?

The Reunification Palace is the former presidential palace of South Vietnam, built between 1962 and 1966 on the site of the French colonial Norodom Palace. The architect was Ngo Viet Thu. It sits in its own gardens in District 1.

North Vietnamese tanks crashed the gates on 30 April 1975, ending the war, and the building has been preserved as a museum since. Two of those tanks stand on the lawn.

What makes it unusual is that it was not restored to a period. It was simply left: the furniture, the maps, the telephones and the carpets are the ones in use that morning.

What is inside?

Four floors and a basement, all walkable. The state rooms on the ground floor held banquets and credentials ceremonies; the first floor holds the president's office and the cabinet room; the roof has a helipad with a red circle marking where a bomb was dropped in April 1975.

The basement is the reason to come. A warren of concrete corridors holds the war room with its wall maps, the radio room with its 1960s transmitters, and the president's bunker, all in original condition.

The top floor has an entertainment room with a card table and a cinema, which is the detail that dates the building more precisely than any label.

What does the palace ticket cost?

Entry is about 65,000 dong for an adult, which at roughly 26,000 dong to the US dollar is under three dollars. An audio guide costs extra and is worth taking, because the labelling is thin outside the basement.

The site opens through the day with a break at lunch on some days, and a visit takes an hour to ninety minutes.

The ticket puts the palace among the cheapest hours in District 1 — the trip cost guide sets it against the rest of a Saigon day.

How long do you need?

An hour covers the state rooms and the basement at a walking pace, and ninety minutes covers them properly with the audio guide. The basement takes about twenty minutes on its own and it is the part people wish they had given longer.

Nobody needs half a day here, which makes it an easy pairing with something heavier — the War Remnants Museum is ten minutes' walk away.

How does it compare with the War Remnants Museum?

The palace and the museum are the same history told two ways. The museum argues, with photographs; the palace simply sits there, with its rotary phones and its maps, and lets the rooms do the work.

Doing both in one morning is the standard Saigon plan, and the order matters. Take the museum first and the palace after, because the palace is the quieter of the two.

The war sites guide sets both against the Cu Chi tunnels and the DMZ.

What hour is the basement quiet?

Early morning or after three. The palace is busiest between ten and one with tour groups, and the basement corridors are narrow enough that a group fills them.

Most of the visit is indoors and air conditioned, which makes it one of the better options in the middle of a hot Saigon afternoon or on a wet day — the rainy day guide covers the rest.

The gardens are open and green, and the tanks on the lawn are photographed from the path rather than climbed on.

Is the Reunification Palace worth visiting?

The Reunification Palace is worth ninety minutes for anybody interested in how the war ended, and worth an hour for anybody who likes 1960s architecture. What it is not is a grand palace in the European sense. It is a government building preserved at the moment it stopped being one, and that is a more interesting thing to walk through than a throne room.

The Saigon three days route puts it in the first morning with the museum and the cathedral.